On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:04:17PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, John J. Trammell wrote: [snip] >> Utter nonsense. In today's legal climate, regardless of your opinion >> of the matter, it is a prosecutable offense, and it is irresponsible >> of you to say otherwise. Looks like I am going to have to eat those words, to some degree. :-) In Mike's original post, as I read it now, he was both (a) clarifying that copyright infringement != stealing and (b) advocating against said infringement. I have no disagreement with those statements, so I think we agree for the most part. I don't know why I got some other impression on my first reading. I still hold the opinion that copyright infringement is a really dumb thing to do. And the fact remains that in the USA, it is currently illegal. > It might be hard for you to accept this, but a law that equates > copying a file with stealing a purse is a very bad law. Not so hard for me to accept. One problem that I keep seeing is that the metaphors are inadequate--a photo of a purse doesn't let you *do* anything; it's a passive object. But an unauthorized copy of Windows XP turns a chunk of metal and plastic into a subsentient entity. -- trammell at el-swifto.com 9EC7 BC6D E688 A184 9F58 FD4C 2C12 CC14 8ABA 36F5 Twin Cities Linux Users Group (TCLUG) Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota