Mr.Google, It is now 2009. Limewire is the way to pirate for pussyfoots.
Additionally, P2P sharing of the sort provided by such amateur applications as LimeWire,Azureus, and the like are like water wings for pirates.
Regardless of that- I will admit downloading music myself- HOWEVER- and I'm not trying to justify my actions in any way- I subsequently purchased several sets of CDs of my favourite bands, if only because the music I downloaded was crappy 128kbps MP3, which is the equivalent of putting it through a goat-*censored* filter as far as my sub-woofer is concerned. I can definitely hear the difference between the crap quality MP3's I've downloaded and the actual, 44,100 Khz 16-bit stereo Audio CD- which I might add that the only way to get equivalent quality is via lossless formats which suck altogether.
... Of course, since most music nowadays is crap anyway, you really can't tell the difference. *ZING*
Go into a music store. How many people do you see? How much music is there? Go on Limewire, how much music is there? How many people are downloading music at any given time?
Not very many people, quite a lot of music.
Limewire: a lot of trojans masked as music(admittedly easy to detect), and some music. Mostly, as previously described, $hitty quality MP3s, because at some point in time MP3 was declared to actually be of good quality at low bit-rates, or something, since everyone seemed to rip at 128kbps.
basically, the lesson learned here is A:torrents are better then any file sharing program and B:any downloaded music has a 90% chance of being *censored* quality. (the other 10% would be rap)
And I believe I just turned this into a debate about genres and MP3 quality. Oh well.
There you go now, assuming that everyone is just like you.
You must be living in a dream world my friend. It is now 2009. Go into a music store. How many people do you see? How much music is there?
Another shallow insight.
Do you know what I do for a living? Didn't think so. I've worked most of my life in and around all levels of a retail setting. Trust me. I know how much music/video/gaming is bought, sold, and even stolen, (which I have had to show up in court a few times to give the stores side of the story on). I know the numbers inventoried not just every day, but for entire quarters as well as projected numbers for future knowledge. I've seen and dealt with the huge lines forming at midnight so people can legally buy the new hot game/CD.
Not everyone does things just like the next guy.
Indeed! A common argument is that pirating software increases the sales later on because the people get "addicted to it" so to speak, which is actually quite false. If they were successful in acquiring a pirated copy of the program/OS/whatever, what in the blazes makes anybody think they would actually go out and purchase a legitimate version? It's simply backwards logic!
Others claim that it's the Anti-Piracy checks and so forth, (WGA and the like for windows, as an example) that make them pirate the OS, and yet- a genuine version will not be affected at all by the anti-piracy techniques. The only "good" reason I can think of that can be used to try to justify pirating music would be things such as the Sony Rootkit and DRM. The justification falls apart when one realizes that CDs sold with such technology are clearly labelled for those looking at the case a little more closely. Rather then focussing on Eminem beating a dead horse with a sack of rabid ferrets or shoving a Watermelon up his but (or whatever crazy things those rappers are doing these days), check the label for such things as claims that it might not work in a standard CD player, which generally indicates a deviance from the red book standard- which is actually the reason I would refuse to buy such CDs. Deviating from an established standard is not something consumers should condone at all.
The fact is, any form of pirating infringes on intellectual property rights. Before anybody flames me for being a goody-goody or law abiding type of person or other nonsense, bear in mind I myself have downloaded copious amounts of pirated software... ok, maybe not copious, but my share... the difference being I don't try to justify it with such BS as "everybody does it" or, "get with the times, d00d!". In any case- the problem stems quite simply from the ease of duplication afforded by storing such intellectual property digitally. Such ease makes it quite easy to "plagairise" in a loose use of the word, other peoples ideas.
Take a book, for example- would anybody go to the effort of trying to duplicate a book word for word, simply to allow them to read it later on? Obviously not. But the difference is quite pronounced between a book and data stored on a hard drive, especially on the case of software, since it's designed for the computer to read, and it can be copied in a relative instant, with no real work involved as compared to the laborious effort required to duplicate a book manually.
However- just like a book, the software contains ideas. The fact that these ideas are encapsulated into code really shouldn't be of special significance, since, just like a book, HUGE efforts go into the creation of almost any program worth pirating in the first place.
This is understandable. An interesting notion, however, is that even though linux distributions and windows program equivalents can be acquired completely free of charge, people still insist on pirating the commercial product, which leads to o believe they suffer from the same syndrome I do- "pack-rat" syndrome. having the software on disk just for disks sake. often I've thought about this to myself, and questioned, "what was the point", since many illegal downloads have sat idle on my harddrive until deletion, at which point I had simply wasted bandwidth. Of course some may say I simply am no good at deciding what to download that's worth my time. Well, some people say time is money, you know.
Arrgh, that was a terrible lead-up to that conclusion statement. I apologize. my train of thought kind of derailed itself halfway through.
Also- be aware that this isn't pointed at anybody in particular and doesn't try to degrade them, since I have probably downloaded more illegal software then many people in this discussion might have (although I'd rather not get in a contest LOL). Rather, it was a blatant observation provided from my perspective.
Poll