OP never talked about doing any of this. You just made up a strawman and started attacking it. Go back and read the thing you responded to.

Sure thing.... here is what was said:

if they start blocking my provider then I guess I'll be cable and possibly Netflix free and will just torrent away

The poster admitted they had every intention of ignoring what was legal and in turn, violating their ISP's terms of service for using it for such illegal activities. Nothing is inherently immoral about either of those if the law and TOS are genuinely unjust and a violation of people's actual rights, but in the end, the only thing that actually drives piracy isn't any kind of sense of justice, or proper moral ethics, it is simply fueled by an over inflated sense of entitlement.

Did you catch that doing something unethical in response to something else unethical is still unethical?

I would argue that piracy itself is immoral because the only thing that actually drives it is a sense of entitlement.

Whether a TOS confrontation ever happens or not is beside the point... one would still be violatiing the TOS if they were engaging in such activity.

And whenever "nobody will ever know" ever becomes part of a justification for something, ethics is invariably involved.

Do excuses #5 and #12 look familiar?

Of Netflix actually provides a service worth paying for

Ah... but the poster to whom I had responded was alleging that if they start prohibiting people from accessing content that is supposed to be available to their region, then Netflix will no longer be providing a service worth paying for, so that isn't relevant.

If Netflix or Amazon Prime don't have it, then I torrent it

Will you actually admit to torrenting it if you are confronted about the matter when the consequences include internet disconnection? I'm assuming not, but if I'm wrong about that, then wow.... just wow.

But morality enters into the matter when one find themselves compelled to be dishonest about their activities just so that they will not face what is ultimately just an inconvenience.... that they might have to wait for a DVD to be released instead of just being able to watch a show on Netflix right now.

Of course, a sense of entitlement also plays no small part... and there's not a whole lot that's morally valid about that either.

Piracy fails on no less than half of the fallacies on this page. Do numbers 5 and 12 would look particularly familiar to you?

Is lying about downloading infringing copyrighted content moral? I'll agree that it's probably not morally justified for companies to not make it reasonably available in the first place, but in what way does that justify having to lie about it if they ever confront a person about the matter just to avoid having their ISP disconnect them for violating their TOS, which probably prohibits such activity?

... Bearing in mind that saying that it does somehow justify it also suggests that one has a sense of entitlement to the content they would want to pirate in the first place.

Of course, if you want to argue about entitlement to public domain works, or even works that *should* be in public domain, you'd have a fair point... and one that I'd agree with, but virtually all pirated works are generally very recently published, and the only reasons they would have to already be public domain are in the minds of copyright abolitionists.

Just what percentage of pirated content do you think is actually *FROM* that era?

If you're going to argue about entitlement to material that is supposed to be going in public domain, a matter on which I would most strongly agree with you, then the only material that is relevant to that entitlement is content that was actually first published back then. Why should the retaining of copyright of old content entitle anyone to content that was published much more recently, and would not have been anywhere near public domain?

If there's any moral high ground on entitlement to be taken, it should be *only* on material that was supposed to be public domain and the copyright is being unduly retained for excessively long periods.

We ARE entitled access to works after a limited time

I'd dare say that the amount of material that is supposed to be public domain by now because of copyright expiry, had it not been extended to the admittedly absurd lengths that it is does not comprise a majority of pirated works.

Your point about entitlement after a certain time would have been a lot stronger if people were mainly pirating older works that should have been in public domain, but the most commonly pirated content is very new.

Nobody is forcing anyone to pirate the content... the only thing that drives anyone to pirate content merely because it isn't being delivered to them under their preferred terms is a sense of entitlement to that content.

And what if your provider decides to cut off your internet access for violating their TOS?

Of course, you'll probably start lying about it then... like that's a particularly morally high ground.

And if you never cared about morality in the first place, why did you ever bother subscribing to Netflix instead of just torrenting the content the whole time?

My point is that if the law had a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol and driving, then at the very least, the matter of people trying to subjectively decide if they have had too much to drink before driving would never come up. It wouldn't stop people from breaking the law intent upon doing so and hoping they can get away with it without incident, but it *WOULD* stop at least some people who may sincerely believe they should be okay to drive after having some number of drinks, only to discover too late that they weren't. And since most people who might have had too much to drink do not generally deliberately get into a car intent upon driving in full awareness that they may not be capable of driving safely, a zero-tolerance policy would, at the very least, leave such people without any excuse for driving in the first place, because regardless of how safe *THEY* might think they are okay to drive, they would still know that the law had a zero tolerance policy, and that should hopefully be enough to dissuade them from engaging in the practice. If it isn't enough for any one person, then it isn't... but at that point, they would be actively intent upon breaking the law, and hoping they will get away with it anyways. Some people might do that, but probably not all.

And while it might seem that people who do not drink irresponsibly before driving (and I don't refute that they exist and even that most people who do drink probably fit into that category) would be unfairly discriminated against by such a law, consider first of all that driving itself is not a right, but a privilege, and that different amounts of alcohol can affect people differently, and a person who has had *ANY* alcohol before driving, even if they were below the legal limit, can still be charged with impaired driving if they were seen to be driving unsafely, or if they were involved in an accident. In accidents where the issue of fault is slightly ambiguous, the issue of alcohol, even if below the legal limit, can tip the scales of determining fault in an accident enough that a person can still be considered legally impaired.

In that context, therefore, I sincerely think that having a zero tolerance policy on alcohol for drivers would still be a good thing.

I might suggest that what imaginary is to our reality would be what our reality Is to such a transcendental being. The notion of us being merely imaginary is necessarily used as a metaphor, since there is no agreed-upon standard for articulating what reality itself is compared to something else that may exist beyond that... Soething that is not part of reality as we could ever know it, but something so far above it as to make our reality be like a work of fiction in comparison. Suggesting that the being were actually part of reality just because we might want the term to include everything that exists is like a fictional character in book suggesting that the author of the story must necessarily be fully obtained in the pages of the book as well, just because that is all that character can comprehend about existence.

My poiing is, and has always been, that a computer being able to beat an excellent human player at chess is nothing more than mathematical stage magic, and cannot be shown to emulate human thought unless or until human thought itself can be shown to be equally illusory.