When is it okay to steal?

[Thanatos]

Continued from this thread:

Can you give an example of a situation when it is ok to steal?

I stole lab notebooks and stationary from the university bookstore while paying $40,000 a year in tuition. Why? Well, it was very overpriced.

If I am feeling overcharged or underserved, I will attempt to steal from you and I will usually get away with it.

Microsoft thinks their office software is worth quite a lot and it sucks more than it should. OpenOffice thinks their software is free and it is awesome. Except, I need the compatibility. Gee, I could afford the $349, but maybe I'm just going to download it illegally...

Christians and patent lawyers find my morals terrifying. I find them terrifying, so I guess we're even.

It has to do with the sliding scale of morality because of chemical reactions in the brain atheists allot themselves. (sarcasm smiley)

I have a sense of fairness, and I'm not alone.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4207351.stm

[finder]

Continued from this thread:



I stole lab notebooks and stationary from the university bookstore while paying $40,000 a year in tuition. Why? Well, it was very overpriced.

If I am feeling overcharged or underserved, I will attempt to steal from you and I will usually get away with it.

Microsoft thinks their office software is worth quite a lot and it sucks more than it should. OpenOffice thinks their software is free and it is awesome. Except, I need the compatibility. Gee, I could afford the $349, but maybe I'm just going to download it illegally...

Christians and patent lawyers find my morals terrifying. I find them terrifying, so I guess we're even.



I have a sense of fairness, and I'm not alone.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4207351.stm

Hey, I'm with you on the overpriced anything we consumers are paying for these days. But stealing from a school store because they charge to much for note books and stationary? Why couldn't you just go to a real store? Now they've probably raised the price on those things and how fair would that be for those who came after you?

The chimps were interesting but they don't justify theft. Indeed they show how primal and self oriented the sense of fairness you exhibit is and that's what scares me about atheism.

[truthreality]

I have a sense of fairness, and I'm not alone.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4207351.stm

Yes let's look to monkeys for our source of morality.

[Jack]

Yes let's look to monkeys for our source of morality.

We don't look to other species as a source of morality but rather as evidence that morality is a social construct intended to permit the group to exist in harmony and at peace. Morality is not unique to humans.

[truthreality]

We don't look to other species as a source of morality but rather as evidence that morality is a social construct intended to permit the group to exist in harmony and at peace. Morality is not unique to humans.

The animal world (or "other" animal world) is a hostile environment. We really shouldn't be referencing them for "harmony and peace".

[Jack]

The animal world (or "other" animal world) is a hostile environment. We really shouldn't be referencing them for "harmony and peace".

That wasn't the point. Wolves, apes and other animals exhibit sometimes complex rules for their societies, morals, the goal of which is to establish a peaceful and harmonious existence for all members of the group. Do they always succeed? Of course not, just as morality in humans doesn't always succeed in providing a harmonious society.

[truthreality]

That wasn't the point. Wolves, apes and other animals exhibit sometimes complex rules for their societies, morals, the goal of which is to establish a peaceful and harmonious existence for all members of the group. Do they always succeed? Of course not, just as morality in humans doesn't always succeed in providing a harmonious society.

"When the pair came from a group that had known each other only a short time, the unfairly treated chimp responded negatively."

Stealing is a negative reaction to being unfairly treated. Instead we should come up with positive solutions to create fairness. Stealing is not one of them.

[Jettin]

It's not right to steal these things, and it's not good for their economy either.

[truthreality]

If I am feeling overcharged or underserved, I will attempt to steal from you

Umm...What? Is this a joke? I generally don't trust criminals who commit crimes based on how they "feel". I mean isn't that just a cliche? This is too easy.

and I will usually get away with it.

I doubt that. Especially if you tell me in advance.

[Thanatos]

Humanity's quirky sense of fairness works two ways.

Diablo III, a heavily-marketed and very modern computer game with a massive game developer behind it, inconveniently requires you to connect to an anti-piracy server every second that you want to play. This is rather obtrusive and prone to failure. The game sold millions of pre-release copies, but as a direct consequence of constantly pissing people off when they actually try to play it by checking on them to be really sure nobody is pirating it, cracks and pirated copies are freely available from remarkably snazzy-looking websites run by sexy hackers. Result: you don't have to pay for it if you don't want it despite the intrusive DRM.

