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The morality of pirating and EULA
- Thread starter likemyorbs
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If you're asking people to answer these questions, you have to accept their answers.
Man I'm tired....
I think if you honestly told your friend something makes you uncomfortable and that strains your friendship, you didn't have a real friendship in the first place. What kind of friend asks you to do something against your morals and when you don't want to, gets angry at you? And why is someone who has those morals not a "fun friend" and take life way too seriously? Can you not even see the point of view that it is wrong to do so (even if you personally don't care about it?) And I don't understand why you keep saying things like "its...really not very important." Maybe that's how you justify it but I work for a media company. To them, its very important.
Yeah, some people cross the line but if you ask people a question about morality and they think what you do is immoral, its hard not to take that personally. How can you not attack someone's personality if they ask if you if what they do is moral or not and you honestly think that it is not.
But what if your boss took away all guest passes, would you sneak them in?
I think if you honestly told your friend something makes you uncomfortable and that strains your friendship, you didn't have a real friendship in the first place. What kind of friend asks you to do something against your morals and when you don't want to, gets angry at you? And why is someone who has those morals not a "fun friend" and take life way too seriously? Can you not even see the point of view that it is wrong to do so (even if you personally don't care about it?) And I don't understand why you keep saying things like "its...really not very important." Maybe that's how you justify it but I work for a media company. To them, its very important.
Yeah, some people cross the line but if you ask people a question about morality and they think what you do is immoral, its hard not to take that personally. How can you not attack someone's personality if they ask if you if what they do is moral or not and you honestly think that it is not.
yep i do. why? I'm poor. Really. It's also not a big deal. After all, big companies got plenty of money to swim in right?
Yes, and I have done on several occasions.
I've got a question back for everyone who says they would never have paid for it anyway. In that case, why do you use / listen / watch it? If it's not something you want then why do you have it?
Another thing to consider is people justifying pirating Adobe CS because they can't justify the cost? I couldn't justify upgrading CS recently because I really don't use it that much any more. However, instead of pirating it I bought Pixelmator.
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I don’t mind buying stuff, especially music but, like someone else has already mentioned in this thread, I live in a part of the world where getting things in a legitimate way is quite complicated, if not outright impossible. So, no matter how much I would love to reward the artists I respect and admire, I just end up pirating a lot of content.
I’m not an ideological anti-Copyright, but I think the existing Copyright Laws all over the world are deeply flawed, unfair and actually counter-productive. I just can’t understand how folks find it justified to protect a copyrighted work several decades after the author died. Of course protection is needed but wouldn’t a duration like 20 years after release make more sense?
With SOPA, it’s really going the path of moral corruption: imagine that 30 or 40 years ago someone suggested to open all private correspondence to make sure no unauthorized photocopy of copyrighted books was mailed…
So if keeping piracy going is a way to eventually knock some sense into regulators’ minds (“No matter what you do, we’ll find technological ways around it!”) then piracy might actually have a moral justification.
For software, I don't pirate.
I’m not an ideological anti-Copyright, but I think the existing Copyright Laws all over the world are deeply flawed, unfair and actually counter-productive. I just can’t understand how folks find it justified to protect a copyrighted work several decades after the author died. Of course protection is needed but wouldn’t a duration like 20 years after release make more sense?
With SOPA, it’s really going the path of moral corruption: imagine that 30 or 40 years ago someone suggested to open all private correspondence to make sure no unauthorized photocopy of copyrighted books was mailed…
So if keeping piracy going is a way to eventually knock some sense into regulators’ minds (“No matter what you do, we’ll find technological ways around it!”) then piracy might actually have a moral justification.
For software, I don't pirate.
I do pirate a lot, and I'm not going to say that it's not a problem at all, but it's not like stealing either. People always try to polarize things, successfully.
Now, if I pirate something I don't like, I don't feel necessarily bad about it. In fact, if pirating killed the movie and music industry, I would pirate Uwe Bolls movies so much that he would never be allowed to make another movie in his life.
The thing is, if you pirate something there's not a chance in Hell you'd pay for, the rights holder hasn't strictly speaking lost anything, so the argument remaining is wether or not you have the right to watch something you have no plans of paying for anyway.
I try to buy as much movies, TV shows and software I can. I'll keep pirating stuff that isn't made available to me by legal means.
PS: Wouldn't it be great with an on-demand service like Spotify, just for TV shows? Pay a monthly fee, get access to new episodes of all your favorite shows.
Now, if I pirate something I don't like, I don't feel necessarily bad about it. In fact, if pirating killed the movie and music industry, I would pirate Uwe Bolls movies so much that he would never be allowed to make another movie in his life.
The thing is, if you pirate something there's not a chance in Hell you'd pay for, the rights holder hasn't strictly speaking lost anything, so the argument remaining is wether or not you have the right to watch something you have no plans of paying for anyway.
I try to buy as much movies, TV shows and software I can. I'll keep pirating stuff that isn't made available to me by legal means.
