[Ti] [OT} All this 'anti-piracy' stuff

[Ric Perrott]

On Sunday, May 4, 2003, at 06:04  PM, b wrote:

>
> And Apple, the RIAA, Sony, and the Department of Justice can all agree 
> that CDS should be $12 US till Kingdom Come, but the market now 
> includes millions and millions of 'customers who disagree to the point 
> of using Limewire, Kazaa, and other slow-pokey methods to pay what 
> they consider to be a more accurately 'fair' price.  Which is their 
> Time and paid-for bandwidth and computer investment, and zero to the 
> usurious 'middleman'.

So then if millions of customers suddenly disagreed that the cost of a 
new automobile was fair, they should all start stealing them en masse?

Do you even comprehend how utterly ludicrous your reasoning is there? 
Theft is not a way of "fighting the system." It is most certainly not a 
way to set "fair market value." So by your specious reasoning, anything 
that I deem to be overpriced is ok for me to steal? After all, that's 
what your "millions of customers" are doing to ensure that they pay a 
"fair price", or in that example, no price at all. Unless of course 
they happen to be sued and decided against, in which case they will be 
paying far above "fair market value."

Time and paid-for bandwidth and computer investment entitles you to 
exactly jack squat. It CERTAINLY doesn't give you the right to 
blatantly steal someone else's Intellectual Property. And the 
"middleman" you so derisively speak of? Well, you wouldn't even HAVE a 
song to steal if it weren't for the money that the "middleman" put up 
to get it produced in the first place. But I wouldn't expect you to 
understand that anyway, you're probably one of the people that think 
that CDs should cost no more than $5 because after all, you can get 
blank CD-Rs for less than a dollar!

> Where's the owner's almighty pricing power in that scenario smart-ass?

Same place it's always been. Again for the impaired.... Theft is not an 
acceptable alternative to what a consumer deems as overpriced goods. 
Last time I checked, music wasn't a life staple, and you could live 
just fine without it. You don't like the prices the market has set? 
Don't buy the product. But please don't steal it and then try and 
rationalize your actions away as protesting or civil disobedience. You 
simply come off as an uneducated, morally bankrupt, piece of shit 
criminal.

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Ric Perrott
Writer, Poet, Pot-Stirrer