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First of all the word piracy doesn't come from within the community of file sharers, but from the entertainment and software industry. It was coined to essentially equate the acts of robbing ships on the high seas (which usually involves killing). The goal, of course, was to make people believe that what they are doing is as wrong, unethical and crimeful as robbing and killing, in order to supposedly make the battle against unauthorized copying easier.
The way I see it, however, the only "wrong" thing about unauthorized copying and file sharing (AKA piracy) is the fact that it is illegal in that it breaches a copyright license. However, sharing in itself is natural to humans and sharing with each others is not unethical. In a contrary, refusing to share leads to antisocial and hence unethical behaviours.
What is at fault here is not so much file sharers as the whole system of proprietary software. There is an alternative way which allows for both freedom of users and freedom of developers (which are infact users at the same time anyway), and that is Free Software (some of you may call it "open source"). Free Software does actually allow a programmer to get fairly compensated for their work if they so wish, even make a profit. But the truth is that a software program a programmer creates is already a compensation in itself. If I make something I didn't make it just for others, but for myself. I hence don't need to be payed extra for making it: my reward is my own creation.
This is why I find it unacceptable for programmers to expect special treatment for releasing their software publically: that special treatment being an absolute monopoly right over all copies of their program ever made. That said, yes, I consider proprietary software licensing unethical because I believe that once software has been released to the flow and an user who get's it and makes a copy for himself to run on his own computer should have the freedom to control that particular copy himself. Otherwise, the one who is legally in control of this particular code running on your computer is not you, but the programmer who wrote and released that code as proprietary.
If you want to make money, fine, there are various Free Software business models to consider. If you're serious about making money then you'll be ready enough to invest that bit more extra time and effort to make a business off of it instead of exploiting the ability to impose your power over users who get a hold of a *copy* of your software.
Thank you
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