orthaic, more or less. I'm not asking for any help on a board games forums, but when it comes to the government, we are all on the same side.

flashman, I most certainly do not steal from you or people like you. I dot know where you got that idea. and if you're going to bring up the books, I must remind you that it was YOU that sent me collapse, harry.

You steal from shops for a start, and that causes price rises to cover theft. I pay those price rises...

I am not sure about your book reference, can you check the wording? Ta.

from corporate stores yes, I cant think of a more deserving target.

I thought you might bring up my distributing books on this forum as theft, so I reminded you where I originally got collapse.

Two wrongs do not make a right. It's as true now as when my mother told it to me when I was frigging *five*, Sicarius!

Two wrongs may not make a right, but three rights do make a left.

And I think that ends my participation here - if pithy comments are the best you've got, I'm gonna get back to work.

wow, stealing not just from the government, but also large corporations. I can't say i support copyright laws, (and hence limitations on redistribution - though i do believe we shoudl credit the authors - and possibly even paying them, but if i can copy and redistribute a book of film on my own i don't think i should have to ask for permission, nor pay a distributer... Still I'm 100% on paying for things which people would produce for free either...)

but you're basically against society, and some of the organisations which it allows exist.

Sic old bean, I am still confused. I never sent or gave you Collapse. Have you confused me with another disreputable toe-rag on this site?

Sic, no matter who or where you steal from, if it has an actual value then an innocent person (or maybe many) pay the price. You steal from the government, the taxpayers foot the bill to replace whatever you stole. You illegally distribute an electronic copy of a print book (the words are what is owned and what you pay for, not the paper they are printed on), you are stealing from that author. You steal from a large chain department store (Macy's, Sears, whatever), then cost of the stolen goods gets passed on to their suctomers in higher prices, once again making an innocent, law-abiding consumer citizen like myself pay the price of your theft.

You argument is so full of holes, it not only doesn't hold water, but I could drive a freight train full of your stolen goods through it.

Oh, and Sic... It was spyman, not flashman, who sent you Collapse. Epic fail, dude!

God forbid someone takes from the government, lord knows they need every cent of their $518.3 billion 2009 military budget for tanks and bombs.

You blame big corps prices on theft? really? wal mart or starbucks or target or whatever pay pennies for their products, thanks to the IMF and WTO, and NAFTA, along with sweatshops union busting and general exploitation, so almost all of their price is mark up. they make almost pure profit. so if starbucks pays 2 cents for 1 cup of coffes worth of beans (that includes shipping and processing, I mean fuck, they own ethiopia) then sell it to you for 4$, and I steal one cup too, they are paying 4 cents, and making 4$. thats jut an example of course but you get the idea.

you were right bout one thing though "Actually this is spyman here not flashman. However in real life
Flashman is my nickname, and Harry Flashman is the name I use most
often online, including Gmail. I saw that someone else already had
flashman on php so I went with a name I have used on another gaming
site, spyman."

whoops, my mistake. the actual total of the US's 2009 military budget is $1.14 trillion

Sicarius, have you ever run a business? Buying something from China for 5 cents and selling it at Walmart for a dollar doesn't make you rich. There are many, many, many additional costs retailers especially have to pay beyond the wholesale unit price to get their wares into a shopping bag.

Big corporations have target profit margins (usually around 5%). If they can't reach that profit margin, they will either raise prices (which, when you're talking about Walmart, hurts the poor worst of all) or cut costs (by laying people off). Stealing from big box stores doesn't hurt the evil corporation or the wealthy stockholders behind them. It hurts little people on whom the corporation outsources their pain.

So then its wrong for the little people being screwed, sometimes beyond their control or choice, to give the corporation a tiny taste of their own medicine?

And Starbucks takes good care of their employees from what I understand, it's supposed to be just about the only big company that pays health benefits for part time unskilled labor. A lot of the premium price one pays for a cup of Starbucks coffee is going to pay for the employees' benefits and wages.

Sicarius, my point is that *you're not hurting the corporation* when you steal from them. I share your anger - I think big corporations are every bit as evil as government (with a few exceptions, and of course corporations generally don't commit acts of physical violence against people with impunity as The State does).

If you really want to hurt them, you must strike at the legal privileges they hold - from immunity from personal liability for executives and stockholders to all the bullshit trade agreements which reward corporations for exporting jobs.

Good, my name has been cleared from the great book scandal!

