Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
If you take something that belongs to me without my permission, that is theft.
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The music industry et al. would like to brainwash everyone into thinking there's exactly the same public consensus about intellectual piracy, which in its current form goes back a mere generation, as about theft, which has been anathema since time immemorial. There isn't.
If I take your car, you'll be left without a car. If I read something your wrote without your permission, you won't even know it. You won't be any worse off than you were before I read your work. So most people just don't think of it as "theft", no matter what the music industry says. It's unfair, but it's not theft.
Now, to prevent this unfairness, and to keep the artists and writers going, you have to stop pretending that it's still the 19th century. You can't enforce your ownership of intangible ebooks or mp3 tracks the way you could with tangible vinyl records or paper books, not on the end-user level anyway. And if you don't control something in the first place, it cannot be "stolen" from you. It can however be used by someone without you receiving your just reward as the author. So instead of throwing up all kinds of anticompetitive restrictions in an effort to milk the consumer dry, you need to make sure I actually CAN and WANT to reward you for your work, and that the required size of the reward is generally perceived as fair, equitable and worth paying. What we have instead is copyright holders, publishers and distributors in a state of denial, pretending that their hysterics about piracy will uninvent the Internet, making it as difficult as possible for consumers to reward the writers and artists, and making a mockery of "fair and equitable" by their discriminatory restrictions and pricing policies.