Downloading materials...is it wrong to sell what you downloaded?

"Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior")"
"Law is a set of norms, which can be seen both in a sociological or in a philosophical sense."

both definitions taken from wikipedia.

how are these not similar. morality governs behavior through personal character and law is a set of norms born through philosophy and society.

"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning subjects such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language."
"Sociology is the study of human societies.[1] It is a social science (with which it is informally synonymous) that uses various methods of empirical investigation[2] and critical analysis[3] to develop and refine a body of knowledge and theory about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and social structures.[4]

Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification (i.e. class relations), religion, secularization, modernity, culture and deviance, and its approaches have included both qualitative and quantitative research techniques."

"A religion is any systematic approach to living that involves beliefs about one's origins, one's place in the world, or a responsibility to live and act in the world in particular ways"

All copy pasted from wiki.

so lets see here. Morality is your beliefs on what virtues people should have. and law is the norm for a society to behave (i dare you to not read that as a common morality).

i do however have to take back the hypocrite statement though because i don't like that word so i'm sorry about that. it was an attack and i need to take it back.

 

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Traceman-You have a point but I didn't see it as an attack.


I'm aware about all the other stuff involved...



There are a few ways to view this, I once took the same approch of "download it for free and sell it for profit" however not only did it fail...but keeping it realisically cheap meant that all the money went back into buying dvd's

My mate over charges...to make profit.



Another way is for those who CAN'T download it makes it easier on them...convience, like how petrol stations get away with over charging on snack (my super market is cheaper than the petrol station next door...despite being co-braded and preety much OWNED by us-same company name ).


But would you consider it wrong...especially for those who have high speed internet, with large download limits (and after all...what ever some might think, buying priated stuff is still illegal...this is why I wanted to NOT talk about the legal issue, just the moral one...excluding the obvious fact)

 

i actually do consider it wrong. it is wrong. what i'm saying is that if people are willing to pay for it then i'm not going to stop them. i'm not going to preach to them nor am i going to try and influence the business. i might occasionally say, "hey you might sell more if you make it cheaper" i might even say "you should at least tell people that they can get this stuff for free online." but im not obligated to force him to stop. sometimes bootlegs are bought because they want a cheap alternative and just want the content but would still pay for it. and hell there's always the ignorance factor. some people are just plain stupid. there is also the mentality where its "if [this content] is good then i'll go out and buy the real thing"

i used to work at a games retail store. people would talk about trying out games on an r4 or burning an iso all the time but the fact of the matter is it didn't keep them from buying games in the store. ive even had people who have had purchased bootlegged games and gotten pissed off and came to the store to buy the actual game. ive seen the aftermath of these situations. ive also gone to fleamarkets and purchased pirated games because sometimes its really funny. like they try to match the picture on the disc and its not the same thing on the real one.

the other thing is if he's over charging and people still purchase it then his people aren't shopping around, or researching what they want, to find better prices. that's their fault.

i guess what im trying to say is that EVERY business takes something turns it into something and then sells it for profit if we're going to ignore the legality.

i also think that if it really bothers YOU that much then you should say something about it. but since ive downloaded some things myself for personal use. id tell someone what could possibly happen and then let them figure it out themselves and leave it at that im not going to drive away any customers.

 

Claps for copy and pasting.

morality is nothing more then self preservation manifesting its self and is not a set a set of attributes that everyone is accountable to as it differs in different situations.

it's not really a morality issue, it may be morally wrong to one person but that does not mean it's an absolute.

if you were not someone who had the knowledge to DL and burn what you want and was hard to learn would you not look to buy it?
put your self in those shoes, do you still see it as such a bad thing?

as i said i used to sell a few dvds here and there not for a massive profit but that only happened because i had a few people that i regularly did the stuff for free and they insisted to pay as i was doing them a service and still wanted to buy even when i taught them how to do it them selves.
i give stuff away for free now as dvds cost nothing and i've always got hundreds of blanks.

i can understand a massive organization pirating thousands of copies as being bad but i bet your mate is selling a few here and there to people that are going to get a pirate version of something whether they DL them selves or buy it from a different person.

