Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[DarkHorse]

Okay, I've spent all morning catching up on this thread after coming back from vacation, and I feel the irresistable urge to throw in a couple cents.

[quote]Originally posted by geoschmo:

~snip~ Moraltiy is absolute. Morality has to be absolute by definition in order to be morality. Otherwise it is merely opinion and it is useless.

Morality is not absolute, it is an informal convention formulated by a given society to reinforce what it generally deems to be beneficial behavior on the part of its citizens. Laws are typically the formalized quantifications of these moral ideas.
Right and wrong, legal and illegal, moral and immoral are all conventions of convenience designed to encourage socially beneficial behavior, and discourage antisocial behavior. If there were only one person left on earth, all ideas of right and wrong etc would become meaningless, because they are societal constructs that exist only to modify the behavior of individuals toward others.

As a man of science I am sure you understand the need to have absolute points of referance in order to make any sort of measurments. Without them all your measurments are useless.
Geoschmo

This isn't necessarily true. In a universe where everything is relative, there are no absolute points of reference, by definition. An object's weight, for example, is dependent on gravity. That same object's mass is dependent on its velocity; accelerate something close to the speed of light and it's mass approaches infinite. All mathematical and scientific measurments are relative. That doesn't mean they aren't convenient and useful, of course, but they are relative.

But anyway, back to the original question.

The question of software piracy is a legal, not moral, question. Legally, it is clear that if you copy software and distribute it, whether or not it is for profit, you are violating the Fair Use provisions of the relavent law. (EULAs are irrelevant, it is the law that counts. Congress enacts laws, not software companies.)

The moral question is whether or not to break laws, and which laws you may choose to break.