[sophacles]

What? So if I hire you and don't pay you, you can go back in time, thus not losing the hours of effort you will never get back? I strongly doubt this, but assuming it is true: why haven't you just invested in the stock market and made trillions of dollars yet?

With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?

If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.

[TimJYoung]

It's a free rider issue. Your ability to acquire software for free raises the price of that software for those that do pay. It's the same reason why taxes are not voluntary, because eventually the system would devolve into nobody paying, with the last few payers being considered "suckers".

As the ability to acquire the software for free increases for average consumers, the more expensive the software will become, with the singularity being that there's one copy, the original, for sale for thousands or millions of dollars. The cost of developing software must always be amortized across all future sales. It's disingenuous to imply that once the software is made, there are no further costs to the developer. The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.