Bill Gates made a ton of money and wasn't necessarily following either law or moral guidelines to do so.
The success enjoyed by Bill Gates was hard earned. Success is a destination at the end of a journey that is too hard for a lot of people.
Bill Gates' software is some of the most pirated software ever.
Bill Gates is one of the richest people ever.
Can anyone become anywhere near that scale of rich without being morally or ethically bankrupt?
What crime 'piracy' in comparison to the business practices of the highly successful / profitable / rich?
I don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't pass judgement as it's subjective, but they're the places my mind went in relation to your comment.
Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the business of licensing creative work not actually doing it.
With zero chances of influencing the law on this or most other issues I can either choose to be a slave to it or not.
Only slaves and cowards obey their masters even when they aren't being watched.
I jaywalk too when its safe to do so. "Find me in New York for this quarter!"
The creators like myself you valorize don’t exist in a vacuum. If distributors who finance the projects upfront with risk capital don’t get paid then there is nobody to pay me for making content and thus content does not get made. Financing the speculative production of a movie or tv series is inherently high risk.
Let me flip the script a little michaelmrose. What do you do for your money and why should you not have to do it for me for free?
Definition of theft
1a : the act of stealing specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
Much like violating copyright isn't similar in nature to commandeering ships on the high seas its not much similar to the taking of real property in that the owner isn't deprived of anything and in fact is wholly unaffected and absent from the transaction.
Actual property is the necessary resolution of the inherently rivalrous nature of property while Copyright is mandate that I limit what data I transmit to another party so as to avoid transmitting any patterns of bits that could reasonably be argued to be owned by any entity on the premise that this limitation will create an intangible good that can serve as an incentive to encourage creators to trade in it.
If congress contrary to the rest of our interests grants you sole ownership of the color red I wont be a thief if I opt to paint my house that color.
Really this is a tired subject having been debated endlessly since the 70s. Anyone still using it is apt to have staked out their position and decided they care more about the emotional import of the word thief than reasoned argument.
That's kind of the point. Whether I pirate your work and watch it or I watch paint dry for an hour doesn't affect your bottom line, because you weren't going to get my money either way.
It really doesn't matter what I do. My employment is an arrangement for services rendered same as yours. At the absurd limit where nobody paid for anything and absolutely everyone pirated everything nobody would be forcing you to work for free. Your employer in that scenario would have totally and wholly failed to secure an arrangement with customers to voluntarily transfer their money to your employers pockets and thus justify their existence. You wouldn't work for free you would just do something else.
In reality if its really easy to pay and even mildly frustrating to pirate it seems like a reasonable balance of paying customers and freeloaders is apt to make you all healthy and wealthy.
> Gates: This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
> WSJ: But those were stolen, correct?
> Gates: Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.