[quote]Originally posted by Willoughby:
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Well....since you asked

Stealing is wrong. It doesn't matter if you don't think its worth it. I don't think a Volvo s40 is worth the price, does that mean I should steal it?
Uh oh....getting off topic...must resist urge to start...pirating debate.....aaaarrrrggghh</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, I wasn't talking about moralistic issues, such as "stealing is wrong". There is a problem with self-consistancy in my ethical stance. My (I'll admit poor) ethics are based on a victimless crime. Since Adobe/Microsoft/etc did not suffer a loss of a sale, NOR did the suffer loss of material (I provided the CDR), their is no victim. Without a victim can it be considered ethical?
The problem I see with my ethical stance is that there is a potential victim.
The victim is the company which produces a similar less expensive product which I would purchase if I didn't pirate the over priced product.
An example is this. Let's say I pirate Adobe GoLive 6.0. I don't really make webpages, I just want to fool around with it to learn to make web pages... but I'm not willing to spend $400 just to fool around with a product I will hardly use. In other words, I'm not in the market for a $400 html editor. For $400, Adobe never had my business. It's not a product that I really want. So where is the victim? The victim is some other company that sells a $49.00 html editor which doesn't do as much, but would be a product I might be willing to buy to fool around with.
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Somebody else had a great example of Adobe's stripped down version of photoshop that costs a lot less. Sure, they didn't loss a sale on the full version of photoshop, but they lost a sale on the lesser version. What do I do to rectify this. I buy the lesser expensive, lesser feature product so they don't lose a sale despite whether or not I use the full version.
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I bought GraphicConverter even though I have photoshop at my disposal. I bought HomePage even though I never used it because I had GoLive. However, if I didn't have GoLive, I would have used Homepage, so I bought it to make sure they got their business.
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Hey, no doubt piracy is illegal and it hurts developers, which is the worst part about it. What I try to do is operate in a way that doesn't hurt the developers. I don't want a developer to lose a sale becuase of my piracy.
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I buy a lot of software. many, many thousands of dollars