This is not the first time I hear about a hotmail account being hacked to send malicious links. I had a few friends with the same problem, always hotmail. It's possible there is a serious security problem with the service. And even if there isn't, logic should be in place to suspend account who start mass emailing their contact lists with suspicious links, it shouldn't be that hard to stop.

I am wondering if you can add even more sense of self-importance when you reply to this comment.

Paragraphs, learn how to use them.

http://www.skrenta.com/rt/utzoo-usenet/ apparently includes a copy of all 141 tapes which comprise the oldest archive of usenet messages.

You definitely should give it a try. I was perfectly happy with FF before I tried Chrome but only after trying it can you really appreciate how speed is of utmost important in a web browser.

"One, simply saying that I'm being hypocritical doesn't hurt my original point or change the facts"

Generally no, but in your case yes. If you believe that there is a right for privacy and that it can be infringed while causing no physical damage than you cannot also claim that physical damage is the only criteria for the definition of Damage or harm. I hope you see the logical fallacy in that.

"When did I say that I was forced to consume it?"

You said "There is little I can do about it if I want to live in this society." And here we come again to the question of your hypocrisy. You dislike capitalistic media yet you cannot bring yourself to ignore it. You say that piracy should be legal because that is what your moral stance says yet you brake your own ethical guidelines by consuming capitalistic media. While this doesn't necessarily mean mean that your claims are wrong, it makes it *much more likely* that you first decided what it is that you want to do and then devised some kind of moral system around it. The fact that there is an inconsistency between what you say and what you do says that in all likelihood your moral system is nothing but a veil to conceal what is in essence a basic egoistic behavior of simply doing whatever you want.

"The key word here is "taking." Absolutely nothing has been taken that they originally had. They've copied data."

You are clinging to a small technicality and conveniently ignoring the whole process of creating and selling a digital product. Damage exists that is not physical.

" If we stay in it, then yes, there will be less art. However, that does not mean that any harm was done, as nothing was actually taken."

So you like product A. However, because you are not willing to pay for it the creator has to find another job and as a result you have no more product A. So in your world having less of the things you like is not considered a worsening of the situation?

"What if everyone exercised their rights as consumers to not buy music any longer (but also didn't pirate it)? Will we have more music or less? Clearly the artist(s) have been robbed of potential profit here!"

Consumers are not under obligation to buy, they are under obligation to pay for the use of the product *if* they decide to buy. You cannot claim your right as a consumer if you are not willing to commit to your obligations.

"Let me illustrate exactly why this argument is foolish (and hope that you'll actually read and understand it)."

It is not my arguments which are foolish, it's your examples. It's like arguing that shooting in the streets is OK because shooting a shooting yard is OK.

" Here: "Physical labor, and your boss agreed to pay you to begin with. Pirates never agreed to anything, and have no "social" obligation to pay for media that is in infinite supply.""

"Physical labor" - and what do you think does it take to produce a book, movie or game?

"Pirates never agreed to anything" - "Judge, I never agreed not to steal his car!" You don't agree to being under the law. You just are.

"no "social" obligation to pay for media that is in infinite supply." Again, a simplification and clinging to a technicality to justify not paying. Just like claiming that you don't have to pay for a train ticket because the train is no full and it would have cost the train company the same whether you are on it or off.

"By changing to a less capitalistic society. That is the key. Either that or find a new way to make money somehow. Music (concerts and such) and movies (possibly movie theaters) I can understand, but I have no idea how video game developers or writers would make money (besides donations)."

Yet no harm is done in your strange world where having less is better.

"You throw the word "hypocrite" around as if it will change basic logic itself and prove that something was actually taken"

I throw it around because your arguments are pure BS. You are not working from some higher moral ground but a lower one, the same one that is shared with all criminals: let the honest people do the work, we will just take what we want. You sound no less delusional than a thief trying to justify why he *deserves* the car he stole.

"I already responded to your privacy comment, but apparently you didn't listen."

I did. All you said there just strengthened your hypocritical stance. Please answer this: you say digital theft causes no harm simply because there is not physical damage done. But, when you invade someones privacy there is also no physical damage yet you consider it wrong. Why? and why doesn't it apply to piracy?

"Yet you still haven't shown why they aren't true."

Why is the Sun not black? Because it just isn't. Your claim is that absurd.

"There is little I can do about it if I want to live in this society."

Really? Since when are you forced to consume entertainment? You have really taken a long way to brainwash yourself. Why won't you limit yourself to entertainment that isn't created by "capitalists" ? You're just a hypocrite.

"No, I'll just continue to pirate media that is in infinite supply while not doing any harm to the artists."

Of course you are doing harm. The artists have offered their work for sale yet you are taking it without paying for it. What would happen if everyone did the same? Will we have more art or less?

" If this something was a physical item, I would agree that people should be paid for it, because its supply is not infinite. However, for something in an infinite supply that you can effortlessly copy, paying for it is not only absurd, but copying it is harmless, as you don't take anything while doing so."

So under your twisted logic, people who work in something like customer service or lawyers or clerks o r any other job who doesn't produce anything physical shouldn't be paid, right? And if not, then please tell me why they should be paid but writers and game developers shouldn't?

"You haven't even bothered to read my comments, my examples, or pretty much anything."

I certainly did but I didn't see anywhere how you think we will keep having stuff like video games or books or movies under your system. You have no idea who is going to pay for them. The only thing I read was some incoherent rant about how capitalistic entertainment is bad coming from a guy who apparently cannot stop consuming it. You still haven't convinced me that you are nothing but a hypocritical leech on society.

