approval from:
kneedeep 
| reply to jhboricua
Re: Cheap? As a person who actually works for a living, and expects a paycheck for every hour of dedicated work I perform, I have to wonder what you believe is draconian about establishing and enforcing laws which attempt to guaranty that a person is paid for every hour that they work? Do you not expect to be paid for every effort you put forth to earn your money? Don't you believe that a person is entitled to be paid based on the quality and worth of their work? Don't you get pissed as hell when someone jacks your possessions that you worked for hours to buy? Wouldn't you scream to the Labor Relations Board if you worked for 40 hours one week and your employer just decided that he wasn't going to pay, just because he liked keeping that money rather than paying it to the rightful owner of that money?
The hours one sweats to labor at a job are completely noncorporeal, just like the billions of data bits that are transferred across the Internet. Yet, the bits that contain the information rushing your Direct Deposit wage transfers to your bank are supposed to be secured and surely deposited exactly as earned, but the bits that belong to a song writer, musician, publisher, author, producer, filmographer, game programmer, all are utterly worthless, a joke, something to be freely stolen? Where is their paycheck coming from, if not from those who are using and enjoying the products they produced as the result of their labor? At what point does the reality, that of the fun and games that are euphemistically called "music sharing", shamelessly and openly supported by the last two generations of ungrateful slackers begin to hit home, that it is outright theft, not rebellion or protest or "something cool to do because it doesn't hurt anyone"?
I personally have refused to buy a single music or video item which is downloadable via the Internet. I physically go to a music or retail store and pay to legally possess the physical disc and reward its creator for their efforts. Yes, it's inconvenient as hell, but a whole less inconvenient than dealing with (what should be) a guilty conscience for having stolen someones livelihood from them. I have a 10MB/sec broadband connection, but refuse to use it for IP delivery, for one reason: I believe in fairly compensating someone who has worked for me and has produced efforts or products that I have enjoyed. If a producer and a bunch of actors have made and published a movie that I like, I'm paying for it, dammit, because it's the right thing to do. They fully earned my money! The same thing goes for songs and games. They worked hard and deserved their pay for having earned my enjoyment of their product. Even if I have to save up for a month or two to afford it. And dammit, if you possess a product, be it a pair of shoes, a cell phone, a car, or a song or computer game, you are expected, no REQUIRED by law and the provisions of moral behavior, to pay for that product. If you do otherwise, you are simply a low-life, stinking, dirty, scum-sucking thief, not a laudable revolutionary. NO DOUBT. I'm old fashioned that way... you know, honor and integrity and justice and all of that all-American bull-$#1t that Americans used to believe in. Not all of the Obama-inspired free-loading utopianist crap that passes for the right "change" for our society today. |
