No, you’re all asshole.
You know full well the difference between stealing a book from a store and lending a book from a library.
I know saying “think before you post” comes across a bit harsh, but let me tell you what you failed to consider before posting:
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Mentioning the names of popular software packages plus the word “torrent” in the same post creates a popular search term. This will draw people looking for hacked software to our site… not what we want.
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You’re encouraging illegal behavior. If you don’t agree with the law, write your congress person. If you can’t afford the software, write the publisher and ask for a student or discount version… chances are slim but you might come away with a deal.
Don’t break the law simply because you’re too lazy to save up for the product you want, or too lazy to look for a shareware / freeware alternative. There’s plenty out there.
Well, I’ve now got Final Cut Studio - full version, no hacking, cheating, torrenting, downloading, etc - and for some reason it feels different when I use it. not because its a different program but because I got it the proper way 
I suppose every person thinks - “its just me getting it for free, everyone else will pay for it and therefore they justify the hacking they’ve done”
if that makes sense 
You’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Ivan. Profit is money that is made AFTER costs are covered. Software houses estimate sales when budgeting a production, and when you take a sale away from that house, you may be cutting into revenue that wouldn’t end up in the “profit” column. You’re taking food out of the mouths of the developer’s children.
If you’d follow your logic to the opposite extreme, you’d be arguing that a person should donate x% of his profit to the software maker should he “strike it rich” with one of his videos. At either extreme, your comment is ludicrous and irrelevant. Buying a piece of software is not supposed to guarantee one any amount of profit from the use of that software.
If someone can’t afford the software, they shouldn’t use it. Are you going to suggest we all steal Lamborghinis simply because we can’t afford them?
There’s a huge difference between an actual advertising campaign and the testimonial of a pirate. There is no repayment in any form here.
The company should be able decide when, where and how its product is advertised. Not a bunch of filthy scumbags who think they’re doing the world a favor by raping and pillaging software developers.
Comparing physical property to intellectual property is an analogy that “doesn’t stand”. You don’t buy a blank disk when you buy software… you buy a license to the intellectual property produced by a software house.
Take your logic and apply it to every copy a software house produced. The house would make $0 of revenue.
Software licensing is much different than that of a book or album. You’re basing your entire argument on a comparison between apples and oranges.
See ? I will fight you at your literary level, I have words
No, you are an asshole, (see, I can match your words with equal eloquence, effortlessly) and you are so ill spoken you won’t go near the central argument.
We all know that when a book is stolen from a bookstore, it costs the store owner $. Borrowed from a library, it pleases the publicly funded librarians, ensuring future librarian employment. Did libraries please scribes? Maybe only those who understood how advancing literacy could boost their job prospects ? 
I know they called the first printers harsher words than asshole. 
Scribes hated printers with a passion. Just as printers hated libraries that under cut their booksellers. As early stage actors hated movies. As movie studios hated the VHS. And now is the age of the modern hater, who hates Bit Torrent, and the free reproduction of knowledge. Get used to it. It is called increasing the efficiency of sharing our knowledge. Some things will change, but not the essence of that.
You see, once people have knowledge, they don’t care what assholes call them. They know better, they have acquired culture. The first and strongest sign of someone who has acquired culture is that they desire to spread it as freely and openly as possible. That will never change, fighting it is beating a dead horse. Oh yeah, carriage makers and horse breeders had a few choice words about Henry Ford. Names worse than “horse thief” , his car was worse than an ass. You had to be a you know what to buy one.
Quite possibly, but I’m not an asshole with a history of stealing stuff.
Then I think it’s time you proved your point by going into a book store tomorrow and walking out with a heavy tome. Make it a nice big one. Hold it over your head when you do it. Make it clear what you’re doing. Then when you get stopped by security, offer the same argument that you posted here. Let us know how that goes.
We’ll send you a cake with a file in it.
omgawd.
this thread is now very entertaining
If it is theirs to spread.
To make that decision on behalf of someone else, someone who invested money in the production of that knowledge while holding a reasonable expectation of generating a return on that investment, is theft.
I only need one word.
Theft.
srsly tho.
you’re in denial if you think it’s not stealing, lol 
with that being said…yes i have illegally downloaded music before. and the thought is always in the back of my head… “is the .0000001% chance gonna happen, and i get sued for copyright infringement or something?”. whether you think it’s not wrong or not, the law can get youuu
i haven’t downloaded any programs before though…i’ve read about it and it seems like a MAJOR hassle… including things like changing the registry on your computer and stuff?? nah…i’ll just stick with my 70$ powerdirector. if it was like 2 clicks and i had the newest sony vegas for free i’d do it. but i’d be aware that i’m taking a risk of breaking the law…
Ever been a professional entertainer? It’s amazing how many people want to “hire” you to work for free. “Oh but we’ll provide lunch, and this event would be great exposure for you.”
Exposure, I would tell the person, is something homeless people die from. Entertainers that can’t pay the rent because they always work for free become homeless people…
No, advertising your stolen warez is not a “plus” for the copyright owners, any more than it makes a car company feel good to find out that one of their products is the “most popular” stolen car this year.
What we’re talking about here is intellectual property. Nothing new there, copyright law goes back a long way, and this is in the same vein. What’s new is the ease and convenience of making perfect copies. Your argument seems to be that, because it’s easy to make perfect copies, that makes it okay.