As I said above Sic, with a personal creed that argues for the ends to justify the means, you leave yourself no position to defend whatsoever. Your every argument is flawed by the simple fact that, once established, you cannot deny anyone else from arguing the same way. So, anything goes...

Some things Sic says make me really respect him.

And then he starts trashing property rights. And then I just shake my head.

The only way to hurt corporations is financially, because profit is the only thing they understand. Whether thats stealing, or a brick though the window, or a flaming ruin where their corporate offices used to be. And hey, thats real nice of starbucks to give their white and or american employees healthcare, but what about the people who grow thier coffee? They get to starve. Ethiopia no longer grows food for themselves, they grow only coffee beans, all of which is owned by starbucks. you know what they get paid for their coffee? not shit, not even enough to afford a starbucks coffee they grow beans for. I am not a reformist. I am not out to get a few ceo's arrested, or to get walmart workers a 50 cent pay raise. they just doesnt go far enough.

perhaps it is you who is shortsighted?


rlumley, I respect property rights as much as you, but I respect personal property, not private property. personal property are things you actually use, i.e. your car, your garden, your shoes, your laptop. great. private property is your tenement slums you collect rent on, or "your" coffee fields in africa. see the difference?

Sic just doesn't get it and probably never will... The corporations add a buffer to their prices for your theft. They carry insurance if you torch their corporate HQ that builds them a bigger better one. Your acts only hurt the individuals under the thumb of big business, either the small business supplier or the consumer or even the unskilled laborer. Heck, you might cause a manager to get fired if you steal enough, but someone else willt ake their place and to make the money back some poor stock clerk will also lose their job.

And we aren't talking personal or private property, but intellectual property. My thoughts are my own on which I alone should be able to make money. If I agree to have those thoughts published and grant the publisher some profit for taking the risk and the effort, that is my business. But if you then take those thoughts that were put on paper and give them away for free, you are stealing my ideas. I know you don't respect intellectual property, but the law does and I hope someday you take it to far and find yourself rotting under a federal prison for 150 years with Madoff.

<shakes head and wanders off>

yeah, the distribution of wealth in the world is rather less than balanced. Have you considered it is the economic system which has allowed this distribution, and the development of corporations - which are effectively legal entities allowing multiple individuals co-operate with each other.

People would work together whether they were recognized as a legal entry or not, it is just the natrual way humans operate together, there is no way to stop it unless you have a larger organisation (government) to control and direct those humans (as in communism, or any centrally managed economy)

Basically us humans are smart and naturally form communities to support each other and make life easier. Without money as a medium of exchange (and trust in it's value) we would never have come up with the idea of division of labour. However given we have the idea, given how effectively it works, nobody is going to simply stop thinking it. (viral memes tend to stick around)

@Draugnar: Sic is not the only one who thinks there is a problem with copyright law.
It is too expensive and difficult to enforce (with todays technology)

We have a very successful system, but that doesn't mean it is the best.
youtube has allowed millions of people create and distribute videos, I gave my kids a choice once of watching anything they wanted, they picked lego star wars stop motion videos on youtube. Even though i have the digitally remastered versions, given a choice of the best hollywood studios can offer, million dollar budgets, and advanced special effects, they choose a free youtube video made by an amateur who made Zero cent from it. (ok i don't actually have children, i'm related a story i heard in a ted talk which i can't find a link to)

The film industry has become a bloated uncreative mass, when individual creativity is squashed, without individuals being encouraged to think, to create, to value that which they can make themselves the human race will lose it's culture to something which is merely a factory produced mess. When it costs a million dollars to turn an idea into a finished product, there are only a limited number of ideas you can try out, but when youtube allows you try and distribute every single idea you get millions of gems among the billions of crappy ideas. Nature see two strategies aswell in reproduction, some species of tree produce thousands of seeds which they scatter to the wind and hipe for the best, while other speices notable humans create only a single child and spend ocnsiderable time caring and nuturing it - different ideas for different environments - and as our technology changes the environment in which our creative ideas develope has changed aswell.

Money need not be the only reason people create new things, ideas will find their own way to succeed whether protected by patent or copyright, or whether distributed by opensource and copyleft.

@ orathaic - but does the flawed system mean Sic should have the right to distribute anything he wants, free of charge (or even seel it) when it was created by someone else. If I want to give away my original work, that is my right. But if I want to sell it and only have people who bought it experience it, that is also my right, which Sic is usurping.

Better a flawed system than Sic's anarchy in which no one owns their own original creations.