What's Yours Is Mine, And It's For Sale!

If you look at a picture in your web browser, you have ALREADY DOWNLOADED IT. There is no implied intent for you to keep it, especially to reuse it for your own purpose, to sell it or otherwise distribute it.

A house's door left unlocked is no invitation to remove furniture, is it? Neither is listening to a song an invitation to make a copy and sell it, nor to provide copies from your copies (to lots of people on the internet.) If you copy it from the radio, or media you buy, or just d/l it from somewhere and don't spread it around, then you have got the right spirit.

It needs to be clear that just getting your hands on something does not give you any right to sell or distribute it: that's clearly 'conversion' (i.e. theft by conversion). It is pretty clear to most people that they can not go into a store and pick something up, and then claim it as their own without paying for it.

Intellectual property may be physically easier to acquire, but it's no less someone else's property. The internet has created a 'virtual nation' of deniers, who say, in effect, "It's just me, one person doing this thing, so it's not so bad." There are 10's even 100's of millions of those "just me's" around, so it is actually "so bad".

/..