You are delusional, sorry. You are so fixed on the fact that because a perfect copy can be made of digital media then the original has no value. You are absolutely wrong. Your arguments are so silly and simplified that they can be used to deny people the right to their privacy: "There is no harm done!" "You didn't lose anything physical!". Those are your arguments why piracy causes no damage. They apply the same way to privacy. So tell me what is the hidden ingredient that applies to privacy but to intellectual property.

The thing is that you are a hypocrite. You want to enjoy the fruits of a capitalistic society but are not willing to contribute. I'd say, grow some ethics and stop consuming capitalistic media if that bothers you so much, and if you can't you will just have to play by the rules of society.

I'll stop responding to your "retorts" because I think you really lack the ability to understand the basic facts about supply, demand, the free market and basically the entire process that goes into creating something, not to mention the rule of law. We simply don't stand on a common ground to be able to start arguing if piracy causes harm or not, our foundations are just too different.

The only thing I can say to you is to try and think (on a global scale, realistic to the world we are living in) about a book, a film or a piece of music you really enjoy, the amount of man hours it took to create, and how the creators are supposed to sustain themselves and create more art if you deny them the right to sell copies of their work (and no, "I don't care" is not an answer).

Oh, I know that. You just missed the sarcasm. Apparently you have no problem defending a right like privacy which, when broken, causes no physical harm whatsoever. But you cannot grant the right of intellectual property.

I am not assuming that. I am assuming that content creators created the content knowing that the law protects their intellectual property and that this law will allow them to recuperate their investments. You want to cancel that law for the sole reason that you do not want to pay for their stuff. You want their stuff, but you do not want to pay.

Yeah, right. And by your own logic if I can't afford the car I want we should change the law so that stealing cars is legal.

This only shows that you either have no clue what is going on in the gaming market or that you have no problem leaving logic and common sense out of the discussion if the interfere in making your point.

This is where you have it all wrong. You are not "rewarding" developers when you pay them for their product, you are fulfilling your social and legal obligation to pay for the work they have done in creating the product, just like your boss is not "rewarding you" with a paycheck, he must pay if he wants to or not.

Of course that harm was done. Let's say 100 people pirate a product. Let's assume 10 people would have bought it if piracy was not an option and that product costs $50. Piracy in this case cost the company $500 or $5 per pirate. Since income was lower than expected the company had to cut costs and had to fire a few secretaries and a programmer. So harm was definitely done.

You are living in a capitalistic society and the content you are interested in was created by capitalistic companies who rely on capitalistic laws that will protect their investments. If you despise capitalism that much then you can simply ignore their content. Obviously you want to have your cake and it eat too.

And how are pirates a symptom of a capitalistic society? There will always be people who want more than they can afford. Pirates are currently enjoying lax laws which make enforcement difficult. As piracy grows more laws will be put in place to stop that kind of behavior, laws which will certainly have to invade our privacy in order to stop pirates, just like some of our current laws invade our privacy in certain ways because that is the only way to prevent criminal activity.

What's the harm in invading someones privacy? I mean, there is no physical difference. The person hasn't loss anything of value.

You have no way to be certain a person that pirates your media wasn't going to purchase it (it's fair to assume there at least small chance he did. He is obviously interested in the media enough to pirate it).

Of course piracy causes damages. Who will buy the media if piracy is legalized? Who will make media if they cannot recuperate the costs and turn a profit?

Just take a look at the sad state of the PC gaming market and see the harm piracy does.

Your examples are meaningless. What are you trying to prove? That loss of potential profit is OK? So what? The whole point is that the copyright owner has the right to do what he wants with his property and the fact that making an illegal copy has little actual physical or financial ramifications has nothing to do it. If I break into your house just to have a look around and I don't cause any damage it doesn't mean that what I am doing is OK or that it should be legalized. You as owner have the complete to decide what can or cannot be done with your property.

Let me ask you this, why do YOU think that piracy should be legalized. Personally, I think it's just an excuse so that people can get stuff they can't afford or are not willing to pay for for free.

Pirates are potential clients, otherwise they wouldn't pirate whatever it is they are pirating. Assuming pirates wouldn't buy the Media if they couldn't pirate is as stupid as assuming that each case of piracy equals one lost sale.

Supporting legalizing Piracy is like supporting decriminalizing thefts of less than 5 cents.

I really wish they would focus on having the search bar offer good options from the browsing history and not from Google searches. Firefox's awsomebar is the last advantage Firefox has over Chrome, IMO. In FF I can easily get back to pages I use often or search my bookmarks through the address bar and the results are instantaneous while on Chrome searching the history is slow and half of the result are Google suggest results which are just not useful.

Ah yes, the bury-your-head-in-the-sand mode of thinking. Who will actually buy the media if you legislate piracy? How will Media companies recuperate the huge investments they put into creating that Media.

In a way Media is still a scarce resource. Media doesn't appear out of thin air and the actual cost of developing Media are much higher now then they used too. I am not even sure that the price (to the end user) of media has even caught on with inflation. The only thing that is cheaper these days is distribution of the media.

As much as I don't like it personally, I think the correct way to treat most Media is as a service and not a product. If a phone call costs almost nothing to t-mobile it does not mean that it's somehow right or fair to not pay them for the service. In order to be able to offer the service in the first place they had to put a lot of money in to create the infrastructure. If companies are not allowed to recuperate their costs they will simply stop investing.