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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Yet another copyright thread (was Re: An unpopular question that
Message-ID: <G6G5nI.EAs@world.std.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 19:18:54 GMT
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Brian O'Neill <briank.o@prodigy.net> wrote:
>And to be sure, please name anyone else here who reacted with even a little
>bit of disdain towards that attitude other than myself.  I don't recall
>anyone.  And silence shows tacit approval, even in appearances only.

The silence shows an attempt at respecting the charter of the
newsgroup and avoiding a never-ending off-topic thread that has
been seen many times before. (On *exactly* this topic--the
downloading of old Infocom games. See dejanews if you don't
believe it.) Perhaps hundreds of readers of the newsgroup
sent the original author scathing emails, as is recommended
by general newsgroup etiquette.

Your statement equating violations of copyright with theft of
property was a new, different, off-topic thread, one that
had not seen much discussion before, and a number of members of
the community were unable to resist the temptation to engage
in an off-topic discussion.  Shame on them for being off-topic
(and that's why this is posted instead of emailing).

Still, despite the number of times people have pointed out to
you that you are reading into the discussion a subtext that
isn't there (that people in this newsgroup are ok with copyright
violation), you insist on attributing that belief, out loud,
to "you" when you reply to posters; backpedalling to attribute
it to the group at large and not the particular post you replied
to is not going to win you any points with the group, when
the group doesn't at large believe that.

One poster attempted to clear this up in a very specific way:
which thing are you arguing, he asked, a) b) or c)?  You replied
"d) all of the above", but ignored the rest of his post, where
he explicitly said he (and others) were *only* arguing about (a);
or if you did not ignore it, you simply assumed that this was
because of a particular belief about (b) and (c) which they didn't
have, and you couldn't be bothered to find out for sure which
believe they had instead of assuming.

You exhibit this pattern time and time again, which is why I
attempted to point it out in another thread where perhaps you
wouldn't be so caught up in the "me-against-the-world" mentality.

The vast majority of this group does not believe copyright
violations are appropriately referred to as "stealing"; some
of us believe the use of the term "piracy" is a loaded word
which inappropriate colors the argument that copyright
violations are bad--because we do indeed believe exactly
that. Certainly quite a few of us *do* make money off of
intellectual property, even software, just not IF, and we
would scarcely want to give up the opportunity to do so.

I'm not sure why you don't believe this; perhaps it is, as you
say, because nobody jumped on the original poster. Or perhaps
it is because the members of this community do give away their
games for free, and you misinterpret this as representing a
philosophy that "information wants to be free, like air"; but
if you actually investigated, you would find that quite a
few games are copyrighted and have a no-commercial-usage
license--a license dependent on the community accepting
the notion that copyright violation is bad.

The thrust of the vast majority of the people contributing to
this thread isn't even "*how* bad is copyright violation compared
to theft", but rather "calling it 'theft' just confuses the issue
needlessly". If you want to argue about how bad it is, and you
happen to think it's just as bad as theft, you will find it more
productive to argue about how bad it is, instead of trying to
argue about the language you're using; except you probably will
find you're not in an argument at all.

And I'm sorry I can't say all that in a more polite way, but
I just don't have the patience.

SeanB
(speaking for everyone when I have no right to at all, of course)