PS: Wouldn't it be great with an on-demand service like Spotify, just for TV shows? Pay a monthly fee, get access to new episodes of all your favorite shows.
Maybe
I generally take the position that once I buy a box of software, it's mine. I own it, and can do whatever I want with it on my own local machines. This includes hacking, duplicating across multiple actual and virtual machines, discompiling, and deliberately breaking every stupid rule that's printed in the EULA if I so choose.
This attitude stems from the fact that the actual content of the EULA is not known until the box is opened. Any contract then becomes negotiable because I've paid money for something and the enclosed EULA may be in disagreement with my intentions at the time of purchase. As it can be difficult to return opened boxes for a refund, and it will cost me some amount of money to make the effort to get a refund, the EULA becomes void once it enters my network. Any attempt to enforce rules in the EULA that I never signed will result in the loss of sales. Not offering negotiable prices for multiple licenses will also result in a loss of sales. I will try to be reasonable and pay the company what it wants for its software, but I'm not going out of my way to deal with license complications that aren't reasonable, and that includes having to make separate purchase orders for each single-machine license that I want to buy. I expect to be able to get a negotiable or discounted rate for a site license.
I just saw a EULA that said something about how a EULA administrator can demand proof of compliance with the EULA at any time. Well, yeah, I Agree. Now try to break into my network and access my local machines to find out how many copies of the software I'm running, or how many instances are running across the network, and it'll be a real computer crime.
Companies that demand active mechanisms to ensure EULA compliance can either remove such roadblocks or lose the sale. I've rejected several that demanded the use of a USB port for a dongle that would lock the software license to the machine. Yeah, what available USB port, and how much money do you want for this software? I won't even bother cracking the security; just reject the purchase order and find a cheaper or free alternative. Software Activation schemes like what Adobe uses are banned due to security restrictions in the environment. If the company can't trust me to use the software as intended, I can't trust whoever put an Activation scheme into the software to keep my software running when I need it. You'll find that some government contracts read the same way. If you want to sell it, open it up for inspection and remove all backdoors and anything that can prevent operation.
These EULA writers can put anything they want into the one-sided contract, but it's not enforceable. By making many pages of gibberish and threatening customers with legalese in their homes, they're also not helping to encourage respect for intellectual property, which includes my work that should not be freely redistributed across the Internet without attribution or payment. The only enforceable contracts are like site licenses that are actually printed and signed by a company. If they agree to allow EULA administrators into their network, that's their own security hole to worry about.
I generally take the position that once I buy a box of software, it's mine. I own it, and can do whatever I want with it on my own local machines. This includes hacking, duplicating across multiple actual and virtual machines, discompiling, and deliberately breaking every stupid rule that's printed in the EULA if I so choose.
This attitude stems from the fact that the actual content of the EULA is not known until the box is opened. Any contract then becomes negotiable because I've paid money for something and the enclosed EULA may be in disagreement with my intentions at the time of purchase. As it can be difficult to return opened boxes for a refund, and it will cost me some amount of money to make the effort to get a refund, the EULA becomes void once it enters my network. Any attempt to enforce rules in the EULA that I never signed will result in the loss of sales. Not offering negotiable prices for multiple licenses will also result in a loss of sales. I will try to be reasonable and pay the company what it wants for its software, but I'm not going out of my way to deal with license complications that aren't reasonable, and that includes having to make separate purchase orders for each single-machine license that I want to buy. I expect to be able to get a negotiable or discounted rate for a site license.
I just saw a EULA that said something about how a EULA administrator can demand proof of compliance with the EULA at any time. Well, yeah, I Agree. Now try to break into my network and access my local machines to find out how many copies of the software I'm running, or how many instances are running across the network, and it'll be a real computer crime.
Companies that demand active mechanisms to ensure EULA compliance can either remove such roadblocks or lose the sale. I've rejected several that demanded the use of a USB port for a dongle that would lock the software license to the machine. Yeah, what available USB port, and how much money do you want for this software? I won't even bother cracking the security; just reject the purchase order and find a cheaper or free alternative. Software Activation schemes like what Adobe uses are banned due to security restrictions in the environment. If the company can't trust me to use the software as intended, I can't trust whoever put an Activation scheme into the software to keep my software running when I need it. You'll find that some government contracts read the same way. If you want to sell it, open it up for inspection and remove all backdoors and anything that can prevent operation.
These EULA writers can put anything they want into the one-sided contract, but it's not enforceable. By making many pages of gibberish and threatening customers with legalese in their homes, they're also not helping to encourage respect for intellectual property, which includes my work that should not be freely redistributed across the Internet without attribution or payment. The only enforceable contracts are like site licenses that are actually printed and signed by a company. If they agree to allow EULA administrators into their network, that's their own security hole to worry about.
Probably true, however intended by you. Children ape their parents.
See!!
OK, I'm out of this thread, so save your fingers OP.
My friends have honesty and integrity which you obviously lack and would not ask to copy something of mine.
