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Old 04-12-2007, 04:38 AM   #7
Greg
Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint
 
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Texas
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Bloo, of course I couldn't condone those who sell others' work without their permission. I certainly agree that taking another artist's work and taking credit for it is stealing, and charging money for it is far worse. That's plagiarism, yet another crime.

But hey, if I've lead anyone to think about what they're really doing, then I accomplished the goal I set out to do when I promised Kathy over at Insim that I'd fire a broadside at the whole criminal philosophy.

You are very fortunate enough that you are wealthy enough to be able to run your web site for free. Far more than that, so incredibly wealthy that you can share the time and talent it takes to create the things you do without need for monetary compensation.

I have happily hosted many "free" Sims sites for seven years now on the Moon Sims server; but I think that it would be arrogant of me to argue that just because I'm lucky enough to be able to do this, less fortunate people shouldn't be allowed to have Sims sites.

Every field of human endeavor has its dilettantes and its professionals. I'm an amateur astronomer, but I don't insist that professional astronomers should not be paid. Volunteer firefighters don't denigrate professional firefighters. People who play baseball at the park on weekends don't go around insisting that all professional sports must be destroyed. (Imagine: "After all, it's just a game. Nobody should be paid for it.") Fan fiction writers don't try to undermine the careers of Jack Clancy and Stephen King, and I've never met anyone who thought it was not a crime to steal books from a bookstore or to make illegal copies of books.

How are artists who make things for The Sims any different? Obviously, they're not. It takes the same levels of creativity to invent and design the things they make, the same level of skill to create the things. Yet, somehow, among all the interest groups in the world, only Sims fans have the unique ability to rationalize criminal behavior based on the philosophy that no one should earn money from their art.

Some people do this because they want to hurt people. "Pescado" openly says this on his criminal site--he only does it because it hurts people. He gets away with it because his crime is too petty to be of interest to the Department of Justice, and because he hides behind a cloak of Internet anonymity.

I probably don't need to go on about how cowardly and sick this behavior really is. Honest people don't have to hide their shame behind false identities and sane people don't have that much shame to hide. But, really, I believe that the majority of Sims fans are not so sick, and they really want to be honest people.

The worst tragedy is that all this is teaching a whole generation of young sims fans to be crooks, as long as you're only stealing intellectual property.

Worse yet, it's happening at the beginning of the Information Age. The job market is changing. More and more, manual labor is being displaced by machines. We are moving toward the day when creating and distributing intellectual property becomes the only means that the majority of the people in the world can earn a living. Yet here we are, brainwashing children into believing that it's all right to steal intellectual property.

If we can just get people to think about what they're really doing and saying, there may be some hope. If not, well hey, it's not that hard to learn to speak Chinese.
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