[Gllug] Uh oh, ministers consider "anti file-sharing laws"

[Martin A. Brooks]

David Damerell wrote:
>> Which I in fact never said.
>>     
>
> Really? Then why did you produce "Downloading a cracked game from the
> Internet deprives the software house of income" to justify the
> assertion that it was morally equivalent to stealing? Was it merely a
> random irrelevancy?

If downloading the game is all you do then all you've done is used up 
some bandwidth you've, presumably, paid for.

If you then use the software, or play the game, then you certainly do 
deprive the software house of income if your intention is to not 
reimburse the software house at the value they have set for the software.

(Now here's where anyone who reads my blog will start waving fingers.....)

I _do_  _completely_ accept that much commercial software is shoddy.  
And I also completely accept that getting a refund for software that 
doesn't meet your expectations is extremely hard.  "You've opened the 
box guv, nothing we can do."

See: http://blog.hinterlands.org/2007/09/27#20070927

Given the difficulty in returning boxes software, the argument of "I 
want to be sure a game meets my expectations before I part with £30" is 
reasonable, especially where game producers don't provide a demo that 
accurately depicts the average in-game experience which is all too 
common the case.

I'm sure had I been instead been expressing my outrage at a company who 
I'd discovered had violated the GPL, this thread would have taken a 
different path.  It's different when it's _our_ licences that get 
violated, right?



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