[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Only while you still care about whether or not others approve of whatever it is you're doing.
The only reason why that "makes someone look like they're a rationalizing/pirate" is because some people seem to be constantly & hell-bent upon trying to make out "the other side" as one-dimensionally evil/hypocritical. Because/And Lord knows editorial you will be punished as soon as you're caught in an apparent self-contradicting/rationalization.

(Good to encounter you in a substantive discussion again, zsb! This should be interesting...)
I fully expect to be called on my behavior when (not if!) I'm engaged in "an apparent self-contradicting/rationalization." I attempt to think about my choices when that happens. Sometimes I find that there are options I hadn't considered, and I need to change some of my behavior (or rationalization). Other times I need to explain myself better. And sometimes I'm just plain being self-contradicatory.

I'm certainly not expecting to change the minds of folks who think that file-sharing of unauthorized copies of creative content is perfectly OK. (How's that for avoiding the loaded and strictly incorrect term "pirating"?) Rather, I'm trying to explain what their choices look like from the point of view of the people some of them/you claim to be attempting to influence.

If your goal is impact on the business world (as in taosaur's second paragraph above), it's important both to see how the business world sees your actions and also to consider the total effect of those actions on their beliefs.

"We're boycotting your products because [fill in the reason]" is a statement the business guys understand and can evaluate. Get a bunch of folks together and you'll have some impact (although the size of that impact is unlikely to exceed your impact on sales numbers).

"We're boycotting your products because [fill in the reason]" combined with "oh yeah, we're also downloading them without authorization or compensation" gets interpreted as "We're not willing to pay for the product at any price, and we're using our 'boycott'-like rhetoric as cover for our file-sharing." And that understanding on the part of the business folks robs the rhetoric of nearly all its potential impact.

Please note: It doesn't matter whether that interpretation matches your intent or not! That's how it'll come across to folks outside the file-sharing community.


As for consistency... well... I was trying to point out firstly that not buying is a separate decision from file-sharing/downloading of unauthorized content, and secondly that you can send a clear message either about poor business models and broken systems OR about file-sharing and "information wants to be free"... but NOT about both at once. If you try to have it both ways, the "influence the business folks" part is guaranteed to get lost.

Xenophon