Stealing. Porsche went through a lot of trouble to design that car. They deserve the right to profit from that.

Stealing is the illegal taking of another person's property. You aren't stealing the car owned by the dealership; you're making a copy. You aren't stealing the design of the car; you aren't claiming that the design is yours. It is not stealing; it is copying--a difference.

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. – H.L. Mencken

I refuse to trade humanity for patriotism.

Not if you pay for it.


Radio. Listening to streaming samples on the internet. iTunes and Amazon both allow you to listen to tracks before you buy them.



Then buy from online sources. Who says you have to buy an entire CD? It sounds like you are trying to rationalize pirating MP3s.

iTunes charges $1 a track right now. To me, that is a bargain. Downloading illegally is a huge hassle...I'd rather get perfect tracks without jumping through hoops using Kazaa or whatever. Thats worth $1 to me.

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Again, obviously, you don't rely on copyrights for a living, nor do you sympathize with those that do. Intellectual property rights are the reason that technology advanced faster in the U.S. than in other countries in the 19th century.

I write software for a large defense corporation, so, yes, I do rely on copyright protection for a living.

However, the "pirating" of music or other media is quite different from that of code or other tools. The purpose of copyright laws are to protect from the use of your property--in my case, code--by unauthorized parties for that party's gain. If someone was to reverse engineer one of my products, change a couple of processes, and then re-release it to the public pretending it was his, that would be a clear copyright violation. If that program was copied and used on multiple computers, that would also be a copyright violation because the use of that tool--which is its main purpose, to be run on a computer--would be unauthorized.

However, in the case of different types of media, the copy and consumption of those items--be it a song, movie, etc--are not platform dependent. You can listen to the radio, blast your music driving down the street, etc. None of those involve the seizing of the guitar riff of a song, for instance, and passing it off as your own. The simply replaying of that song is not owned by the artist, the media label, or the distributor.

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. – H.L. Mencken

I refuse to trade humanity for patriotism.