NL5 said:
It is not theft. It is still wrong. However, corporate America has perverted the copyright laws so bad that it is truly a shame. Look up some of Lessig's papers on the subject. Very enlightening.
Which part of taking something that does not belong to you do you not understand as being the definition of theft?
The copyright laws have nothing to do with the basic truth, and you
know it. That's just hiding behind a smoke screen that pretends to be some form of consciencous objection or resistance to corporate law. But with a wink wink, nudge nudge everybody knows that's just a bunch of bullshit used as an excuse for those unwilling to learn the satisfaction of working for their rewards.
Let me know what your business, service or product is so I can send a bunch of folks out to take it without paying you for it and let's see how you like it.
I got news for you; most of the companies that put out this kind of software are not the "big coporations" you think they are. Many of them are - or were before being bought by a bigger name - companies of less than 100 people living from week-to-week on multi-million dollar loans they got from venture capital interests and/or bank loans. They falter on their business plan, fail to make the sales, miss their payments on the loans, and they can have the whole rug pulled out from under them. That actually happens to 9 out of 10 companies that try it. For every Sonic Foundry or Cakewalk there are 10 or 20 more companies that you probably have not heard of that never made it that far. Sonic Foundry was bought by Sony. Success story, right? Not as much as you think. You know how much Sony paid for SF? $18 million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Thats NOTHING. That barely covered what SF owed to its creditors.
And through all those difficulties, these companies have to have keep a team of bleeding edge software and support engineers together long enough to actually make it through v3 of a product. These men and women are costing them on average over a hundred grand a year each in salary and benefits, the benefits the especially costly and tough for small companies to afford. Not to mention the cost of office space and all that.
I could go on, but I have lived inside companies exactlly as I described as one of those engineers. It's hard, hard fucking high pressure work where the even existance of your job depends on being able to build a quality product against fierce competition that can sell at some kind of reasonably acceptable price point and sell enough to pay your salary and your company's debts.
We literally had an engineer that passed out on his feet from medical stress and fatigue because he was putting in too many 72-hour-straight shifts programming during the Christmas season just to get out a revision of our video editor software on which the company depended. I myself spent 5 days straight in 1998 as the only person (other than one bookeeping and supplies assistant) to hold up our entire company and office while the entire rest of the company was down in Vegas at the NAB show trying to find buyers and distributers for our product. I wasn't a corporate officer, a VP or even a department head. Nobody important in that regard. I was a hardware engineer and development support enginer that also was the company's webmaster, that's all. But that's how life is in these companies. You do anything and everything that you have to just to keep afloat.
And you have the nerve to call me misguided when I tell you first-person that software piracy is theft. To call me delusional because I say that to take a product of this smaller-than-you-realize company's blood sweat and tears without compensating them anything in return is theft is both insulting to me, embarassing to you and just plain insane in general. To say that a few hundred dollars is too much to pay for this kind of effort and gamble because some geek anarchist wannabe with no apparent responsibilities of his own writes some paper saying that Sonic Foundry, Cakewalk, Native Instruments, Bomb Factory or Steinberg are in the same class of corporate and legal scam artist as Halliburton or Waste Management is just plain ignorant of reality.
G.
