On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 18:17 -0500, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> solarwind wrote:
> > This is EXACTLY why people pirate stuff. People don't like to be
> > treated like criminals.
> 
> No that's merely a justification.  People pirate stuff because they don't
> want to pay.

Often true, but not always true.

As is often the case with this issue, things are not black and white,
but MANY shades of grey.

There are many cases where people are "pirates" because the content
provider restricts actions that should be lawful, but are blocked due to
overly restrictive copyright protection mechanisms (i.e. in many
countries making a backup of a physical medium is 100% legal, yet
blocked by DRM, meaning to backup you have to circumvent the DRM, which
most consider pirate behaviour. Copying your own DVD for backup purposes
is technically pirate behaviour according to most).

Then there are situations where the consumer wants something, but it's
not available, so they "pirate it", even though they were 100% willing
to pay for it. This was true of the music industry before iTunes (people
just wanted digital copies of songs, there were very few options outside
the US until very recently). Even today most people want digital copies
of TV shows. They're willing to pay for them, but in many jurisdictions
there are no legal ways. So they "rip" their DVDs. Technically the
industry considers them pirates. 

TTYL

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