Not so Jolly Roger<\/p><\/div>\n

Piracy, banditry, or any other self-serving tag line you want to apply to thieves in the act of burglarizing\u00a0intellectual property (IP) is never romantic, or audacious, or heroic, Jack Sparrow with his bandanna, earrings and self-effacing grin be damned.<\/p>\n

Recently, Julie Andresen started a discussion on Google+ entitled \u201cWhat are your thoughts on content piracy?\u201d She got over thirty comments with opinions varying from \u201cpiracy is great,\u201d to one advocating a personally administered penalty of \u201ctrans-anal evisceration.\u201d Most of the heat came from a handful of the respondents, who purported to be listening but obviously were not hearing one another.<\/p>\n

Ms. Andresen started her discussion by including a reasoned post, entitled The Question of Piracy<\/em> by David Amerland in which Google stresses the major, and oft repeated, argument for piracy, namely, “Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply,”<\/em> which, of course, is really no argument at all. It attempts to justify lawlessness by blaming inefficiency. With this reasoning, any time your mail is late you could go down to the Post Office to raid their coffers.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the (slightly paraphrased, intent intact) arguments \u00a0in favor of piracy\u00a0from that post. No names have been attributed to\u00a0prevent\u00a0author embarrassment:<\/p>\n