> Price is a barrier to entry for many users who wouldn't have paid for the software.
This is what demos, student licenses, etc. are for. I don't care what your justification is, property theft is wrong.
This is what demos, student licenses, etc. are for. I don't care what your justification is, property theft is wrong.
It sure is, and those people should promptly return their stolen Photoshop bits to the front door of any local fire station so Adobe can put them back into their bit warehouse and ship them to paying customers next day air
And I adamantly disagree with your password analogy if for no other reason than your password scenario creates temporal harm (assuming I do not change my password, of course) in a way that someone pirating version 1.0 does not automatically give them access to 1.1 or other product lines. In fact, I'll see your temporal factor and raise you: if someone pirates a product on Monday, and then buys the product on Tuesday, should they be jailed on Wednesday?
I'm eventually going to be sorry that I waded into this discussion, but I found the stolen bits == property theft so absurd I wanted to mock it, and now it seems this thread is somehow doubling down on false equivalences.
Piracy can be morally wrong for taking food out of software engineer's mouths, but one should not lump it into breaking-and-entering just to ratchet up the "look at how bad it is" factor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of...
One person breaking and entering is bad. But in my example, this person broke-and-entered and then gave all of my future earnings away to literally everyone on the planet, thanks to the multiplicative power of technology – that's an outrageous violation.
If you think copyright infringement and theft are synonymous then presumably you'd be happy with people paying for copyrighted goods with a picture of some money, because a copy that doesn't involve a transference of control is identical with the actual item, right?!
No theft occurred, so everything's fine, right?
Some might says you did steal the password, because you made it unusable for me, but that's a pretty subtle position I'm content with either side of.
Perhaps you'd understand better if you consider a physical key - if you take it then I cannot open the lock (with that key at least). If you only copy it, I can still open the lock, so you didn't steal it from me; but the possibility of use allowed you to deny me the use of whatever the lock protects. Not so with most copyright works. If you copy my music I can still listen to my copy as often a I like.
Maybe you understand the distinction now?
the term you want is Copyright infringement
We have the word infringe for the cases where the word theft is inaccurate.
Digitization doesn't somehow transform my limited time and resources into something you're suddenly entitled to.
I would expect Adobe would be nothing but a forgotten brand name list to the annals of time at this point, considering their Suite has been the most pirated application every year since the early days of Windows 95... And yet....