Pirating = Stealing

[Skyone]

Anyone who claims that pirating is ethical is just a nonsensical moron. However, that will hardly stop anyone from pirating.

[Ben Cebhrem]

Anyone who claims that pirating is ethical is just a nonsensical moron. However, that will hardly stop anyone from pirating.

The use of a DVR or VCR to record a movie or show could be considered pirating, but only as it allows one to skip commercials; if it is the commercials that have paid the bills, thereby allowing you to view the movie or show (I am assuming you are watching basic cable here, and perhaps a channel that you can get for free on the air), then you are disallowing the delivery of an ad; therefore, you are circumventing the placement of content that is positioned towards a certain group or groups, and not allowing such content to influence your buying habits. Without the influence, whether you buy or not, you do not support those that make the ads, and by extension, the channel that the ad company has paid money towards in order to advertise.

Or, if you like, you're potentially cutting out the middleman who pays for a channel to operate by using a DVR or VCR and skipping over the commercials. Sounds like piracy, does it not?

EDIT: My point is, it may not be a black and white scenario; however, theer is always a viewpoint which could be considered valid. It just depends on your view as to what piracy is, and what it isn't. What we are in the midst of doing, certainly, is establishing that. The outcome, nobody can know for sure, but it certainly won't be what we have now.

[Squalid]

Its funny, i never thought about the ethics of pirating. Now that i have, i dont care.

Maybe its because it doesnt feel wrong (Where as i've never thought about stealing from a store)

But then i think that about how long pirating has been around, my parents used to record the radio using cassette tapes, should they be arrested for that?

Ask your parents, they will all say the same; everyone did it.

[sdh]

Bah, I say go for it.

[bacteria]

Its funny, i never thought about the ethics of pirating. Now that i have, i dont care.

Maybe its because it doesnt feel wrong (Where as i've never thought about stealing from a store)

But then i think that about how long pirating has been around, my parents used to record the radio using cassette tapes, should they be arrested for that?

Ask your parents, they will all say the same; everyone did it.

Indeed, it was ironic that companies made cassette recorders with twin decks and vinyl record and cassette decks with the purpose of allowing people to copy onto blank cassettes; and then they moan when people do it! Same with CD writers, DVD writers, etc.

[nitro2k01]

I agree with Rekarp; keeping a backup and selling the original media, no matter what the form of information comes on, and keeping the backup is unethical.

But XPCportables brings up the biggest point here, I think: we are in an ethical and moral quandary due to the proliferation of a technology that makes information piracy widely available to the masses. What we as a society must do is to come up with a more (that is, a social "law") free of corporation/legal influence. If it becomes neccesary, then you enforce the more through law.
This is how many of our laws become laws by the way. Society deem murder as a bad thing, to be avoided whenever possible; therefore at some point, it also became illegal. It's by no coincidence that laws happen to follow a country's social code.

As to my own opinion about the whole thing, yeah, piracy is wrong. Is it justifiable? Well, yes, and no. Mainly it depends on the person and the situation. But then again we come around full tilt as to what is "allowable" and what isn't. Perhaps there may be a middle ground at some point- certain forms are acceptable, certain forms are not. Doesn't matter to me, I keep on living all the same.

The point that you're bringing up here is that sometimes the legislation is not in par with the social code. Today's legislation is created largely by corporate lobby groups, whereas today's social code, I believe, is way more liberal. I would say a majority of the population are either people who download regularly to som extent, or people who are indifferent to the whole thing. I would say that a minority of the general population, and certainly a minority of the younger population (<30 years old) disagree with notion that piracy is plain wrong, unethical and unjustifiable.
Does this mean there's something wrong with the legislation or the social code?

[nitro2k01]

Indeed, it was ironic that companies made cassette recorders with twin decks and vinyl record and cassette decks with the purpose of allowing people to copy onto blank cassettes; and then they moan when people do it! Same with CD writers, DVD writers, etc.

Obviously, the companies that sell music and sell, should we call it, "piracy hardware", are not the same.

[hailrazer]

Indeed, it was ironic that companies made cassette recorders with twin decks and vinyl record and cassette decks with the purpose of allowing people to copy onto blank cassettes; and then they moan when people do it! Same with CD writers, DVD writers, etc.

Obviously, the companies that sell music and sell, should we call it, "piracy hardware", are not the same.

Ummm Sony ??

[MrTroy]

Wasn't it also the case when VCRs first came out, companies didn't want to release tapes because someone could play the tape for an entire audience at home, thereby losing every one of those people as a potential customer?

I mean when you look at it that way. Renting something from block buster and watching it with the whole family ($5.99) versus every member of that family renting that movie for themselves ($23.96). That's looking at it as a family of 4. That's how much a potential customer is really worth. 3 family members stole that money from blockbuster!!!

