I'm not taking anything from anyone. I'm making a copy of it. The original owner still has theirs.

This is why digital media differs from physical objects. You can make unlimited copies of it and the original remains with the owner, therefore nothing is being stolen.



Which is precisely why it's not victimless. =)

One could make the argument that making counterfeit currency alone isn't a crime, but doing so with the intent of spending it is, since it's the spending of that would actually lead to the devaluation of the overall supply. So in that it is similar to copying digital media rather than buying it: intent. If you never intend to use it then there's nothing wrong with making counterfeit money, and if you never intent to purchase a digital product, making a copy of it without paying isn't denying the creator money they'd otherwise have gotten. Both become victimless.



They'd only get paid if I would have bought it, though. If I would never have bought it and downloaded it instead, the result would be the same: they wouldn't get paid. That's the crux of this.

That's the problem with these laws vs. those regarding normal theft.

If I steal your cookie then you obviously no longer have the cookie. You've lost something you owned. You've suffered. A judge can easily recognize that because it's already happened, and they punish the thief accordingly.

But with digital piracy there's nothing physical being lost. What's lost is the potential monetary gain from a legitimate purchase. The law acts on a "maybe" in a thoughtless way. You can't have laws contingent on what might or might not happen all be handled with one broad stroke. You have to prove intent--like conspiracy to commit murder--the court has to prove that the offender sought to harm another. Same with this: the court should have to prove that the offender would have ever paid but chose never to, because only then is the offender actually causing harm.

Music I don't have a problem with. It's easy to hear an entire song before you fork up the money to buy it, and now-a-days you can buy individual tracks off CDs in really convenient ways without signing away your privacy.

Video games, not so much. Unless you have a gaming friend who has it already, it's impossible to see the entire game (ie, product) before forking up a lot of money, and with the case of EA games now, allowing them to scan everything you do on your computer.

Just the fact you can't see what you're buying until you buy it... everyone should consider that messed up. That alone, in my mind, is enough to justify software piracy with the intent of playing it to decide if it's worth purchasing it or not. $50+ is a lot to fork up for something you might not even like.

Any reasonable person, IMO, should understand and accept that. Your intent was clear. You weren't denying anyone their financial gain and, in fact, the practice lead to them getting more money than they would have had you not done what you did.

But if you were judged by the letter of the law, what you did would be illegal. No victim and all parties in fact benefited, but the law still deems it "wrong".

It's all about the intent. Someday maybe the courts will recognize that.

I feel it is a lot harder to be so cavalier about piracy when you know people who have been directly hurt by it. While i do feel that film is a large enough industry to the point that it is mostly harmless, piracy doesnt stop there. Software is a market with a huge piracy problem, and thousands of indie developers are crushed by it on a regular basis. I can somewhat understand piracy when the makers are already making bank off a product, but not when they are scraping by.

Do i think people should be able to try before buying? absolutely. if more demos were released I feel piracy would take a definite hit, but I also know that its not the cure. People pirate for so many reasons: too high of a price, wanting to try it first, not able to experience it anywhere else, or just not giving a damn. How do you solve people not being able to watch Game of Thrones without a cable subscription? How do you justify to your shareholders selling games and albums at a lower price point? and how do you get people to start appreciating that thousands of hours go into some of these projects?

I do applaud people who purchase content after using piracy to demo it. But those who do are the clear minority, so how do we deal with the people who straight up want something for nothing?

I don't do it anymore but there has been times i downloaded a game to try to see if i like or not or music, But there was a lot of games and music i just deleted because i didn't like it. Now for the ones i didn't delete i did go out and buy a real copy and went on steam and got it from them. I just see how people can say every download hurts people, if you don't like it and delete it that means that you never intended on really buying in the first place you just wanted to see what it was like. Which kinda goes back to that whole intend debate everyone was having, And one of the other reasons i would get a pirated copy of a game was for the CD crack i don't know about everyone else buy i hate having to try to find the CD DVD just to play a game i like to just click on the icon and play, kinda what steam is doing now. And why i buy my games on steam now plus you don't have to waste the gas to go somewhere and pick it up just download it from steam and play.