The problem I have with that rational, is that you can say that about anything. I wasn't really hungry so I wasn't going to buy that snack anyway, so I took it. Hey, it was fruit and it was probably going to go bad and the store was just going to throw it away anyway.... I think if you start rationalizing one theft, you can start to go down a dangerous road and justify any theft. Yeah, pirating doesn't necessarily take a product out of the hands of a company that can't sell that one item to someone else, but its still wrong. I wish more people were at least like the op, who seems to admit its wrong (those who argue its fine to do, its a victimless crime, are just beyond words to me) but simply says "I don't care". At least, he's grounded in reality with his argument.
In the context of a hackintosh, if you buy Lion, and you install it on a hackintosh, how is that piracy? You may be breaking the EULA, but piracy isn't the right word. Piracy is "stealing" (better, copying without paying). That isn't the case here..
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The problem with your examples are that in those cases, something is physically removed from someone else's possession (too many s'es?). That means that it is impossible to sell it, as it has been stolen. Unless I steal a DVD from a store, it's not really equal.
What kind of masochistic pirates only consume content / use software that they deem to be worthless though?
What about if you leave enough money so you're only depriving the seller of their profit?
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I touched on this earlier in the post. It is equal because different businesses make money in different ways. Some sell services, some loan you a location to use, some sell physical products. If you take any of those things without Paying, it is stealing. Saying that there is no physical media to steal is a lame excuse. After all, companies don't sell every single piece of product they make. Saying if u took a DVD is the only true way to steal because they now don't have that piece of material to sell is silly, they have plenty to sell with a lot left over. They will sell to as many honest people as there Are.
I don't get your second point, but it can be quite handy to watch something awful, so you know why you dislike it.
But me pirating a given movie doesn't prevent the seller from selling it. That's the difference, and it's a vital one if you ask me.
I don't get your second point, but it can be quite handy to watch something awful, so you know why you dislike it.
But me pirating a given movie doesn't prevent the seller from selling it. That's the difference, and it's a vital one if you ask me.
Not according to the law. My poInt is simply this: we can have a conversation about if it's morally ok to do some things that the law says is wrong. God knows we have had unjust laws in the past. But to argue over well or not this stealing is silly. It is. And all the justification in the world doesnt change that simple fact. When I smoke up, I know I'm breaking the law. I don't say well it's not the same as blah blah so it's different. I just made the choice to disregard this law that I believe is unjust.
Dagless, you don't get it. They. Don't. Care.
They don't care about you. They aren't you. They aren't your friend. They will steal from you if you make it easy, because you deserve it for trusting people. They will steal from you if you make it hard, because you deserve it for daring to use DRM. See how it works? They will steal from you just because they can, if using your product makes their lives better somehow. They are parasites, and I don't know why anyone cares what they say. They are thieves, whether they want to admit it or not. They are just a few steps down from identity thieves or the British tabloids... Oh, wait, you can't "steal" information, can you?
Anyway, for further information, google "antisocial personality disorder".
Maybe because the copyright laws are so outdated and silly they just get tired of all the complications. They become... too jaded to care.
True. I once tried Netflix for a day or two and cancelled. Wasn't worth paying whatever the monthly price was about a year ago. At the time, I preferred buying my TV shows on iTunes. Since then, Apple has disabled and banned me from the iTunes/Mac app stores forever after filing a unauthorized charge claim with Paypal. Now I buy a few shows in Amazon and what I can't get there, I D/L as Web-DL which are iTunes rips anyways and import them into iTunes.
I like having copies of my shows so I can watch them at anytime and not be tied to an internet connection.
As for the music, well, I was a Napster / WinMX user back in the day so that answers that question.
Now that the poll is starting to show a consistent trend, what do our anti-pirates have to say about the fact that 70% of poll responders sometimes or always engage in piracy. Surely the majority of people here aren't evil parasites? It's obvious that people who are against all forms of piracy are a minority, but a very vocal minority here.
I figured that a majority of posters here would pirate in some form just because anyone would frequent this type of board probably has the knowledge of how to do so. Your average computer user might not even know how to pirate stuff. However I bet those people might see nothing wrong with buying those DVDs that are clearly illegal from a street vendor.
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I figured that a majority of posters here would pirate in some form just because anyone would frequent this type of board probably has the knowledge of how to do so. Your average computer user might not even know how to pirate stuff. However I bet those people might see nothing wrong with buying those DVDs that are clearly illegal from a street vendor. I'm not sure our forum represents a good cross section of society to make any kind of judgement about this issue in any great context. But it is an interesting thread to be part of.
Maybe it's a jersey thing, but as i said before, i don't know anyone who doesn't engage in some form of pirating or another. My best friend didn't know how to do it when i first met him because he's not too tech savvy, but then i yelled at him for paying for his music and taught him how to pirate and he's been a happy camper ever since.
I doubt all your friends are such staunch anti-pirates. They're probably torrenting as we speak.
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