Thread: Is it okay for a student with limited financial resources to pirate software?
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matthewbpt is offline matthewbpt
2010-09-21 , 21:53
Posts: 10 | Thanked: 1 time | Joined on Mar 2010
#136
Originally Posted by geohsia View Post
I don't agree but I understand why you might think that.

Let me ask you then, about music. If you were a musician, you love making music and for you its a joy but also a ton of work to get it just right, you need agents, band members, equipment the whole works. Now let's say you only make $0.05 or $0.10 on every song, iTunes takes 30%, the label gets their cut, so forth and so on and then all that's left for you is a few measly percentages. Now, if you were full-time and the only way of sustaining, you, your family, your children, do you think you'd still be ok with the world downloading your songs for free? Again, I'm talking full-time profession, not just a part-time hobby you do after dinner before you go to sleep.

So when people say, yeah, it just a stupid digital song, it has no value, do you think that would make you feel good after you've poured yourself into your art? You think that's right?

Look, some people get rich, some people don't. When people think Microsoft they think Bill Gates with BILLIONS of dollars, when they think music, they think Michael Jackson with his Hundreds of Millions. The music and software industry employs thousands if not millions of other people who also depend on the revenue.

Sure, there are the rich in any industry, that DOES NOT mean you can steal from that industry as a whole because you're also stealing from the regular workers, not just the big names.

Sorry I just can't seem to get my mind wrapped around taking for free someone else's hard earned work. I'm a photographer so maybe for me I'm more sensitive because my work is digital as well and I don't like it when I hear people say that digital media has no value, and no I am not rich.
I agree with you, to me music is art and I appreciate that which I find artistically stimulating, and that is why I buy the music of artists I like, and the books of authors I like. But I don't want to buy Music if I am not going to like it. Actually recently I have been using Spotify (instead of downloading) as a means to test whether I like some music before buying it.

Again about the morality aspect, you just described your view of morality, a view which many including myself agree with. But morality is not universal, as we can see by examining people from all over the world outside the more homogenous western culture, and people can have completely different moralities. For example in some tribes of indigenous people in the Amazon, the mother often drowns a newborn child if she already has many children and it is impractical to feed another. We may view this with horror and disgust, but that because of the moral system that we have been brought up with, and to them it is a completely normal and acceptable thing to do, indeed many other species in the animal world do this too.