Quote:
Originally Posted by CommanderROR
I'd like to give an example from a different area...
Smoking and Alcohol...
Both are forms of drugs, dangerous to individuals and their environment.
Now, you could make a law that says "Smoking is illegal". What would happen is, that the whole deal would go underground. It has happened with Alcohol (Prohibition?)
Now, if you start to teach people that smoking is dangerous, raise prices for cigarettes and make smoking "more difficult" by not allowing it in public places and things like that you won't get immediate effects, but you will see a slowly diminishing number of smokers. We're having this "slow change" in Europe at the moment, and it is working It's slow because the addicts don't die quickly and there is still far too much "Media-induced coolness-factor connected with smoking", but give it another 10-20 years and we might have quite considerably reduced our number of smokers.
This is of course a process that works the other way round, but in principle it's the same
story.
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I agree with you and that takes us back to what we were saying earlier, that it needs a change in culture. 30 years ago it was socially acceptable to smoke, and virtually everybody did it. Today, in the UK, if you smoke you are treated virtually as though you had leprosy
. The same change in attitude needs to take place with downloading material from the internet, and people (especially children) need to be taught that simply because it's not a "material object", that doesn't make it acceptable to use it without paying for it.