Nazis did in Germany was legal. DO NOT BUY INTO THE LEGALITY ARGUMENT. If for some reason hell freezes over and Big Music proposes legal limits to the profits they can make out of the changing face of music distribution, then and only then would they begin to have an argument for their 'laws'. I'm not holding my breath.

This is exactly why 'piracy' is such a good thing. Before, when there were tollbooths before all the artists of the world, we could only really sample the delights of a few. Now, there's no where on earth most of us could afford to pay for all the content we consume. How can we be convinced that it is GOOD to be able to only taste a tiny fraction of what is out there? The Big Music enforced tollbooths are a plague of this planet, and it is PIRACY, resolving the contradictions of digital content in the age of private property, that is the cure.

lol ... look over your shoulder at Latin America will you... you never answered my point, you just saw the bogey word 'socialism' and ran screaming ... you say you are working towards your own future ... exactly who is keeping you alive if you aren't doing all the things i describe previously? You are going to say you hand over hard-earned money for the necessities of life but you are basically saying "I don't have to care about how these things that i need become available to me, they're available aren't they?". There is a humungously intricate network of human organisation that provides you the needs to stay alive, I just wish you could appreciate that. It seems you have been filled with an ideology that prevents this.You do live in the belly of the beast, however, so i forgive you. Millions wouldn't! (Seriously, just in Vietnam alone...)

"they want to be left alone" ... are there many people who want to be totally self-sufficient hermits, who grow their own food, make their own clothes and shelter? Totally on their own?

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Assuming we're talking about the other 99.99% of human beings, the victory of the capitalist mode of production is socialized production, ie, we ALL rely on each other to survive. But you just want to be left alone. How is that possible if you are relying on others to survive?

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I, too, want to be left alone, but that's not possible when we all are suffering under a social system that is not a system of solidarity. You want to be left alone? How about trying to do away with the conditions that necessitate a state and thus a government? That's what i am working towards, and that's why i'm a member of a revolutionary socialist organisation. What are you working towards?

Firstly, "'so called' necessity" is a nonsensical phrase isn't it? We can argue over what falls under the definition of "necessary", but once something IS necessary then in order to be free from the consequences of the thing we NEED to NECESSARILY prevent, we must ACT. Who wants to act and who doesn't?

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Secondly, just like there are countless examples of collective action around the world, there are also countless examples of coercion going on, the capitalist mode of production couldn't function without it. Usually you guys have no beef with capitalism just coercive governments... rather hypocritical don't you think?

IE is NOT a web browser...It's an internet advertising companion. Bonus feature: surf the web! But while you do, we will throw as many ads as your poor brain can handle, and then double the number, for each and every site that allows such abominations.

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Renaming IE shortcuts from 'Launch Internet Explorer' to 'Launch Internet Advertising Companion' since 1999.

Playing the Russia card is so old hat comrade! Really, why link the idea of collective action to an enormous tragedy of history? The world is completely and utterly full of examples of collective action at work, the world couldn't FUNCTION without it. All us lefties are asking for is simply a little bit more. Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

they're still calling us pirates. I like to think of myself as someone who likes to walk around the tollbooths the entertainment industry puts in front of everything, not walk through them. Haven't they got enough money? How many copies of my favorite albums do i have to buy to replace the ones i lost, or had stolen or whatever? Because the tollbooth owners don't care about that sort of fairness, how can i be expected to WILLINGLY put up with the hassle of the tollbooth experience when i can just walk around? The ISP guy got it spot on in one regard -- the only way to combat the culture that has developed to avoid this hassle (ie filesharing) is to make stuff dirt cheap and mega accessible. But there's no or very little profit in that is there, and so here lies the contradiction of trying to own something in digital form and make "good healthy profits". Normally i would sarcastically say "good luck with that" but its simply not funny that while they're trying to make these healthy profits we have to put up with all the associated nastiness of their stand-over tactics and absurd propaganda... can we have the revolution now please?

Yes, you could describe it that way but that assumes there's nothing wrong with exploiting the ownership relationship. Most people don't have access to highly developed technology, and they certainly can't just "do it themselves", so they have to pay whatever is asked of them, as you so helpfully point out. But there is NOTHING voluntary about it. Of the group of people that would like to send text messages, there are some who are rich enough to consider the cost completely negligible and so can see no reason NOT to "voluntarily" pay the amount asked, and there's the rest of us.

Your comment appears completely valid if you cannot see, like i do, that capitalism is a system of exploitation and oppression, full of contradictions like we are seeing big time right now.

Not everyone who buys a game is interested in helping develop the game, but surely there are those who can't afford to buy the game that are willing to donate time to develop the game (providing detailed feedback, etc).

What should we be focusing on? Maximizing profit or maximizing game development? or in other words - producing games to live, or living to produce games? I know which future i want ... and i want it now!

Here we have the financial equivalent of the thankfully age old superstitious and usually religious belief that one person or a group of people could cause the weather to go bad or cause some other crisis-producing natural event.

The enlightenment put paid to that didn't it?

We need another one it seems, an enlightenment from out of the darkness of the deluge of economic dogma we all live under ... or in other words ... capitalist mythology is soooo the matrix.

... heard one of them? No, seriously, everyone get excited about THIS promise by a politician, all the other ones weren't about mega-fast pornband, sorry, i mean broadband.

... Kudos (Iain M Banks, The Algebraist). He also said that money was a sign of poverty (The State of the Art). And yes, this was WAY before the current economic crisis.

so any misgivings i have about using it have disappeared with the new 0.9.9 release. It's da bomb yet again.

OK, we were talking about the State, and now you're talking about the Law, excuse my idiocy, i didn't realize you'd changed the subject.

And for your edification it's revolutionary socialist, not anarchist -- we believe in the State as something transitionary as we rid the world of the vestiges of Class, but in EVERY case, it is still an oppressive institution. We're talking about the STATE, ie, an armed body of men, which is decidedly NOT neutral as opposed to the concept of LAW which could be, depending on whether its based upon a society DIVIDED against itself, ie a class society.

Ooops, sorry for all that argument and information, i forgot for a moment there that i was an idiot and wasn't in fact replying to one! Silly me.