The Video Game Critic

For all of you people who don't think it hurts anybody...keep in mind that Piracy alone put Commodore out of business. It hurts everybody. It's stealing. It raises prices, it's that simple.

[QUOTE=Paul Campbell]Exactly.  It put them out of business back then because it was taking money out of their pockets and it was the same as stealing.  Now, if I have a friend with a Commodore who makes me a copy of Impossible Mission, who am I stealing from?  I couldn't have bought it new, so what's the difference?[/QUOTE]

Paul, it's too easy to answer that one.  Unless the IP is in the public domain at this point (which only could happen ethically if the owners willingly gave it up to that), then the theft is from whomever owns the IP presently.  Theft is the taking of someone else's property, intellectual or otherwise.  Theft is not just taking something if it has value on a market.  The latter is only theft of profits.

I don't really understand this mentality that if it's not available on the market, it's not stealing.  I have a lot of personal IP that is not available on the market, but if someone just takes it and uses it, it's still stealing from me personally.  There are any number of legitimate reasons why someone doesn't put their intellectual property on the market.  But there's nothing essential to the definition of intellectual property that it has to be marketable or put on the market at all.  The mere desire to have something you don't own isn't enough to constitute just cause to take something that isn't yours.

(That nobody wants my IP is true, but also irrelevant to this debate  

[QUOTE=Paul Campbell]Exactly.  It put them out of business back then because it was taking money out of their pockets and it was the same as stealing.  Now, if I have a friend with a Commodore who makes me a copy of Impossible Mission, who am I stealing from?  I couldn't have bought it new, so what's the difference?[/QUOTE]

Unless the IP is in the public domain at this point (which only could happen ethically if the owners willingly gave it up to that), then the theft is from whomever owns the IP presently.  [/QUOTE]

And what happens when no one owns the intellectual property rights as the entity no longer exists?  The world's not black and white but contains shades of grey.

[QUOTE=Paul Campbell]Exactly.  It put them out of business back then because it was taking money out of their pockets and it was the same as stealing.  Now, if I have a friend with a Commodore who makes me a copy of Impossible Mission, who am I stealing from?  I couldn't have bought it new, so what's the difference?
[/QUOTE]

Ok, so I want a vintage Corvette, say 1969, they are not readily available at a dealer so that  gives me the right to go steal one b/c the price is too high on the market? Ok so I steal it, what happens? Insurance rates go up, the price of other Corvettes go up, etc, etc. Trust me, I am not saint but call a spade a spade, it's stealing.

[QUOTE=ActRaiser]And what happens when no one owns the intellectual property rights as the entity no longer exists?[/QUOTE]

If their intellectual property was sold to pay their debts, it belongs then to the company it was sold to.  If it was instead made public property, then it becomes something you can piddle with all you want.

[QUOTE=ActRaiser]The world's not black and white but contains shades of grey.[/QUOTE]

There are black and whites in the world.  I am going to use words here with very specific meanings so that I can be very clear.  Slavery is wrong.  Murder is wrong.  And theft -- IS WRONG.  All of these are examples of black and white.

I am usually tolerant of the idea that there are "no black and white but shades of grey" argument when it is applied to the fact that not all facts are always known, and that it might even be possible that some facts cannot be presently known.  That means at least in epistemological terms, there are shades of grey.  But because human perception isn't all there is to "facts", metaphysics itself is built on nothing but blacks and whites.  And our limited ability at times to understand a fact of the universe or of the nature of man isn't enough reason to just declare a free-for-all on ethics, especially where ethics deals with the rights of man and the violation thereof.

The mere fact that ownership is not always clear doesn't absolve someone of the responsibility to pursue understanding who something belongs to before making claims on it.

[QUOTE=Quiet Flight]I have no illusions weather it's wrong or not. I simply don't care. Free is free.[/QUOTE]

I guess in some sense all things stolen are free, at least to the one who does the stealing.  Thank goodness the vast majority of the civilized world doesn't see things this way.

lol at people trying to justify stealing things.