Pirate? Or Opportunist?

In my first post, I admitted using P2P networks to get illegally licensed files.  Basically, when you purchase music, movies, or software, you are buying the physical media (or right to download), but the majority of the money you spend goes toward the license.

What is that license, and what rights does it extend?  For music, it means you can enjoy it yourself, or in the context of a party, but if you are making any money while listening to it, you owe a cut to the record companies.  For example, the bar I work at pays a license to ASCAP to enable the bartenders to play cd's of licensed material.  (The practice in and of itself is a bit of a shellgame scam, but I'll get into that in a future post.)

You are all probably familiar with the FBI warning displayed before video's.

The license associated with movies, basically prevents you from charging people to view the video.

Interestingly enough, most software licenses allow for the user to make one backup copy of the software media. The End User License Agreement (EULA) is the list of legalese, that most people don't bother reading, but must be agreed to before you can install software.

The gist of most EULA's is that you won't sell or give copies of the software away, you won't reverse engineer the program, and you'll only install the program on one computer.  In fact, if you sell your computer, most EULA's require that you uninstall the program beforehand.

So using limewire, napster, or any other P2P filesharing network to obtain files that you haven't legally obtained a license for is, in essence, stealing.  I stole music, and software.  I was a child, to be sure, but that would not have prevented my prosecution.

Why did I do it?  I wasn't a big fan of flaunting the law, and I didn't shoplift.  I was aware that obtaining these files without a license was illegal.  Was it wrong, though?

I did it, because I was a broke ass kid.  I couldn't afford to follow the paths that new music brought me too. How would I ever have known about the magic of Fugazi's entire catalog?  How would I ever be able to figure out the superiority of NTFS over FAT 32?  My justification, was I made no money from these pursuits.  I still bought the same amount of music and software as I would have if I hadn't procured any from P2P networks.  I will posit further, that I bought more, because of my introduction from pirated materials.

In my next post, I will talk about some alternatives to pirated materials.