Reply To: Piracy good or bad

@David: Interesting article!

@Eugene: One positive feature of all that might be that the general public, and the judges of these competitions, might learn better standards in the end — they just have to go through a transitional period of “a lot of junk churned out all over the place” on the way.

The last vinyl album I bought had an inner sleeve with a tape cassette skull-and-crossbones warning that “home taping is killing music!” But far from killing music, home taping was bringing more and more people into a wider and more diverse music scene who previously couldn't afford to buy lots of albums. The eventual result is that standards of musicianship have improved hugely. Far from “killing music”, home taping was just annoying a lot of big-shots in record companies and super-mega-stars who couldn't be bothered to play live gigs.

@Jongware: I'm not saying “piracy isn't stealing, therefore it's OK”. Piracy is often worse than stealing. For example, if you lend me a book, and I don't give it back to you, then I've stolen it, and that's pretty bad. But if you write a book, and I dishonestly present myself as the author of what you wrote, that's much worse. You yourself were the victim of a really awful example of that sort of piracy (of your excellent InDesign Object Reference). Action should be taken against that sort of thing, and I think it probably could be more effectively taken if stop pretending it's exactly same thing as theft, that's all.

If we label every case of misappropriation — piracy, plagiarism, extortion, common theft, etc. — as “stealing”, then we won't be able to take appropriate steps to control it, and deal with appropriately, in proportion to its severity.

Unfair pricing isn't the same thing as “stealing” either — but it's still unfair!