I'm a little disappointed in myself for not addressing this earlier, and quite a bit dissappointed in allayouse for not beating me to the point.
In the original post that started all of this, and in most of our discussions we've talked about someone giving away files.
Giving away. A very important distinction.
Of course, the haters don't want to bring the guys selling the game into the equation because by contrast the give away guys look pretty fucking clean. Everyone can agree selling copies of someone's book is bad piracy.
Giving someone a copy of a file? Not so clear. I mean, what if I give my buddy my physical book for a few days, knowing he's just gonna scan it in and keep a copy?
See, some people think it's sharing. Sharing is good, its personal. Some people think its theft. Mostly people hoping to make a sale out of it. But what if I knew my buddy there never bought books? Maybe he doesn't have the money for them (ignore the value of the computer for the moment here...) or maybe he doesn't have shelfspace in his house. He borrows books indefinitly to play games... having him scan it relieves the burden on me to fight with him to get my shit back.
Oh, but files are different.
How? If anything, Files cost the producer LESS, essentially nothing.
When you lump in ordinary sharing behavior with money grubbing piracy you get 14 year old girls sued by RCA records for listening to a bootleg Eminem song she got from her best girl friend.
Claims that the industry, that is gaming, is a much smaller marketplace with less room for that shit is not really addressing it at all. Unless you think gamers are inherently special people with special rules, that is.
Yamo has it right when he says it's a fact of life, deal with it. How you deal with it may vary, but simply crying foul over every mention of it is rather pointless.
Semantic debates, however, are fun... those guys can carry on at will.