Thread: torrents are destroying the world

Originally Posted by abachler

The problem is none of them carry Janis Joplin or any other music that people with credit cards tend to listen to. Sorry but im not paying a monthly fee for a bunch of degenerates yelling about how the man is screwing them over and teeny boppers squalling in their underwear.

Well, that's certainly true, but the idea is to have download services with a broad range of selection for music, movies games and whatever else and I'm sure we'll get many more who actually download legally.
Of course, this may or may not be feasible, but in general, I think such services is what a lot of people want.

Well, forgive me for being less of a person then you, all mighty abachler! I'm just a stupid 15 year old that doesn't have the kind of wisdom or experience that is required to realize when something is wrong. I'm really sorry. I guess I'll just go and steal something. In fact, since abachler thinks it's okay, why don't we ALL steal stuff?!

You're a stupid prick, abachler. Who the hell gave you the right to judge me because of my age? You think I dont know what money is or something? You think I've never seen anything get stolen?

The thing is, piracy has not, and never will bring us to armageddon. What it does is destroy our morals. Do you think today's society is good? It isn't, and piracy is a part of humanities current state. Giving companies like Microsoft dominance-by-theft isn't a plus side to piracy. Maybe for Bill Gates, but without piracy maybe we'll have a better OS dominating the market. Better open source at least. Quite the opposite of armageddon? Are you kidding me? I don't see piracy helping anyone except helping corporate scumbags steal our money with ridiculous prices.

At 15, you dont make a living at all. You live off the generosity of your parents and society, and do not have the life experience to hold an informed opinion about a technology you barely understand. Spare us the childish blathering about how software piracy will doom us all. It just isn't so. Piracy has been around since before you or I or probably anyone alive were a twinkle in their momma's eye. It hasn't brought about armageddon yet. In fact quite the oposite. Microsoft owes its dominance of the OS market to the fact that in the formative years of personal computers DOS was easily pirated and thus used more widely than any other competing product.

Yea sure, piracy has existed long before bittorrent was invented, we all know about the scene, BBSes, hell, piracy is as old as the internet, and older than that aswell. But how can you deny that bittorrent and P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster and Limewire has made piracy a much larger problem than it ever was in the days of BBSes? What point exactly are you trying to make? Yea, piracy is old, but it was NEVER as big as it is now...

And Abachler, not long ago i saw you discussing the Jaqcuard Loom, the ENIAC and the Z3, yet nobody mentioned that you wasn't around back when these machines was invented, it didn't make your point any less valid.
In fact, you just said it yourself, piracy is probably older than 90% of the members in here, yourself included, so how come you can dismiss Trennto's arguments solely because he is young, what do YOU know about piracy? You're not old enough either are you?

So you're saying, if you got hit by a hoon in the street driving a Skyline -- you'd blame Nissan?

And what do you think would happen if torrents, "somehow" disappeared? I'm pretty sure HTTP*/FTP, IRC, and other P2P would come back on top... If you're a free software org' (like a Linux distro) then it's a fantastic way to share your product, as bandwidth and such is spread accross several people rather than some poor fool paying for all the bandwidth.

* Rapidshare (yes, a free service for uploading files) has millions, if not billions of illegal files on it. Should you blame rapidshare? Well they do remove them all the time, perhaps we'll blame HTTP.

There is no reason to think that Gates is who he is today because of piracy when he actually wrote the code for the earliest versions of windows and other, earlier computers. Nor is there a reason to think that Gates invented what monopoly means, anyone dominating a market destroys competition, one of the best forces that moderate price.

Sorry, my rant about Bill Gates was off. I was talking about the point that people are making about piracy helping companies like Microsoft gain more users. That's true, but I dont think it's a plus side to piracy. In fact, I think that open source alternatives such as some Linux could have gained many more users otherwise. If people who wanted free got open source instead of pirated Windows, then the world could have been a slightly different place. I have nothing against Bill Gates at all.

Originally Posted by Trennto

I make my living as a human, and I still find your attitude extremely disturbing. Pirating is theft, that's all.

My attitude -- that illegally downloading software is wrong -- disturbs you? Do you have some kind of split personality disorder?

Software piracy is not theft. It does not cause a person to cease possessing something he/she previously possessed. That doesn't mean there's nothing wrong with it. The software I write costs about $2000 per copy. Do you think I'd like it if people just cracked the licensing and started using it for free? Use your brain.

Technically, software piracy is copyright infringement, not theft.

Is it theft to steal a print of the Mona Lisa, even though another duplicate can be produced?

Unfortunately, that analogy is not accurate. Suppose that that painting was still under copyright, then the correct analogy is to ask if it is theft to make a copy of it and distribute the copy.