This is an honest question, I'd be curious to hear how you might differentiate this from music and movie sharing? I hope that people won't just down-vote me without responding. I am truly curious because I myself have mixed feelings about all of these issues as both a content creator as well as a consumer. It's hard for me to understand why certain types of art must be free for all, but others are defended vigorously.

I've seen this happen several times before where someone uses photos, design or article text without permission, gets busted and winds up on the tech forums. The tech community generally tends to get pretty noisy about how despicable they find it.

It strikes me as interesting because one of the piracy arguments is that it's not stealing because the original author didn't lose anything. In this case (well aside from the hot-linking bandwidth) the original authors didn't lose anything.

If all intellectual property should be free, shouldn't this be perfectly fine to use art and graphics and such as well? Why is it ok for 37signals to have any claim of ownership over these things when musicians who do so are criticized for not understanding.

Is the difference the way the material is being used? It because curbit is using this in a corporate setting? People who are in favor of file sharing, does that not apply to design and software? Does it only apply to individual, personal use? What about sites who host music and have banner ads, are they ok? What if I use a song in my YouTube video, is that the same thing? How about some photos for a YouTube slide show?

Thanks for any thoughts!