Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
We may be unable to control what people call things, but we can be aware of the way in which what we call things functions. In the current example calling what people do "theft" or "piracy" seems to function to throw more heat than light on the issue. It's a bit like whether one constructs tax as a "burden" or a "contribution". If you construct it as a burden you have already decided that it's something that's not a good thing, ought to be avoided and something that one almost has a duty to minimize. None of these things are intrinsic to tax as such, but convey an attitude towards it.
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Very true, and don't you think that many of the people who use the word "piracy" do so because the image of the pirate as an "outlaw" has a certain romanticism in popular culture, and makes the act of taking someone's intellectual property without paying for it sound less sordid than it actually is?