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I predict a hard fall for the people doing this. Fundamentally they don't know what they're doing, and so they are doomed to lose.

So, in the end it's just a personal choice - to steal or not to steal. As it is with shoplifting, auto-theft, rape and drug use . . . I guess I'm just missing out.

I've seen all the justifications for downloading and "file-sharing" - I've heard all the complaints against the capitalist pigs in the music industry and why copyrights shouldn't exist and some pseudo-socialism should rule intellectual property. It's an old argument that goes forever on.

I still choose not to steal - even when it's "free" on the Internet. I'm trying to avoid that "hard fall" doncha know, and be cognizant of what I'm doing. Imho, those who steal, with or without knowing what they are doing are the ones doomed to lose. But, that's just me.

I still choose not to steal - even when it's "free" on the Internet.

I'll bet you drove 55 mph, too.

I try to stay out of the theoretical squabbles. I'm an empiricist. Laws are ultimately by the consent of the governed. When the governed do not consent to something, attempting to enforce it breeds disrespect for law and contempt for lawful authority. Such things are a cancer on the body politic.

Many people believe that a simple price adjustment would make a great deal of this 'stealing behavior' go away. One can plead to the heavens that the copyright owners have the right to charge anything they like, but one then must accept that a generation of students is learning that stealing is no big deal; that everyone does it; and that for most, there are no consequences. Is that really a social good? How does it stack up against the divine right of copyright holders to charge prices that its market will not accept?

I don't propose answers to these things. I only know that when I was a kid, laws were laws, and people obeyed them. And then came the 55 mph speed limit. And a whole nation learned to be criminal; to think of police as the enemy; to consider "getting away with it" a good thing. That may have been the most destructive law ever passed in the United States. It taught people that the Emperor had no clothes. Things have not been the same since.

Now we are watching a generation of students violate their own 55 mph limit. What are they learning? And what is the price of this learning? I'm not arguing that they should do this; I only note that they are... and that they are learning something by doing it. And that there are a lot of them.