Or does it not make it okay? How about we start from there? Is it only okay for you? Or should each person be able to pirate n software titles before being a thief? It’s like the old graffiti discussions we used to have. If you think grafitti is okay, let us know your address so we can come over and help decorate the place. But if you don’t own the place, it’s not up to you either.
How do I feel about music downloads? I did my fair share of downloading from Napster back in the day. I picked up copies of songs I had already purchased; didn’t feel guilty there. Stuff I never had a copy of; felt guilty there. But before the digital revolution, most of my music collection was gathered by recording the radio, then editing what I wanted out of the long tapes. And I’m pretty sure that was legal (at least then), as long as I wasn’t distributing/selling it.
Wow, John Foss felt guilty
We are both old guys. I felt pissed when my Steely Dan tapes got ate by my Sony player. Good luck asking Sony for a new copy of your Steely CD when it doesn’t play. It was and is fuck you if your media goes crap. Official Corporate policy. You buy the media, and if it goes shit, well you should buy it again, or listen to silence.
Or not be a retard, figure out bit torrent. Or meet a guy with a 2 Tb external hard drive (80 $ toy) who will give you more music then you can listen to in ten years, in exchange for a beer, and conversation.
This is not a conversation. The transfer of huge libraries is becoming so trivial that this debate will be seen as trite and archaic in a few years. Actually , it is trite now. I have no hope of living long enough to listen to my music collection. Well, maybe, if I really tried. But I don’t care to. So many friends have given me so many files, that I see a future of just this giant free library of music, books and videos, that I could never live long enough to experience.
I already have this library. Friends keep giving me more stuff, just as I pass them a TB (also known as 1000 movies) , quite casually.
To not see that the free transmission of digital (all information) is free now, is to amaze me at your blindness. Please explain to me again how you feel more virtuous by buying things I get for free.
The fact that it exists does not change the fact that property belonging to third parties are being exchanged without their consent and thwarting their realistic expectation of an income from that property, is theft.
I’m not saying it’s not happening, I’m just saying it’s theft.
And the fact that you’re still arguing is making me wonder who the blind one is around here.
Using the excuse “Well it must be ok because everyone else does it!” still doesn’t make it right.
Aye, it also takes us just about full circle.
Something else I’m suddenly wondering about, where in this marvellously utopic world of the free exchange of information and knowledge does the hacking and cracking required to do so fit in?
Attaching your perception of culture to one’s desire to spread knowledge isn’t the same as everyone doing so. You’re passing judgment here and that does nothing to further your argument.
There are several free software organizations who are working to do what you claim is cultured. But not every software manufacturer is part of that organization… and software users should be happy about that. There are many cases in which commercial software is released with much better quality than free software. When people are paid to do something, they’re motivated to do a better job.
FTL, you’ve yet to acknowledge the fact that a software license and a published book are two completely separate things… likely because your argument will fall to pieces once that happens. You can’t jam a book into a disk drive and have the computer play Beethoven… why are you arguing as if that’s the case?
Here’s one attempt at utopia: the Free Software Foundation
The hacking and cracking come in when someone wants to impose their ideas on someone else who doesn’t agree with them. Not too far from what we see some of the religious extremists doing… except they’re destroying revenue instead of churches.
Yes it does
That is precisely what makes it OK. By your reasoning, printing presses should have been banned centuries ago. Talk about stealing the work of scribes, it was the devils own invention, if you were a scribe. Not so bad if you were a reader. The Supreme Court should have realized that home cassette recorders and VHS tape machines should be banned, as proposed by the entertainment industry,decades ago. How much that would have helped to advance our culture we can only dream ! Especially as these new technologies were whole heartedly embraced by morally inferior countries in Asia. If only we had kept the moral high ground! Please help us picture it sir. Show us that great place we could have been in now. I want to share in your dream of the moral superiority of intellectual property rights winning out over the advance of technology and the eternal quest for knowledge.
Please make your argument about how cultures that banned the printing press (many did and still do) out prospered those that did not. Follow that with your argument for how the recording of music (and the legality of home taping machines) destroyed the music and acting professions. Follow that with an intellectual crescendo of predictions about how the presently occurring free dissemination of digitalized information is ruining our society with the injustice of it all. Do it over the internet please, it’s faster and so uppity intellectual I am sure it suits you fine.
It will be a very stupid argument to make. Even the most craven sold out corporate owned blow hard assholes would blanch at the task. But you are up to it, I have faith in your articulate genius. I remain all ears.
I’m guessing you still haven’t tried to take a book from the bookstore yet, so until you do, I’m done with you.
Keep taking the acid.
That’s what thousands of people who perpetrated genocide thought. Well, guess what, it’s still wrong…
So far you’ve failed miserably to prove your point, and it looks as if you were still looking for an excuse to feel ok about stealing stuff. I sometimes download stuff illegally, but at least I don’t brag about it, nor do I pretend that it’s ok in order to feel better with myself. Get used to it, you’re stealing intellectual property…
Yee…e…e…s?
And the scribes we’re making this up as they went along?
Or were simply a slower version of the press?
Did the scribes “own” the material they were copying?
And before demanding the triumphirate of tasks you demand of Maestro, are you going to define “theft” for us?