There are a lot of reasons for punishment. Deterrence is a valid reason. The possible harmful consequences of this action are extreme. This kind of reckless behavior could easily result in multiple deaths. I think a little bit of extreme deterrence is warranted.

Aaron Schwartz's behavior might've hurt someone's profits someday, and really didn't hurt anybody. It took up the time of a few admins who decided to try to stop him and that's about it. There is no societal need for a high level of deterrence there.

The reason I because I want audio I can recompress to the format I like without progressive degradation. Better lossy formats might be created in the future, and I want to be able to re-encode in those formats without suffering the losses due to lossy compression twice.

Ahh, re-read the OP and realized my answer wasn't fully relevant. For software like that...

Release it as Open Source. Put it up on an app store someplace relevant to your target audience for a small fee. Trademark key elements of the interface to force people who try to just clone your project and sell it themselves to avoid using any of your branding.

Again, stop trying to force people to give you money. Just make it really easy for them to do so. Gentle encouragement works. Trust that people know the equation and will support you if they like what you make. Remind them if they seem to forget.

Charge enough for the game before you make it that you won't lose money if all the copies after you make it are pirated. That's the very best way to handle piracy. As a bonus for this strategy, you can make sure people who pre-paid get something nifty (but preferably not gameplay unbalancing) for their faith in you before you even had a product.

Barring that, just ignore it. If you can't make enough money on the game, tell people that you weren't able to make enough money to pay for your time and are thinking of leaving the business. Give figures on how much you made (not on what percent you think was pirated) so people can see that you made squat on making something decent and useful for them.

If you want to, you can try offering people who can prove they don't have a pirated copy stuff that isn't necessary to play the game, but is nifty and shows off that they bought it. This works especially well if your game has a strong online component. This works even better if there's some sort of way to allow people to purchase this item in-game for the cost of the game.

Charge for access to the server if it's an online game.

Set it up so players are solving some random problem for you by playing the game. Make money selling that solution.

Stop trying to force people to give you money. Trust in them to give you money if you make something good enough. People know how it works. And a gentle education is usually all that's needed if they forget.

Only for the driver. It's clear from the number of stupid things that drivers do while driving that humans are bad drivers in general and most consider it a waste of time. We should stop letting humans drive. Then they can text all they want.

If you're trying to protect your big organization against foreign spies, yes. If you are a little guy who wants to communicate without having that communication be laid wide open for a large organization to see, then I think encryption is still pretty useful. Even if just because managing all those separate unique intrusions over a long period of time requires a lot more resources than just tapping into a trunk line.

I agree. Making it an acronym makes an annoying piece of jargon slightly inscrutable for people who aren't conversant with the field. APT in this case refers to Advanced Persistent Threat.

And you want cake (watch movie) and eat it too (not pay a cent).

Gee, those don't seem nearly as mutually exclusive as publication vs. exclusive rights. Heck, I see people doing that all the time trivially. Whereas I see a huge legal apparatus being swung into place in a vain and horribly destructive attempt to try to reverse the laws of nature to try to make publishing + exclusive rights a reality.

Did I force the artist to publish anything? I don't think so. That's the choice the artist has. Publish and be pirated, or don't publish and keep things to yourself.

I'm perfectly happy to find that only artists who are happy to work in an environment where they don't need control over my stuff and the ability to censor people in order to make money are the only artists who's stuff is available. In fact, I would be overjoyed if all the artists who want to tell me how to use my own stuff or control who's allowed to say things would just go away and stop creating things. Then the rest of us can figure out how to function in a reasonably sane world in peace.

Heck, I already find most newspaper comics too boring to read. And I don't notice that the authors of web comics are busily forming guilds to sue the heck out of everybody or shut down piece of the internet they don't like. Though a few have publicly outed people who repost their stuff without attribution and tarnished the reputations of the reposters. And I'm just fine with that too.

The artist has no 'right' to be compensate whenever something is copied after they've published it. After that it stops being their property. For artists who can't figure out how to live in that world, they can go away and I don't care.

And where did you get right to make use of his work without giving something in return to either him or society?

When he published it.

If I go pick up all the trash along a road, should I have the right to sue the city for the work I did without compensation? When did they get the right to have a clean street without contributing anything to me or society for having made it happen?

The story about not knowing about Python was actually fairly believable because it correlates well with the kinds of actions the company has taken and the other things the CEO said. So now it remains, how is it that his technical staff couldn't tell him the problem?

I mean, someone had to be told to actually put something at the domain. Someone had to make up the graphics. Someone had to publish the graphics on the site. I'm certain that some people in his staff were groaning and clutching their heads over what kind of problems this would cause them. How is it that none of them could come to him and tell him what the problem was?

I can only conclude that he makes it impossible for his staff to question his decisions. CEOs like that are awful to work under.

but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it, because in your theory he has no particular right to the fruits of such labor because it's bits on a disk instead of, say, a piece of hardware like your the expensive computers and smartphones middle-class users use to view the content, right?

If that's how it is, then your brother shouldn't make the movie or novel. Your brother has no right to make a profit on this.

I'll consider this phone once CyanogenMod is available for it.

If TPB wins, the copyright maximalists end up with egg on their face over a law even they can't seem to follow. I will admit that the TPB winning this case is actually the worst outcome. Though the hay they can make while it's going on is almost worth it. I'm imagining the copyright maximalists are going to have some pretty interesting defenses.

But, if they lose, it's really clear that this is all about making sure the rules apply to the 'right' people. And it will done in a really public way that tells the people who vote that they don't count. And, of course, the people who vote still do count in Finland, and maybe they'll get off their collective behinds and do something about it.

Yes, the people complaining about the hypocrisy of TPB here are really missing the point. This isn't hypocrisy, it's high satire with the legal system playing the straight man. It's brilliant.