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Originally Posted by molman
@xg4bx: I think your post echoes many peoples odd logic around this topic (which I personally find to be a false logic). My contention comes down to this. You don't have to consume said book/song/tv show etc. It is in many ways a luxury item. If you can't afford that $100 novella don't read it. If you breach someone’s copyright (I really don't like the word pirate, it is so loaded now), then just accept that you are breaking the law in most countries and depriving the people who hold the legal rights due compensation... anything beyond that is just the stories people tell themselves. Btw. Not judging you, just saying that people seem to have overly complex narratives around this topic.
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One reason I don't agree with that position is that it assumes that the content creators are holding up their part of the deal. They aren't.
Broadly speaking, the deal is that the creators have a limited period of time in which to profit from their creation, after which it enters the public domain.
Obviously, there's a spectrum along which the proper point of "limited period" might occur, but basically, in the United States, we have reached the point that for practical purposes, nothing enters the public domain during the lifetime of any adult alive at the time it is created.
When you add to that an attempt by the creator to extract a disproportionate price for the content, leveraging off of the extended time frame of copyright, I think it's fair to say that the deal is off.
That's not a legal argument, so YMMV.
But there's another point that is a legal one. You are assuming that it is unquestionable that downloading files from pirate sites is illegal. People tend to confuse the clear illegality involved in the unauthorized
distributing of copyrighted material, with the downloading of that material for personal use. While the matter is not indisputable, I think that there is a very strong case - stronger than the contra - for the proposition that, legally speaking, merely downloading a file from a pirate site for personal use is not a copyright violation.
You do have to be careful, though, that you are not downloading in a PTP situation, because (as I understand the way the technology works) that involves you with distributing at the same time you are downloading.
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I personally think copyright law is where the real issue lays, and that the abstracts of the physical world don't translate well to the digital where everything is infinitely copy-able...... but then I'm leading us down a rat hole so I'll stop.
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Well, without going down the rathole, I would observe that maybe the problem is with the physical abstracts in the first place, not with the translation. I think that the concept of intellectual property is incoherent, but it works well enough to be useful in the physical world. I think that the digital world exposes that incoherence.