"Mueen Nawaz" <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote in message
news:493c8410@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:

> > miserable. In fact, I think abiding by ethical principles only when
> > convenient is, well, not really much of a virtue, but that's just me.
You

> Your statement would have value if abiding by ethical principles was a
> binary state. Some don't see the world that way.

Fair enough. I freely admit that stealing a loaf of bread whilst starving is
vastly a different proposition than pirating Haskell books, and implied as
much (quoting myself; "...I really cannot imagine a circumstance under which
not pirating Haskell books would cause suffering for me"). In the former
case, I'd say that not stealing the bread is the unethical choice. On the
other hand, software, audio or media piracy doesn't follow from necessity at
all, the sob stories to justify it notwithstanding. It won't cause any sort
of suffering not to have an mp3 of the latest hit, or not to have a copy of
the latest version of Photoshop. It only follows from entitlement mentality,
not of necessity. There are literally millions of web pages with free
information about anything you can imagine, including Haskell, there is
radio, TV, libraries (the brick and mortar kind), OS or free software that
does pretty much anything you are likely to need... etc. Piracy
justification arguments are vacuous for that reason.

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