werepossum said:
Stealing is stealing. Certainly stealing a little is better than stealing a lot, but it's still theft. Piracy is no different than stealing someone's car on the grounds that insurance will pay him back and he'll be out nothing.
While I concur that the consequences of actions hold weight, even if they cannot be seen, I disagree with your analogy. Stealing property of physical, tangible quality is definately theft, but downloading off the internet is duplication, not removal. Your analogy would be more apt if the perpetrator created a free copy of the subject's car and drove off leaving the original in the parking lot, now slightly devalued for its diffused uniqueness.
Now, the obvious response to that would be to say that the theft in this case was not the car itself, but the its potential sale. That makes sense, but the part I have trouble accepting is that once you get into ascribing value to hypothetical actions, you destroy the basis for establishing principles such as Stealing = Stealing. As thoughts aren't facts, a person could steal the whole world in their mind and be guilty of nothing. Meta-ethics aside, the value of intent is nothing when its execution is unverifiable. (e.g. WAS there a sale that was lost, taken, or stolen? Or would the person inclined to piracy have even bothered if it wasn't free?)
This is where I stop speaking like an authority on the topic because I have no fucking idea how to answer that question. But I'm pretty certain that its folley to create the basis for judicial principles on maybes. All of that said, I think the stolen care sale analogy works better in the case of individuals who actually SELL pirated or bootleg media and IP for personal profit, as opposed to people distributing/downloading freely for personal use.
Regardless of the morality of piracy or people's feelings about it, I think its safe to say that it is inevitable that inclined people will do so, regardless of how much bad noise, lawsuits and copy protection media corporations throw at the "problem". Further, I think most people here will agree with me that us legit, paying video game consumers it is much more tasteful to be treated to an honor system (ala Stardock Games / Glactic Civ) than it is to be bludgeoned by intrusive, futile DRM software that punishes and alienates paying customers (ala, PC Mass Effect). I'm not sure what would be the "right" way to dissuade piracy, but I'm confident that the RIAA/MPAA publisher types are beating down the wrong path with a heavy hand.
