i’ll give an example why piracy and effortlessness do to harm creativity and community work in my country
here in Algeria 100% of pc use pirated MS products and people have never heard nor used opensource softwares
when i try to predicate about FOSS they give me those replies:
1) it’s hard to use
2) i have to relearn and i’m lazy
3) why bother
4) i don’t understand those principles
5) our county don’t belong to the OMS
6) there’s no law about software copyright

when people find easy access to something they won’t bother to find let alone create and invent alternatives
when people don’t believe their actions or personality are wrong they won’t try to change

Piracy is like smashing a store front and stealing TVs. Yeah, it’s a form of civil disobedience. There are better ways to leverage civil disobedience against copyright, “intellectual property,” software patents and the like. Piracy just devalues software. Free software (although given away freely) has alot of value. Put your time into free software. It won’t be a bad investment.

Do you think the (American) civil rights movement would have succeeded if Blacks pretended to be Whites in order to use facilities as they pleased? No, they had to show the world that we are a community which will not put up with your racism — by boycotting the racists and by empowering themselves.

“Stop software ‘piracy’, support Open Source!”

Bottom line is that it is hypocrisy in no uncertain terms and de-evaluates your imfluence, who wants to listen to a double minded man. As you said, no man can serve two masters.

You know, as an IT professional, I CONSTANTLY get people within my personal circle of acquaintances, who come to me and go, “say, can you get me a ‘free’ copy of {your favorite commercial software, typically Window$ XP or Micro$oft Office, here}?”

This drives me stark raving nuts, and I usually rant back to them, “Sure, I COULD… but I won’t. Why don’t you just use Ubuntu and OpenOffice, instead?”

It frustrates me no end that even in an environment where there is a legal, free alternative that is FAR superior to the commercial product, people are still so short-sighted and cheap that they’d prefer an illegal copy of the commercial thing, to a legal copy of the free thing. All we can really do to stop this, is simply to educate people about Open Source. It is going to be a slow and painful process, but it’s also a necessary one.

Having said the above, there is one thing about your position that I really have to take issue with.

Whereas it is obviously unethical to pirate some kinds of digital goods (the latest Britney Spears CD, for example… though I have no idea why anyone would want it, even if it was free), there is a huge “grey area” of digital goods, the unauthorized downloading and / or use of might IN THEORY be illegal and / or unethical, in practice, I think you would have a hard time convincing any reasonable person that doing this would in any real sense be worthy of sanction.

For example, consider using BitTorrent to download a rare, “niche interest” song or movie, that is simply unavailable for you to purchase, in your area of residence, for any price (or, any reasonable price).

What if you’re using some kind of semi-legal service to watch television shows that the motion picture industry hasn’t “released”, for the part of the world in which you live? Or what if you want to buy something, but they refuse to sell it to you?

One glaring example of this is, in the country where I live, I once tried to pay Amazon U.S. to download a few .MP3s, from their on-line store. I was promptly presented with a “geo-blocking” error message, saying, “We are not authorized to sell you digital music, because we have not been able to conclude a licensing agreement with the recording industry in your country.”

So here we have the ridiculous situation in which a customer WANTS to pay for a digital good, but is prevented from doing so, purely because of the archaic licensing rules of the recording industry. This kind of nonsense goes on hundreds of thousands of times each day. Is it any surprise, then, that music enthusiasts just download what they want, from BitTorrent?

There are thousands upon thousands of other examples of this kind of thing, in which, one’s accessing digital content in a way that “the authorities” deem to be “illegal”, can’t possibly have any real effect (or, more than a marginal effect) on the revenues of whomever theoretically “owns” that content. It strains credulity to believe that consumer non-conformance with wildly unreasonable and one-sided “intellectual property” laws designed to enforce these types of restrictions, should be considered as “illegal” or “unethical”.

The larger point is, we are living in a world in which (for example) the U.S. RIAA and MPAA are steadfastly demanding that it should be “illegal”, for a consumer to transcode songs from a legally purchased CD, or a movie from a legally purchased DVD, to some other format that might be compatible with (say) an iPod, etc.. These trade cartels are seriously arguing that each time that a piece of digital content gets transcoded, the “intellectual property owner” has to get paid again… and again… ad infinitum.

The huge power imbalance going on here is that the IFPI, RIAA, MPAA and so on, have a huge lobbying budget and a strong parochial interest in abusing the political process to impose their way of doing business, on consumers. Conversely, the rights of digital content users are diffused across millions of individual citizens, who have neither the time, nor the expertise, nor the money, to challenge self-interested groups like the recording, software and movie industries.

Given this kind of obstinate denial of basic consumer rights to access LEGALLY PAID FOR digital content, it is both unsurprising and wholly legitimate, for consumers to use whatever technological means that may be at their disposal, to ‘end-run’ stupid laws like the DMCA, that were imposed by an incompetent, corrupt political process.

So am I in favour of “piracy”? Not at all. But when I have a recording industry, or a government, telling me that ripping a CD that I just bought at the local record store, is “piracy”, then they have just completely discredited themselves. They can drop dead, and take their so-called “lost revenues”, with them.