 

no in the sense that it must be the cheapest price.
there are people on craigslist who sell their dreamcast system with bootable games and sell them for like $1-$2 a piece.

i wouldn't mind paying someone who can give me a copy of windows xp, vista or windows 7 or any other software or game. the reason why is that it takes the hassle of having to worry about viruses and other similar crap from screwing up my computer as well as ensureing that it'll fully work. it also gives me time to do something else rather then sit around and wait for the download to finish.

i can't nor will i get anything from torrent sites. i'm therefore willing to spend $5 for a bootleg copy of microsoft windows 7 or office 2007 or etc... because i don't want to deal with the headaches.

 

Wrong because his making a profit from someone else's work. If you download something it should be for educational purposes not for profit.


H.

 

remember, everything is not useful. i'm certain no one here is paying the full price for adobe photoshop or illustrator.

yeah, he's making a profit, but it's his work [time] that he's profiting from by downloading and dealing with those crazy viruses and other stuff one would find in those torrent places and the other stuff i've mentioned. so i'm fine that he or she is profiting, but it's profit that he or she deserves because they spent their time dealing with the stuff i don't want to deal with.

i could download the adobe photoshop myself but why when you can pay someone cheaply to do it for you. that is his profit, me having to pay him to get it for me.

 

Yes, it is morally wrong to sell what you download. But for legal reasons regarding software, that depends on what is stated in the End User License Agreement (EULA). If the EULA specifically states that you cannot copy and sell that software for profit, yet someone does make copies of that software and sells to others, then it is a legal violation.

The legal issue regarding movies is quite difficult to say with certainty, as it all depends on the laws enforced by the governing country (as each country has different laws.) But in the United States, if you were to sell copies of movies (whether you duplicated yourself or downloaded), then you can expect to face a lawsuit from the RIAA.

That's laughable. Someone can sell you a bootleg copy of Windows that doesn't work or install properly at all. In that case, what do you do then? Ask for a refund? If there is no return policy, you're screwed, and you're stuck with some cheap useless coaster.

I wonder how difficult it is for you to run virus-scan on your downloads. Sure, you may think that paying someone "cheaply" to download stuff for you is no big deal, but in the long run, as you are constantly relying on others to do it for you, all the money that you have wasted starts to add up to the point in which you would shit your pants in disbelief. After all, if you have a fast-speed internet connection, and know where to download properly copied (perhaps cracked) software with no viruses and other bullshit, then you shouldn't have to waste a single dime on someone to do it for you.

 

some people just don't want to learn or find it hard to understand how to do it even if they find out, some people are not technically minded.
you'd be surprised at the demand (obviously that whym people can make money) and as said i've taught people how to download stuff and they still ask me to do it or if they tried to do it are phoning me a week later to fix there pc.

and anyway i know how to do it all and i've still bought 360 rips off the net because i can't be bothered to DL and burn (especially in the case of older games)

and again with the moral thing it has no basis on morals at all, it may seem morally wrong to some people but morals are completely dependent on circumstances they are not absolutes that we all share equally.

 

Well, I think there's a gray line between "share and share alike" and outright piracy. It would be against the wishes of those who took the time to share and put up the material for free on the internet in the first place. To me, it's morally wrong: but I digress. Downloading the files in itself is "illegal", and selling them doesn't make it any more "illegal" anyways. As long as he doesn't get caught, good for your friend.

 

I call it supply-demand/impatience-intelligence economics

lets take a step back to primordial times... shall we... lets say you are a neanderthal that has found a spot naturally incurring with super sharp rocks that take the form of spears... only a few know where this spot is... is it wrong to sell the goods to the other people who don't know the spot? i think not, if they were smart and patient they would go out and look for the spot themselves... you have the intelligence to make a sale, they are impatient and not willing to find it themselves, thus you have the supply, they have the demand.

for me it isn't immoral, it's just smart... survival of the fittest

 

Giving is fine. It is wrong to sell it.

 

I think it more pisses me off than strikes a moral nerve. When i was about 2 years younger I used to go around spending as much as 50 dollars for around 3 dvds. Then after a while I found that my friends had the exact same movies (better quality) that they put on my usbs for me for nothing. Still there are the stupid/incapable/lazy people who don't know how/don't have the means/can't be bothered to get the material themselves, and for them I guess it is a better idea to just buy them. It is wrong on the salesmans part and he should probably go and die in a hole somewhere but for some people its just better...