That is also right, Bhante.Dhammanando wrote:With any contested moral issue, when things seem to be getting overly complicated, the ethic of reciprocity (aka Golden Rule) will usually suffice to cut through the sophistry and dictate a felicitous conclusion. In the present case I think we all know perfectly well that if our livelihood depended upon receipt of royalties for our creative work, then we would feel robbed if people were making use of our work in a way that bypassed paying us our due. How then can we treat others like that?steve19800 wrote:I'm wondering how do you guys come to a conclusion?
I think it depends highly on the circumstances.
Some people copy, for example, a music for him/herself only. Some other people copy hundreds of thousands of the materials and sell it. Some people do not want to download the music because it is considered stealing therefore he or she goes to YouTube every time he wants to listen to that particular music, maybe four times a day? But he might listen the music from the different uploaders, if that makes any difference.
In other occasion, we like a music, pay for it. We download this music and save it to our hard drive. One year later, we decide to donate this music to someone, is this action or the action of the recipient in the future in regards to the music that is given to him is considered stealing?
To what extent copyrighted material is considered legal or illegal? People can forbid us anything they do not want us to do and create a term for it e.g. offensive, abusive, purely intellectual but partially influenced, stealing, etc.. What we do is all wrong. Everything we need to ask for permission, we see a nice house design on the street, decide to use it for our own house, you go and ask the owner of the house, the answer is probably you are not allowed to do that.
But this is not to say that we can do whatever we want to do. That's why I think both stealing and not stealing do make sense.