Compare this with Minecraft's strategy. For those of you who don't know, Minecraft has minimal advertising and graphics that look like this:



This game also asks for a login, but even without having an account it still lets you play and only produces a warning in very small red text. There's also no attempt to detect if an account is being used to log in by multiple people at the same time, and no requirement for a continuous internet connection. The files themselves are free to download. In other words, "stealing" it is just absurdly easy and will not be punished.

Minecraft has sold 9.2 million copies (a lot, although Diablo III might eventually pass it) despite there being no practical reason to buy it.

Stealing is a negative reaction to being unfairly treated. Instead we should come up with positive solutions to create fairness. Stealing is not one of them.

No one has ever had any luck reasoning with the Blizzard legal team. It's been tried.

One way of encouraging fairness is to resist playing along with things that are unfair while rewarding entities who deal with you fairly. I would not say this is really a conscious plan of mine, but I do my part.

[truthreality]

Humanity's quirky sense of fairness works two ways.

Diablo III, a heavily-marketed and very modern computer game with a massive game developer behind it, inconveniently requires you to connect to an anti-piracy server every second that you want to play. This is rather obtrusive and prone to failure. The game sold millions of pre-release copies, but as a direct consequence of constantly pissing people off when they actually try to play it by checking on them to be really sure nobody is pirating it, cracks and pirated copies are freely available from remarkably snazzy-looking websites run by sexy hackers. Result: you don't have to pay for it if you don't want it despite the intrusive DRM.

Compare this with Minecraft's strategy. For those of you who don't know, Minecraft has minimal advertising and graphics that look like this:



This game also asks for a login, but even without having an account it still lets you play and only produces a warning in very small red text. There's also no attempt to detect if an account is being used to log in by multiple people at the same time, and no requirement for a continuous internet connection. The files themselves are free to download. In other words, "stealing" it is just absurdly easy and will not be punished.

Minecraft has sold 9.2 million copies (a lot, although Diablo III might eventually pass it) despite there being no practical reason to buy it.



No one has ever had any luck reasoning with the Blizzard legal team. It's been tried.

One way of encouraging fairness is to resist playing along with things that are unfair while rewarding entities who deal with you fairly. I would not say this is really a conscious plan of mine, but I do my part.

A reasonable solution to this perceived "unfairness" is to snub Blizzard not steal from them. This perception of "fairness" is completely arbitrary and subjective. Stealing from an entity will only cause the entity to set up stronger regulation. Blizzard will not one day say "Well everyone is stealing from us so let's ease up". They will continue to push stronger measures. On top of this stealing will bring in enforcement from the law. If you thought logging on to an ant-piracy server was "inconvenient" then law enforcement is going to make life "hell". Gaming is recreation and a gamer has no entitlement to a game unless he or she purchases that game. Gaming is a poor analogy. Stealing for personal gratification is the quintessential crime of theft.

[Thanatos]

This perception of "fairness" is completely arbitrary and subjective.

All rules are ultimately grounded in how some (select) group of people feel about an issue and what consensus they reach. I believe in allowing yourself to feel things, and in knowing what you feel.

If you thought logging on to an ant-piracy server was "inconvenient" then law enforcement is going to make life "hell". Gaming is recreation and a gamer has no entitlement to a game unless he or she purchases that game. Gaming is a poor analogy. Stealing for personal gratification is the quintessential crime of theft.

The antipiracy goons are a rather vicious bunch. $675,000 fines for music on some random kid. What do you make of that?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...ill_be_lowered

I want them to do that. Maybe not to me specifically, but the more they go way beyond reason and try to intimidate the general public the more people will want to edit the laws a bit. It is all arbitrary after all, and all these clowns must do to change how things work in this country at a very fundamental level is further provoke the reasonable public into having an opinion.

I specifically chose entertainment because it is something people do not require. I didn't exactly need to rescue a single item from that bookstore either. I wanted to because people were attempting to deal with other people unfairly.