i consider telling someone else's jokes stealing in the same sense as stealing music. if you steal my jokes and tell them i am pissed (not really, but i would be if i had the attitude the music industry has). but i dont have the government on my side, like the music industry does. you people do not sem to understand that ones and zeros are ones and zeros, no matter what form they take. information is information. joke, idea, song, movie, it is all the same. either i can "own" information, or i cant. of course i am "rationalizing". the reason i do not steal video games is that i think it hurts the industry. i dont think stealing music hurts the industry, i think it helps it. and i certainly dont feel bad about helping the world by stealing music. there is no magical reason why stealing is wrong. it is wrong because stealing screws up society, it kills the motivation for production. if it doesnt screw up society, you should steal. morals are based on reason. 5 years from now it will dawn on you that everything i am saying is true.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/coffee.htm maybe this link gives my perspective a little credibiity. i think you dudes are stuck in the past.
Fascinating thread! I gotta be honest with you though. The whole time I read this thead all I could think about is the outrageous prices of the software industry including game systems. Microsoft comes to mind as number 1! Sorry I'm not trying to change the subject but this is all I could think of!
i do not steal operating systems, because i have been too lazy to deal with it, but i definitely think it is not morally wrong to steal a copy of windows. like music, i think the market might be best served by the collapse of the current closed and copyrighted system. open and free works better. in many cases i think of copyright as a government enfored monopoly that hurts the market.
Telling a joke is the same thing as singing a song. As long as you aren't doing it to make money, you can sing anybody's song you want, just as you can tell anybody's joke that you want. Having the song Head over Feet is not the same when you sing it as when Alanis Morissette sings it. You keep referring to telling someone else's joke, but when you steal a song you don't just steal the lyrics - you steal the artists performance. I don't feel bad about stealing music either, that doesn't make it right. Whether it is ultimately good or bad for the industry is not the point. You don't get to decide that (legally, at least).
This is exactly what I said I didn't have. I use satellite, not cable. The signals I'm receiving are already floating around in the air. All I'm doing is capturing and decoding them. It's a little different with cable since that's coming through a hard wired connection.
right but i believe that using technology to work around encrypted or protected content is illegal. what you said would be true if you were not descrambling, as you are allowed to recieve whatever is in the airwaves, which is the justification people use to allow radar detectors.
stealing a performance is not possible, which is good news for performers. i can only steal a piece of information that represents that performance.
so i cannot own the joke, a musician cannot own their lyrics, but they can own a recording? why? i have 3 pieces of paper with ones and zeros on them. each one is a perfect digital copy of a piece of information. one is a joke, another is lyrics, another a recording. the only real difference is that the recording is many, many more ones and zeroes. why is it the only one that is protected? the answer is that until now it was far harder to transfer larger files, so music companies took a technological monopoly and made it a legal one. the technological one is gone.
