Guess what, I have two real options in my area. The phone company with a 60GB soft cap where I have to pay surcharges every month (which I do), or the cable company with a 60GB hard cap where the internet goes bye bye if you hit 60.01GB for the rest of the month. I put up with it. I'd
love to have a 250GB cap montly. That's not even available even if I was inclined to pay for it. Telecom in my entire country is a huge monopoly and the companies throttle you, surcharge you, raise your rates with no warning, etc.
I created this thread to get people to look at their actions from a different perspective. You are making the same arguments software companies make for placing protections on their programs. Many end-users suffer for these protections. The arguments are not that different from the other Industries, either.
Actually I'm not. The industry says "you're stealing our product", which is incorrect. I never would have "bought" lets say, Adobe Audition. It costs hundreds of dollars and I use it so infrequently that it'd be a pointless buy. I would however, download it for the occasional usage. Now the company will say "you stole that", but no, I didn't. If I went to Best Buy, took the CD off the shelves, and stuffed it in my pocket and walked out, I'd have stolen it. I deprived someone of a physical copy that cost them money to produce and would roughly equate to a lost sale. If I download a
copy, I haven't deprived anyone of anything other than imaginary profit.
On the other hand, if I take my neighbour's bandwidth, I've specifically deprived them of a product they paid for, leaving them to foot the bill for my greed. They may be forced to pay surcharges, they may be cut off from the internet for the rest of the month, they might receive copyright notices from the RIAA/MPAA or their equivalents elsewhere, they might experience constant slow speeds due to your sharing (depriving them of something else they paid for), they might be throttled because of you as well.
This is clear unabased greed. There are no acceptable conditions for your situation. As I said, acceptable would be "I don't have an internet connection but need to be able to access my email/work material until I get one again", not "I don't like my ISP so I'm going to ruin other people's internet connections".
We are copying things we want. You are taking things you want. Enjoy justifying that :frusty:
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