"A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it"

Piracy: 

Piracy, or copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.

Flogging a dead horse sounds so much better than beating a dead horse. Why would they even put that? It totally dilutes the awesomeness of your post, you should have just deleted that part.

While copyright holders fought libraries and the idea of renting in general, this is not entirely true. Libraries typically have legal copies of the products they are carrying for people to rent, not bootleg or illegal copies so the publisher was paid at least once or in some cases, the copies might have been donated from the source (publisher). A lot of libraries have personal donations but again, unless those books were taken out of the store under a trench coat, they were initially purchased.

Zehdon, flogging a dead horse would have worked if it had been your first post here, but it wasn't. Saying your piece and then trying to silence others afterwards, makes you hypocrite.

Telling people to stop posting about something while discussing it yourself makes you hypocrite.

Well said,

I usually just sit back and let these topics go where they wish, but one thinkyou said that you don't get.  You said "I believe", which makes what you said your own opinion, not fact and not a universal truth. The laws of men have been discussed, reviewed, and changed for thousands of years. Piracy is no different in this issue, secondly the fact games are still being made with the level of piracy we have this day and age coughchinacough, shows that piracy will not be the stopping point for games being made. Believing this is no differentthen believing that because guns are banned, people will stop killing each other.

You're not actually claiming to be informed about piracy and yet be completely unaware of the fact that certain industries are literally trying to ditch the term piracy and pirates right? What I said was to be taken literally. But please, don't stop on my account

You can stop drinking or sleep walking or whatever it is you are doing and try to read this properly. They, the industry that created the term, are trying to ditch the word piracy. That is P I R A C Y and the P I R A T E S that are associated with term piracy. As in the word, the words. WORD. That does not mean they are saying it's legal. Piracy and pirates has become a sexy term. It not like a phisher or a spammer or people that are generally hated by almost everyone. Pirates is too "cool" of a word to be used (not my opinion, just the fact). So let me try this one more time. You are obviously not aware of the fact that after a decade of failing at the mentality that you promote so well, the new tactic on the block is to rename the pirates. It is so refreshing to see you talk about something you know so little about. I guess this would make sense though since you like to lecture people and not discuss anything, because this isn't worth discussing right?

So let's recap. Your type of thinking, piracy is theft and that's that, has been at play for a better part of a decade. Let's see how did that work out for everyone? Let's see. Piracy is on the way out the door... no. Suing one out of tens of thousands every once awhile is creating a real sense of fear and .... errr wait, no. DRM is getting more effective and not punishing people who actually pay for their games... err this is a hit or miss but generally nope, customers are not being rewarded for their purchases and games are still cracked.

So let's go back to the reason why the people who thought it was a great idea to call it piracy, might be rethinking their steps shall we. What is a word exactly. In this case, it's cultural and it's backfired. It was meant to create one image and wound up creating another. So for them to even attempt to try and think about relabeling what we call pirates today, whether it works or not, is basically an admittance there is a social issue attached to the problem. Theft is still theft (and since you read so well enough to pick apart words you hate, I am sure you know that I have called it theft from the beginning), but there is something more to the problem when certain ages groups have more pirates than not pirates. There is a social norm at work here. An acceptance and a rejection of how software copyright is handled today. I really don't care if you agree with me or not, but I am not going to let you sit back and try to label anyone who discusses piracy as more than just theft as a pirate themselves and a waste of time.

And next time you have a question about what someone wrote, try using a question. Then again you would have to get off that high horse of yours and actually discuss something instead of lecture which might be a difficult task for you.

ummm I'm pretty sure that happened before pirating laws went into effect(like 500 years before) giving them ex post facto immunity.

Just to let the pirates know ...... the pirate bay ,isohunt and others lost in court and found to be stealing product and have been punished for it.  And also its a riot to hear pirates using drm in their reasoning but then say that companies are trying to stop the word piracy... If that was true then drm and securom wouldn't exist.

I also like the argument... Everyone else is doing it so its ok. Heck there are people robbing banks and stealing cars every 10 minutes so I guess that s ok too.

p.s. not trying to say i'm abvove anyone. I was an offender back when cd burners were new but now have stopped...Got sick of not having inserts and cover art anyway.  Not to mention I'm musician and have many musician friends trying to get their band off the ground and have seen first hand how much harder pirating makes things for these people.

Wrong. That's why it's called "copyright infringement" and not "theft".

Wrong. "Piracy" is a marketing term invented by book publishers to demean those who printed their own books. Using it in a serious discussion is akin to calling black people "niggers" when discussing racism: it may refer to the exact same body of people, but the connotations are *drastically* different and it just feels like a cheap ad hominem to anybody else who doesn't already agree with your line of thought.

Ad hominem and red herring.

Wrong. You're drawing a link between ethics and legality, and as anybody who's ever studied ethics can tell you, that's problematic on so many levels it's not even funny.

We're arguing whether copyright infringement in specific contexts is acceptable or not. Legality does not, should not, and *cannot* enter in such an argument. The reasons behind the adoption of copyright can, of course, but I already debunked them in the specific context at hand (copyright was born out of a desire to maximize the number of works in existence, maximization has been shown to occur at 15 years of protection, therefore any protection past that is ethically wrong).

In the minds of many: yes, and there is no inherent self-contradiction in believing as such so your counter-argument does not work.

It's not 'confusing' it, it's you oversimplifying it and, as such, failing to understand it properly.

I think the copyright laws for music and art should be changed. If your father made a song, died, and then it made millions, the money shouldn't go to you. What did you do to earn it? Absolutely nothing. Art in general should no longer be copyrighted after its creator dies.