coachm - 11:59 pm on Feb 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's not yours to take. End of story. Doesn't matter if you were going to pay for it or not. It's not 'you get it if you pay for it or not'. It's 'you get it only if you pay for it'. There's laws to this effect and they're their for a reason. It's legally wrong and it's morally wrong. If the content creator wants to give it away for free, that's their choice. But it's THEIR choice, not the person ignoring copyright.

On the nose. Perhaps those claiming theft doesn't harm anyone need to pay a few bucks and read. First, nobody can tell me what uses my material will have to ME and how I can monetize it. I have work that is over 12 years old that still earns me money in various ways, but it only does that if I control where and how it is used.

It's funny, but again, Jaron Lanier talks about "intellectual socialism", the notion that art, is becoming something people think "belongs" to them, because its free or just because they can steal it.

I say this once more. If you want to have things to read, watch, and listen to, you need to protect the rights of creators to OWN and control their own work.

I'd have thought webmasters would be on this like crazy, since we/they are probably the biggest group of victims of theft of intellectual property. And we KNOW it costs in terms of visitors, revenue, etc, even though the content we put on the web is usually not sold on a fee basis.