Now, perhaps someone who defends the stealing of music via the Internet might answer the question that I have posed a number of times and that not one person has attempted to answer. Why do you not steal from the greedy Companies who make huge profits like the electricty suppliers , motor-vehicle manufacturers, drug companies etc. etc. etc. Not that I have any love for Record Companies, but why single them out for this treatment? Could it be that because it is easier to steal music the rationale then becomes to blame record companies ethics for our own lack of ethics?
Most people steal because they won't get caught. However, you haven't convinced anyone that downloading music is legally stealing. It depends on your country.
BTW, if you try to steal electricity and you screw up, it can kill you. Now there is a motive not to steal electricity. I know how to handle electricity, and you won't get me tapping into the wires that are before my electrical meter. Not while they are live and can pump hundreds or thousands of amps through my heart. Only a few thousandths of a amp will kill you. And I am one of the few who could do it and live.
I used to work for the phone company. Due to our equipment being after the billing equipment, we could make long distance phone calls anywhere in the world without a record of the call being left. The creative souls in the office could even patch in a buddy from his home phone.
Being a good Dub wannabe, I did not do this; instead I paid $250/month for my personal long distance. My coworkers would argue that there was no cost to the phone company, and no revenue lost. Their arguments were valid.
Why did they do it? It was free, and they would not get caught. Even if they did, they would only be asked by our boss to stop. Making personal long distance calls was against company policy. We could call anywhere in the world for business reasons.
Incidentally, just so you know, if you make a long distance phone call, your home address can be traced. Yes, both during and after the call. And yes, even if you use a calling card to hide your location. There is a trick to it, which we employees knew because our jobs involved tracing calls for the police. Even when a suicidal person hangs up the phone, we can still complete the trace and grab their address. This works with only long distance calls; the equipment used for local phone calls is different.
Also, to feed the very paranoid, your phone calls are listened to. At night, the employees will look for calls about sex to get their jollies. They are legally allowed to listen to a live conversation for 7 seconds; with computers, they can listen forever legally (the computer disconnects and immediately reconnects every 7 seconds).
In the daytime, we had a room where people monitored and took notes on phone calls. We were told this was highly illegal, and we were to deny it existed if asked. They claim that random calls were listened to to ensure that operators were polite to customers and to ensure no one was abusing the phone system. Both reasons seemed bogus to me, but both my employer and my union went along with it. I have no idea what they actually used it for; my employer gave us a work order to move the monitoring wires (held on by two big clamps) to a certain circuit, and we did. The thought just occurred to me that with computers following the 7 second rule, this may now be legal.
BTW, the phone company I worked for was owned by the government and that the union contract required that all work orders be followed.
So, what I am saying is that people and companies will break the law when they can get away with it.
Richard
