Notices

For someone so anti-piracy, you sure do justify it an awful lot....

You claimed "when you pirate something the original owner does not lost anything", which is simply not true.

Your logic is wrong. If you take something that someone else is selling, no matter what that is, and don't pay for it, the person(s) that created it have lost potential value. Even if that potential was a later "fire sale", or selling that version much later at a huge discount when newer/better products were out. You can buy Duke Nukem for $2 at most Big Lots, for example... Unless you pirated it back when it came out, in which case, why bother?

Using your logic, and your false assumptions, you could justify just about anything. Like taking _a_Ferrari_ is just fine, because they're asking more than someone else values it for.

Pirating is wrong. Justifying it is equally wrong. If piracy didn't cause financial loss, nobody would be concerned over it.

*sigh*

Call me when you learn to read.

Actually i'd much rather "pirate" games, music etc and then give money directly to the artists than help enrich the *******s that steal more money from them than they would earn if all free copies out there were legally paid.



edit: and anyway, numbers can't be stolen. And regarding the 'rari, if you paid for the machinery and raw materials to build yourself your own fer' then how can you call that stealing?

I see, and how exactly do you do that? Have you heard of anyone who sent a check to an artist or band that they pirated music from, ever? Didn't think so. It sounds all nice an cozy to say "I'm not giving to the big conglomerates, but right to the artists", but it's quite another thing to actually do it. Some bands when they're small maybe you can do that with, by buying right from their site, or at an event they do a cover for. But any group that's semi-popular, you can't get to directly. Even their concerts have middle-men and vendors.

So, you don't want to give "Microsoft", the big company, money for their office suite. It's too expensive. Tell me, when you pirate it, how are you giving back to the engineers that get paid to code the program? When you pirate Photoshop, how are you supporting the secretary that arranges the lunch and learn sessions the engineers are going to, to learn new skills and get ideas for new tools? You're not.

Software at least has the advantage that it doesn't always get sucked in. Mom and pop shops can make it pretty big and still stay pretty small. But I'm willing to bet most people that have pirated versions of software have never paid for it, even if it's a small mom & pop that made it.

I bet you'd agree numbers can be stolen if the numbers were coming out of your bank account. You don't mind if I take those numbers, right? They're just numbers... They can't be stolen.

Are you ok with someone using your car for a long trip when you're not using it, as long as they provide gas? In the example I gave, you don't own the machine. You're just using it. You're not paying for the initial investment, nor are you paying to help maintain the machine. That's what's being stolen.

And tell me, how exactly are you "providing materials" when you take someone's program (without paying for it) and run it? Again, we're not talking about people writing their own driver after seeing a youttube demo of this one. They're using the exact code, not their own version.

Oh, trust me... I wouldn't be calling you in any case. I know how to read. It's you that has issues reading (and with logic, apparently). But then I'm not living in my parents basement still, or gorging myself on hohos. So there's more things we don't have in common...

LOL so the 'search this thread' link at the top of every page of every post is obviously too difficult for you to use?

That's what intellectual copyright is for.

A better analogy would be going to a museum that is free entry but with a suggested donation.
All the patrons in front of you are graciously giving a few £/$, you get to the window.. "What's this ... SUGGESTED DONATION?! ..... Well you can **** right off then", strolls in for free, looking like a complete dick!

That analogy alone deserves a donation

Not to wade into this forum flame-war but just a drop a few points to try to being some understanding and maybe some calm to the situation:

1) Please learn the difference between rivalrous goods vs. non-rivalrous goods. They fit in different economic spaces and misconstruing one for the other makes for some really dumb laws/calculations of loss/arguments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_%28economics%29

2) Everything is based on something before it. Putting a value on a small evolutionary change is difficult and subjective. Some people think that since this is a small addition (module) to an already enormous code base (kernel) that the value is infinitesimally small. Some think because this addition enables some profound new functionality (wifi Monitor mode) that it is worth a lot to them. Both camps are probably right but have no right to force their views on each other.

3) No one is taking anyone's food out of their mouth by sharing GPLed software. If you don't want it shared, don't GPL it or base your software off of GPLed software (a difficult thing to do for a kernel module). That is all there is to it. The whole point of the GPL is to encourage sharing and ensure that things GPLed can't *stop* being shared and annoying everyone who has contributed to the code base in the past.

Being adequately compensated for writing GPLed software is a related but a mostly orthogonal issue.

I hope that the author works to get this code included in an upstream project (most-likely the power kernel ... I suspect the Nokia will ignore this completely for the official kernel).

I also hope that some company (Nokia/Broadcom/RedHat/Intel?) recognizes the talent it took to make this and hires the author.

This debate on this is an old one. You're talking about the two as if they both form in a vacume, but in reality, that is not the case.

The biggest problem (and the one happening here) is that people don't take into account the labor taken to create "non-rivalrous" goods. Just because a good can be duplicated without "significant loss" to the original work doesn't mean that labor was not expended creating the original work. Labor that that author or creator should be compesated for in a manor of their choosing, by those willing to use the work.

With rivalrous goods, only a fraction of the price is the material used to make the good. A large portion of the price often is the labor involved, be that direct labor or indirect (eg. machine maintenance). Yet when the material used to make a good is virtual, or so cheep as to not register, for some reason people feel it's ok to duplicate without compensating for that initial labor.

If one lived in a utopia (like star trek) where artists get a stipend from the government to create non-rivalrious goods, then free duplication would be an acceptable thing. In most of the world however, even digitally duplicatable works have to be able to support the person(s) who put the labor in to initially create them. Non-rivalrous goods don't simply come into being on their own. They take time and effort to create initially. And if the author of a piece of work sets a value on that labor and seeks compensation for it, and others circumvent that by duplicating the piece without compensating the author, that's morally (and in many places criminally) wrong.

Yes, that's true, which is where the market comes into play. If you charge too much, nobody will buy, and you will be effectively forced to reduce your rates to sell. If you charge to little, you may not make back enough to continue the endeavor, or repay the initial investment.

The problem with piracy is that it is exactly one group forcing their views on the other. By stealing/duplicating/pirating goods (or converting them to a non-rivalrous form to duplicate) they are effectively forcing their view on the author that their labor is worth nothing, regardless of the price the author may want to set on those goods to compensate for the labor and time spent.

I'm sure it is until you're in a situation where you lack food, and took on work to improve GPL based code in exchange for compensation that then was not forthcoming. In that case, it is taking the food out of your mouth. That's the exact situation we're discussing here. Would you still consider it an orthogonal issue when it's your ability to have food that's in the balance?

One of the key reasons I'm sensitive on this subject is because what I do for a living focuses on creating what you would call "non-rivalrous" goods. But I can assure you, just because something is digital doesn't mean it has no value, nor does it mean there's no rivalry. That, and the fact that I like to eat and have a place to live, incites me to speak when others are justifying or advocating the the concept that creators of such goods don't deserve compensation.

I share these hopes, but know that in reality the odds of the later hope (him being employed because of his work here) is rather slim. Sadly, such things happen rarely enough that when it does happen it's pretty big news.

I use OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Gimp

If i have 123 dollars in my account, and then someone deposits or withdraws enough money on their account so they also got $123 in their account, that isn't stealing; if a department store sticks a pricetag on a product that says it costs $123, i still would have 123 dollars in my account, no stealing there either. Now if someone withdraws the money from my bank account without my authorization, you could call that stealing, but what they stole wasn't a number, what they stole was money. No one owns the number 123, same with any other number no matter how big.


what this has to do with anything?


You've paid for the machinery, and you've paid for the electricity etc.