[Ben Cebhrem]

The point that you're bringing up here is that sometimes the legislation is not in par with the social code. Today's legislation is created largely by corporate lobby groups, whereas today's social code, I believe, is way more liberal. I would say a majority of the population are either people who download regularly to som extent, or people who are indifferent to the whole thing. I would say that a minority of the general population, and certainly a minority of the younger population (<30 years old) disagree with notion that piracy is plain wrong, unethical and unjustifiable.
Does this mean there's something wrong with the legislation or the social code?

I think there's more a discrepancy in the generations, how they express a social code via a law, and the very upbringing of the latest generation. Combine that with the fact that, for a generation of US citizens, it has been legal to circumvent, in a way, what we would now call pirating. The original intent was not what we might consider as such, but combined with the digitalization of TV and radio, and the widespread use of computers, many youngsters are going to see lines as being more blurry than would a person of say, seventy years. But then again, who can blame the seventy year old? It's fairly hard to see the future in an impactable way where hardware technology is concerned.

[nitro2k01]

Fun Fact: The first pirated piece of software I have ever "owned" is Nero 6 by ORiON. My Uncle gave me it when I modded my Xbox so I could burn my games. I've given it to a few people, I think it might have been gamemasterAS's first pirated app too.

I remember it. Wonderful chip music keygen. I know I recorded that tune, let's see if I can dig it up.

Now I dug it up. The tune I was thinking about was the 7.0
keygen, not the 6.0 one. If anyone wants to listen to it, it can be downloaded here:
http://keygenmusic.net/?page=team&teamn ... on&lang=en
(Nero 7.0.1.2 / NeroBurningROM(2001))

Note to mods: That site contains only music, no keygens.

[APHawkes]

Obviously taking a program (including game) which you did not buy, which the creator charges (or charged for), and using it is "wrong," and if you can't see that you're hopeless. You can't have something that you did not obtain legally - if that's beyond your grasp then your momma raised you wrong. Sorry, sucks to be you.

I think there is a problem of conflicting legality here.

On one hand there is the concept of "fair use" for copyrighted material. It is legal to make backups of media, for your own use. It is perfectly legal to take a VCR/DVR and record your favorite TV show to watch later. Same for a movie on TV as well. It is legal to copy a Compact Disc and use the copy in your car so the original doesn't get destroyed. It is legal to copy a game CD in case your drive decides to scratch the hell out of it.

On the other hand there's the DMCA. It makes it illegal to circumvent copy protections, period. That includes copy protections which would only be used for "fair use." That's the part that's getting the issue confused. I should be allowed to make a backup of my DVD collection, but the DMCA says I can's use CSS to go around the copy protection to get a copy. I should be able to make a backup of my game discs and music collection, but there are DRM protections which get in the way.

If you want to not buy games/music/DVDs that are DRM protected because they "violate" the concept of "fair use" that's fine - as a form of protest. But pirating these things in spite of the DRM is only making the situation worse.

[Jongamer]

I think the bottom line is, Pirating is illegal.

But your not gonna stop it.

As long as their is Humanity, there will be stealing, it is flat out human nature to steal.

None of you are innocent, not a single one of you, you all pirate stuff, or have pirated stuff not too long ago, but you all act like your shi* don't stink, and yell at other people for pirating. [/rant]

[Ben Cebhrem]

Agreed, mostly.

Some people, a minority, will view pirating something that has a very restrictive form of DRM as a way of showing a company that the content is good, but the DRM is not. There are a lot of companies starting to view DRM as a point of contention, and are willing to err then on the side of the consumer. For instance, DRM that allows you to only play a game if the media is in the computer on starting the game- hey, makes sense to me, and it ought to make sense to anybody on these forums. It's the way consoles have worked nearly forever, though the physical media may have changed.

At the same time, you say it's fair to record using a VCR or DVR. I assume you mean only if it was recorded in your household. However, what with the widespread use of technology, people are going to view it as "I could have recorded it, I get the channel, so I'll just download it". In either case, you can entirely skip over commercials, which are the way a show gets paid for (I am not including the fact that you also pay a fee to a cable or satellite provider in this example as it is mainly still not commercial free). In the view that you disallow the chance of advertising to perhaps sway your buying behavior, you are in fact, stealing the show- you aren't giving full consideration to how the show is paid for, nor are you "doing your part" in supporting how television then operates in the main.

Which brings me back to - you have a whole new generation, being raised a very different way than previous generations. Do I myself support piracy of games, music, OSs? No, I do not. But I think you'll find that society as a whole support piracy of television and music, simply as they have grown accustomed to such in the form of recording, and will be unwilling to let go of it. There's a gray line somewhere in here, and it's not terribly easy to define it in such a way that society, not law, will enforce it.

[SonyPortableizer]

Valium almost has it
piracy is like originally buying those candy bars, THEN cloning them

Except you're not buying anything when you pirate stuff.

Well I meant making copies of it, like someone(Could be me)copied all their NES/N64 games to the computer for use on a plane ride, so the whole bomb thing does not happen again, and It was called pirating by another member