| timmah said: Just because a person is rich doesn't make it morally ok to steal from them. That would be like saying a particular store is making big profits, so it's ok to walk in and shoplift from them. And the term 'file sharing' does not make it better than stealing. You own something that somebody worked to produce, and you didn't pay for it. Pirating games - stealing, pirating movies - stealing, pirating software - stealing, pirating music - stealing. |
I would argue that the term "stealing" doesn't entirely fit the situation. When a person pirates media, he is only costing the distributor a potential sale--even then, there's no guarantee that they would have made the money that his piracy "cost" them, or that he would have bought it at all, had piracy not been an option. When you steal a videogame, movie, or album from a store, you not only deprived them a sale, but you also deprived the shop of the physical, tangible worth of that disc. I don't know if I'm stating this correctly. Basically, if a store has a $10 album, and I steal that physical album, they've lost $10. It's gone. Whereas if I pirate a $10 album, the "source" for that revenue remains, and, technically, the distributor has lost nothing.
Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not trying to say that piracy is okay, just that the unique nature of digital media makes this a somewhat morally grey area. Personally, I do my fair share of pirating, but I also buy as much as I can afford, because if everyone pirated everything, no one would earn anything, and we can't have that.
