With due respect to all the poster's on the thread, it seems to be a discussion of hardened positions, rather that a look at the potential change in morals due to the availability of pirated materials. (Liviu_5's first post). I'm going to post my view on how we got here, morally and ethically (you may substitue ethos if you prefer), and then where (and why) we seem to be going.
Please save your brickbats until the end.
First, the word <steal>. All ethic systems traditionally defined <steal> as taking an object from one entity by another without permission or compenation. When that occured, the former owner no longer had the property, and the new acquirer then had it. But it was based on the concept of a transfer of property, not the creation of a new property. If I <stole> an apple from you, I had an apple and you no longer had one. If I had a machine that could make unlimited free apples (given a pattern) and I bought (or borrowed) a pattern apple, I didn't <steal> the original apple, no matter how many copies of the apple I made. You may argue I have broken other laws, but not <stealing>. You either still have your apple (after I returned it) or I bought it legally. The glut of apples may make them commercially worthless, but again, that is not <stealing>. (Other criminal labels may apply.)
From the beginning of civilization until the time of Gutenberg, the above concept was true, as there was no way to make (unlimited) cheap copies of anything. Gutenberg created the first mass-production technology - printing.
This was so different from anything before, it several hundred years before it started to reach legal definition (Statue of Anne (ca. 1710)). You can look in Roman law, Greek philosophy, Chinese and Indian philosophy, ect. and not find it. Nor in injuctions from sacred texts, either (stealing was always defined as property transfer - not unathorized (sic) property creation).
So when we talk of the morality of Intellectual Property(I.P.), remember, this concept has been around only 300 years (or so) out of 5000-8000 years of civilization. It is a creation of modern man, not given from on high (so to speak).
The whole concept of providing legal protect to what we now call I.P. was to provide a <limited> monopoly to the creators of new ideas, to encourage their creation. In reality, it was to protect producers who used I.P. to make a massed-produced product from competition. All mass production required large production runs to defray the equipment cost of production. I.P. protection allowed one to charge more, and pay off factory costs faster. This was true whether you were talking Patent or Copyright. This is a <very> important point. Once given the protection of law, I.P became self-enforcing under the mass-production worldview. If you could have your Capital (i.e. factory) seized for I.P. infringment, no one wanted to take that risk. The gain would be little and the risk (economically) large. Therefore I.P. gained value as a thing in and of itself, and created industries based on it (i.e. authorship and inventors).
Unfortunately, the world has continued to change. First, The invention of the photocopy machine made copying printed material cheap, without having to invest any capital at all. Second, the home computer (whatever other things it is used for) made a cheap and readily available digital copying machine. Finally, the coming of the internet allowed the rapid transfer of digital information between all these copying machines. Suddenly, huge numbers of people had the I.P. equivalent of factory sitting in their homes - paid for, and <lots> of things to manufacture (sic). The economics of mass-production I.P. was shattered. The collateral damage is the primary industries making I.P. The higher the I.P. content, the more the damage.
This is not going to change. It's only going to get worse. (You may not like it, shucks, <I> may not like it. But either way, it isn't going to change reality.) I.P. was (and is) an artifact of mass-production methodelogies, and live and dies by them. When there is a large economic profit to be gained by breaking laws, those laws get broken. Eventually, they get repealed.
Sorry about the length. 30.
