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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ender_wiggin" data-source="post: 1957836" data-attributes="member: 21629">Well, I sincerely apologize for all the offense I've caused, but you'll just have to crucify me for being honest about it.I will not argue with you on the morals of this issue. Of course its wrong. Yeah I'm hurting people. But then again, I don't feel particularly ashamed about it. I look around me and see everyone doing things a lot worse. You were right. I am very young; I'm to go undergraduate college next year. And if you see the act of piracy as a base, morally wrong act, it'll probably get a lot worse in college. Universities have massive virtual databanks, several terabytes or more. That database is the conglomeration of everyone's hard drive, filled with pirated software and documents they didn't pay for, all operating on platforms they didn't buy. I know some of you haven't been in college for years, and I don't mean any offense, but this is the age I find myself in. Information is being traded around for free. I occasionally buy things, but for the most part, any electronic data you want you can get free of charge.But these crimes that I commit, I believe, are trifle compared with what happens daily around me. I don't *feel* like a criminal. I don't have a stealing ring. Neither me nor my friends make any sort of monetary profit with our little boot disks. We don't do it to feel good. We don't do it because we think it gives us power. We just wanna be able to play our games without shelling out our life savings.Yes, you can buy Win XP if you want. But I choose not to. It won't make Bill Gates any poorer. I can pay a fortune to have these pdfs on my computer. But I choose not to, and I don't feel bad about this decision because if it were the other way around, I would expect the author to rip my work off if he were given the opportunity. Having a minimum wage job isn't really an excuse.So I've pirated software. So I download songs off Kazaa. I just don't see it as the felony-class crime that some of you guys seem to. I don't know of anyone who is starving because people are pirating his work. If you are starving because your work isn't making money; its because your writing is bad, not because people are pirating. And if your work gets to the point where it is circulating between small groups of friends who live in the middle of nowhere, then you have probably made a good deal of money off of it already. More than I will make for the next ten years. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have posted this; it will just be disected and destroyed and whatnot. I originally posted to apologize, but realized that it was empty without some sort of awkward explanation. Anyway, due to the sensitive nature of some of this, this thread has a possibility of being closed, so I just wanted to at least make an effort to get my message across before that happens.....I just hope I have an account after this chirade.</blockquote>

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