Uh-oh. So, since they don't count me as a potential consumer of their content, does this mean I can just torrent all their stuff without repercussions?
It doesn't look that such action will result in some lost revenie, right?
It doesn't look that such action will result in some lost revenie, right?
This is like saying, “since this show is on HBO, but I only subscribe to Netflix, it must be totally ok to pirate it”
They aren’t required By law to support all forms of consumption to maintain their copyright.
It might suck, and you can be mad at them, but it doesn’t give you any legal right to pirate.
No, that does not mean you can steal.
Not paying for the right to use something is theft of goods and services.
Have you personally verified this fact or are you just stating an opinion as fact?
Content creators/providers are legally allowed to restrict the platforms they support. For example, you have to watch some live sports through a cable tv subscription. There is no way to pay for it separately.
Does this suck? Sure, but cable companies pay enough money to make it worth all the lost customers (or at least that is what they are betting on)
You have no legal right to access content under your terms. Content creators have (nearly) complete control (there are some laws around what they can do, but requiring Linux support is not one of them)
Usually theft means that the original owner is deprived of goods - they can't use them, can't sell them, they simply don't the the original item. This is simply not the case for digital goods. HBO won't lose money when I download GOT, won't they?
It is disingenuous to say piracy doesn’t cost anything to the content creators.
However, when a creator goes out of their way to alienate me as a customer - by either dropping support for my platform, or by region-blocking - I happily put on my pirate hat and get what I want for free. There is no other viable choice for me.
I have bought a great deal of games I played in 1990s (pirated, of course - there simply did not exist a way to buy games legally in Russia at that time), just because I liked them back then.
Also, please stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a dangerous penal crime involving violence and an open theft of possessions. It has nothing to do with copying information.
Also, I think that you misunderstand the GPL terms. The aggrieved party in this hypothetical case is not the original author, it is the buyer of this modified software, whose rights to four essential freedoms [1] would be violated. These violations have a very real material cost.
BTw, it is common for people to believe that GPL requires publishing source codes on the Internet. It is not so. The requirement is to provide the user of a program source codes, so he can exercise the guaranteed freedoms. You can do it in any suitable form, publishing code is just the most convenient way to do it, but not mandatory.