Originally Posted by Socks

If you're talking pirating things for profit, I'd say there is only a small % of people here that go to those measures, although it's growing.

If you're talking pirating things for consumption like downloading music, movies, TV shows and whatnot, I'd say a good 75% of people are guilty here, and that's my low-ball estimate. If you've been to redtube even and watched a single stolen movie, are you not guilty of consuming it?

You might argue you never would have bought it anyways.. The pirate community argues the same thing, that they are not the consumer. When a software company claims $829106870912 millions in losses due to piracy because X software was sent X # of times etc, how many of those people would have actually bought the software?

In the traditional oldschool pirate scene, there was a big divide between pirating things, and actually selling them. The biggest no-no of all, the cardinal rule was that it wasn't to be sold. All the nfo files clearly stated that if you used and enjoyed the software, go out and buy it. Many people even in the pirate community buy things too. Much of the stuff is initially purchased in order to be shared.

My personal opinion is that all of us would NOT be here today if it wasn't for piracy, that is very clear. The explosion of computers and computer literacy since lets say 1990 could not have happened without piracy.

Hell, my first experience with piracy was through my father (a policeman) who would bring a box of 720k disks home full of Amiga games from... work! The police bought computers early on, and employed some computer geeks, and everyone got into it early there.

Clearly Microsoft would not be the largest company in the world, the computer industry would not be nearly as rich, and the education levels of people in all connected industries would be much lower as well. Also the cost of doing business would be much higher, with less competition, and less people involved.

We can all thank piracy for getting us here. How many of your sales have come from customers that have illegal copies of windows on their PC's? Lotttts. If they were forced to buy a $200-300 OS, they might not even have a PC.

The problem is that with nothing to cool off the growth, and the worldwide reach of the internet, it's just impossible to police. It's grown into a sort of virus that has spread outside of a somewhat controlled community (computer people who know what the fuck they're doing) to the masses pirating media.

The pirates of old never even saw pirating media as an option really, and online music piracy for example didn't even come around until 1997-1998 with full force, and it did NOT come from the traditional pirate community. The music groups organized themselves, then there was a merger or some sorts.

So we're at an interesting juncture, where the only option really is censorship. I think it's scary to start going down that road, and how ironic is it that we're all looking to some kind of law enforcement to protect us from... the internet?

There are no easy solutions, but if you think piracy is all bad, take a step back and look at what you have, and where piracy has brought us today.