ah, reminds me of a great episode of the screen savers. a mini debate started between Patrick and Leo. Patrick got on his high horse and said when he was a kid and was caught doing something wrong he was spanked.

funny.

i love forums and i used to think they were a place to have mature, deep discussions about ANYTHING. no, i was wrong. if a moderator disagrees with you, you can be banned or the thread locked, simply for voicing an opposing opinion.

but i will give you my mature, deep thinking insight into this topic.

whats right isn't always the law and the law isn't always right.

that said, copyright and DRM has gotten very out of control. now, i do see where one would say its wrong to download a film, or song, when you haven't legally purchased it. i also see where its wrong to purchase a song and then when the DRM servers that support that file no longer function, you cannot use the file you purchased.

piracy is a complex topic. its not one simple thing. its certainly not as simple as piracy = theft.

theft of what? the millions of dollars the film industry MIGHT have gained in the future? the film industry has no rightful claim on our money. money that could put cloths on your back and food in your stomach, send your kids to school.

enforcing copyright on the internet to the point of denying a person access to the internet is an abuse of a communication tool (the internet). a tool that should not be owned by any one entity. and certainly not controlled at the sole benefit of capitalism.

when it comes down to it, we should choose a free internet over the trillion dollar film and music industries. lets stop buying films / music from the major companies, and stop pirating them. and pass laws against the industry's selfish manipulation of the internet.

Leo at another point said "piracy is a victim-less crime."

thats a brave thing to say, especially on TV. and if you're on your high horse, you may be too high to have any kind of open mind. during the american revolution, it was "right" to stay loyal to great Britain. loyalists were the conservatives of their era.

do you want to be a high-horse riding, "loyalist" conservative or a free thinking human being?

today, we (the working class) are saturated with film, tv, music. its apart of our daily lives. it shapes the cloths we wear, the food we eat, our interests, our relationships. but to the film, tv and music companies, we are nothing more than consumers for them to manipulate and profit from. reality to the consumer and reality to the companies are very different things.

an example would be your friend next door who grew up watching a television show with his parents. feels an emotional and memorable link with this show. but the company holding the copyright either doesn't re-release it at all (on dvd for example) or releases only part of it. he now feels compelled to pirate the content he desires.

The companies want you to desire the content they own, but they want to regulate how you access that content and maximize their profit through any means, no matter how ridiculous, patronizing or insulting to your intelligence.

we should get our entertainment directly from other human beings, not from the giant heartless parasites we call the film, television and music industries.

if you keep your viewpoint so narrow that you think of piracy in terms of honestly paying for the things you want, which is a very good thing, then you are short changing yourself.

the old saying that "you get what you pay for" is completely untrue. if you truly get what you pay for, your dollar would go way beyond what it does today.

if things cost only what they cost to produce, society would have much more food, more electronics, more clothing, more electricity, more everything available. and guess what; less crime.

i believe in a small percentage above the cost of manufacture, but that "profit" should go to further company development, not huge salaries, bonuses, stock holders, etc.

its interesting that they want to automate workers at the store level, when the highly paid executives could be replaced with automation much more easily than a cashier. a computer program would make better and faster decisions than greedy, over paid executives, at a lower complexity than interacting with a customer.

anyway, getting back to the topic of piracy. it depends on which is more wrong:

violating copyright or paying more than you should?