Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[Nospheratu]

While I have to admit Nospheratu for having balls to admit such thing, you should really bear the consequences of your words as on the internet going like that is bound to cause explosions for diffrent reasons and eventually evolve into a mini nuke explosion in terms of fallout.

Thanks

Well, I kind of expected such comments to a degree but even so I wanted to present my point of view, regardless of what other's think about it (living in democracy and all ).
Also I don't see myself as a criminal just becouse I admited having received a stolen product from some other guy and then deciding I'll buy it. It's like my friend would steal a car, come to my place and say "Hey, check out this car I got; i'll leave it here if you wanna try it out" (not mentioning that he stole it ofcourse). I'd say "Well sure, I'll try it out!" then drive it for a month. Somewhere during that time I'd find out that he stole it and since I'm a honest guy, I would drive directly to the car shop where the vehicle got stolen and tell them: "Look, one month ago i got this car, which was stolen from you by a friend of mine, but I didn't know that at first; now that I know, I came to tell you that it is a really good car and I'll buy it since I have already driven it for a month and I really like it." Do you think that the owner would press charges against me, even when I buy the car that wasn't even stolen by me? I assume that even the police would only arrest the guy who stole it, not the guy who was given the car and didn't know it was stolen, then returned and bought it. If you wonder, how I didn't know the game was stolen - it was burned on a dvd and I assumed that he made a copy at home, my bad.
But I won't make further excuses for myself; i just wanted to mention a recent case I saw in the news today, where a woman who downloaded 24 songs and shared them for a while is charged with paying the music company about 1,5 mio $; if she (a normal person, not some wealthy celebrity) doesn't pay up, she will go to jail. Becouse of 24 songs, which are probably worth 50 - 100 $ at most (even if shared), the company came up with such a ridicolous price and the judgement system agreed and sentenced her. How can the people in charge even expect for the public to have sympathy with their company and the sentence, if it is so ridicolous? In my opinion they should have just fined her with the price of, say, 5 CD's instead of freakin' 1,5 million dollars or a couple of years in jail.
Anyway, like some posters already mentioned, we probably won't get anywhere with this debate, since any real change will require a shift in the thinking process of both the industry and the consumers/pirates, but for this to happen both sides must first come towards eachother instead of blindly pulling for their side; i for one can see some things already changing for the better but we all still have a long way to go.