Originally Posted by extendedping

Oh please...you bring up race in your argument, then act all self righteous when I thing you have a false premise. You can't be American right? Anyone from over here liberal or conservative would at least have understood that I am saying certain groups can score substancially lower on tests and still get into colleges/police depts etc with those scores, where another group would not have a chance.

Originally Posted by extendedping

Debate away if it is justified or not but it is fact. Btw I spent 6 years as a case worker in the worst areas in nyc (bed stuy and bushwick). So my opinions are not out of a text book they are out of experience (oh and I do believe in some limited affirmative action too).

Originally Posted by extendedping

So not pirating stuff has made you a perfect person, no slippery slope and some poor guy who got a pdf is on his way to being jack the ripper?

Originally Posted by Benson

See the difference? They still didn't lose a sale, but they lost actual property, so it's theft even without the dubious notion of counting hypothetical sales as stealable property.

Originally Posted by Benson

Sorry about that, you know how the human mind loses track of time sometimes. Now that you've reminded me it's the '10s, I'll try a completely different argument: Next time you buy a pizza, if you don't give me half of it, I'm going to call that theft. No, wait, actually, I think I'll just go all-in and call it murder.

Originally Posted by Benson

I can do that, right? Since in 2010, apparently nobody cares that the definition of theft involves depriving someone of property, just as the definition of murder involves depriving someone of life.

Originally Posted by Benson

Non-sarcastically, as "sad" as my reusing old arguments may be, attempting to guilt-trip or prejudice by disregarding definitions to call something by a scarier name is even sadder. If your arguments as to why information should receive property-like legal protection, or why that legal protection should be morally binding, cannot stand on their own merit when using accurate terms like "copyright infringement", then you should find some new arguments.

Originally Posted by Benson

Wow. The ignorance is staggering.

Originally Posted by Benson

Do you really not know that the publishing lobby's efforts to secure legislation stripping people of their natural right to copy their own property dates to the early days of the printing press, not the "electric box"? The only thing changing in the '80s was the barrier to entry -- and by then, the legal framework of copyright (and the assumption of its moral validity) had already been established with little scrutiny, because at the time it did not really affect most people,

Originally Posted by Benson

Maybe, if you'd even read what I said, you'd realize that I was suggesting a completely different class of business models, where one doesn't speculatively invest in developing a work, then seek ways to force people to pay it back, either directly, or by bartering their eyeballs on a screen, which you in turn sell to advertisers. Business models where you directly sell the service of producing content , and get out of the distribution market altogether.

Originally Posted by Benson

When I spoke of someone who didn't have money, so they couldn't have bought it, so there was no real or potential lost sale, I was using that as an example to show why that argument is ridiculously broken

Originally Posted by Benson

-- in fact I consider it ridiculous precisely because, if accepted, it leads to the conclusion that whether piracy is "theft" or not depends on whether the person could have (and, even more awkwardly, would have) purchased it legitimately, which is obvious nonsense.

I completely share your disgust with arguments that the morality of theft, copyright infringement, or anything else should depend on the depth of the perpetrator's pockets.

Originally Posted by qwenjis

Unfortunately, it's a wild place and people tend to value only visible things(cars clothes and so on,you understand me). For stuff like software, movies and everything else people use, see or hear but can't literary touch there's no value. It's considered to be irrelevant that's why people can't think of paying somebody for movie for example.