Author: Enrique Irazoqui
Date: 10:40:55 07/20/98
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 1998 at 13:13:23, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >On July 20, 1998 at 09:08:47, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: > >>All this is a lousy analogy. What you steal from a grocery shop can not be sold >>to a customer and the owner is hurt. Copying a program you don’t find >>interesting enough to buy or you want to check before buying damages no one. >>That’s what shareware is all about. > >These arguments are particularly awful. > >1) Software piracy hurts nobody. Your words, not mine. Quoting myself from the post you are answering to: “it is true that pirating may damage producers, and to this extent I am against it.” Above I referred to a specific case. > Perhaps this is even true in some cases, but >there is the other side of this, piracy enriches the pirate unfairly, and annoys >those who follow the rules. And taken in mass, it does hurt the software >manufacturers. > >2) The price was too high, so I took it for free. Your words again, not mine. > This is not one of the >choices given to you by the software manufacturer. By law you have two choices: >1) buy it, 2) don't buy it. There is no legal choice 3) steal it. > >Shareware is a decision made by the software manufacturer. Someone owns the >rights to the software and makes a decision about how to distribute it. It it >not something that is imposed upon the manufacturer by outsiders. > >>>I don't see why you are upset at me for telling you that you are rationalizing. >>>This is very obviously what you are doing. >> >>I don’t think Fernando is rationalizing. The issue of being honest/dishonest is >>complex and to a great extent personal, in computer chess and anywhere else. >> >>About honesty in CC: it is true that pirating may damage producers, and to this >>extent I am against it. On the other hand, why talking only about the dishonesty >>of pirates and not about the marketing impositions of releasing a new version >>every year, no matter if it’s an improvement or not, buggy or not. Buying a new >>program is often like buying a sealed book. > >I agree that sometimes you buy software and you realize that you have been >burned because the software was extremely buggy, just plain bad, or whatever. >This is not a justification for software piracy either, the thing to do in this >case is send the software back. I have had no problem doing this. If the place >you buy it from gives you problems for doing this, it is best to shop elsewhere. > I expect that ICD and GambitSoft would both allow returns, perhaps I am wrong. >If I am not wrong, where is the substance to this argument? > >Whatever is wrong with the software industry, and the chess software industry in >particular, none of it confers the right to free software upon anyone. > >>And do you really believe manufacturers never get or pass pirated copies of >>someone else's programs, operating systems, whole collections of games? > >Undoubtedly there is piracy all over the place, but I don't see what difference >it makes. "Ah, these guys probably use a stolen compiler, therefore I have the >right to this piece of software," sounds like a pretty weak argument. > >I had thought the time for all of these pro-piracy rationalizations was long >past. I feel like I have been teleported back to 1982 or something. > >I don't see why this is turned into such a "complex" issue by some people. If >you go to the grocery store, you either buy stuff or you don't, there are very >few cases where you can argue that the decision to steal or not to steal is >morally complex. > >I think that "moral complexity" is added when we talk about software because the >odds of getting busted are almost zero, so more people do it, people who don't >want to have to consider themselves as thieves. The "moral complexity" you try to ridicule comes from differentiating "legal" from "moral". It is complex. Too many works over many centuries are written about it to allow you or anyone to come with this simplistic equation legal=moral, copying=thief (necessarily). The example I gave before: I am sure many of us use the same operating system running on several computers. How many of us bought a copy of this operating system for every computer we have? I guess few of us or even no one. Does this make thieves (your expression) out of all of us? If this example is right, then a door is open in your strict sense of morality. Once it's open, it all becomes a personal decision and not a simple matter or legality. Enrique >bruce
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