I knew you were clever enough to get to the right conclusion. I think Anonymous comment

an honest question that is not immediately apparent as black and white, although it actually is.

is actually quite pertinent. Part of our Lockean heritage is to question the authority of tradition. And sometimes traditional ways of doing things no longer makes sense as circumstances change. But these old rules actually derive from some substantial experience and many make more and more sense as one gains more experience that validate them. Whether circumstances have really changed is the question that needs to be faced more squarely and is often avoided for convenience sake. I believe this is one of those cases.

Ease of copying is one of two major challenges the digital age has brought upon us. The other is the return of the dominance of the image over text. Both represent real existential threats to intellectual activity.

Now suppose your show isn’t produced by a dictatorship, but by powerful conglomerates that support left-wing dictatorships, encourage terrorists and murderers through action and selective inaction, whose leaders & stars pollute the earth through excessive consumption and they use their media/money power to subvert the law. Would it be your moral duty to actively work against these conglomerates? Especially if you can do it in a relatively easy, safe and harmless way as downloading/uploading some movies?

A lot of us have been having this argument for a long time. You were a babe in the woods when you started asking your questions, and you got ripped to shreds. Wolves will do that to you, especially when they know that they are in the right.

You aren’t dishonest, or a thief. You didn’t deserve a lot of the accusations thrown at you. You asked an honest question that is not immediately apparent as black and white, although it actually is. You didn’t have much time to even try to offer justifications – old hats have heard this argument so many times that they preemptively made them for you, and then shot them down. They were right, of course.

I’ll quote you here:

Part of maturing is being able to admit you are wrong – and I was. No amount of justifying it makes it right.

That settles that.

You know where I stand on this issue, and why I didn’t bring it up here.

I’ll add this, though – I didn’t know who ‘James R. Rummel’ was before, but after reading the previous thread I now know he’s an extremely poor judge of character. You were rather diplomatic there – personally I felt like kicking that guy’s teeth out.

That’s a nice bit of ad hominem to go along with your dishonest representation of my arguments.

There were some absurd comparisons in the comments to these posts that tried to equate this small illegal act to stealing cars or engaging in child prostitution. I fully reject those arguments.

You are being dishonest by making this claim (much as you were when you claimed I’d decided the producers were conspiring to keep their content from you). There was no argument that what you did was equal to child prostitution, and thus no argument of this sort to reject.

I explicitly said in my comment:

(note: I’m not equating what you’re doing to child prostitution, but instead using that universally repugnant illegal activity for illustration because it better highlights that these posts are not about the rightness or wrongness of the underlying activity, but about the desperate attempt to rationalize behaviour that you know is wrong in the hopes that someone else in the comments section will agree and absolve you.)

I made that same clarification again laterin the same thread, for those that missed it the first time:

I wrote that parallel example because by framing it that way, it is easier to see that the bulk of the original post is irrelevant to answering the question posed about the underlying behaviour (i.e. “have I stolen anything here?”); it is simply a litany of rationalizations for the behaviour.

It’s good that you realize that what you did was (legally) wrong, and that your posts were focused on trying to justify/rationalize the behaviour rather than examine the legality of the behaviour.

It would have been better had you done so without flinging one last dishonest handful of mud at the people who wouldn’t absolve you in the earlier thread.