Gpl

[Anirban Chakraborty]

The drm people just don't realize: Programs are data. F34A8D... or 10101000111101010010...
Data is, almost by definition, easy to copy. And the problem with encryption, or locking, is that sooner or later the key's got to be sitting, right there, on the user's computer. So a pirate can simply get the key, decrypt or unlock your program, and upload it on bittorrent.

And I could argue that the pirate isn't really doing anything bad. He is giving people stuff. You could argue that J. Random Pirate is a Robin-Hood like character, Stealing from rich people, no, corporations, imaginary, impossibly rich people, and giving to middle-class, real people. And as far as I can tell, no singers or actors or even managers have been harmed in any way by such stealing, although, can I call it stealing if no physical object is gone?

The above statement is true for Richard Stallman and other geniuses like him.
You can't call a combination of 0s and 1s physical. But you can certainly call the signal that carries it over the wire to be physical. Moreover if you support piracy saying that you can as well support eavesdropping, cracking saying the same thing.

[Aereshaa]

That's not the point. People who pirate music or dvds on the internet are essentially sharing their stuff, something which we are taught in kindergarten is a good thing to do. So-called 'piracy' is, unlike spying or cracking, a charitable act: giving stuff away.
Now you could argue that file-sharing steals revenue from the music industry, but that would be like saying that charity bread-lines steal revenue from McDonalds!

[G_Morgan]

It's worth noting that without the GPL a lot of this stuff wouldn't be written. True there is a great deal of free software written under more permissive licenses but there is also a great deal written by people who would not accept their work being closed or who use the GPL explicitly in a tit for tat manner as described by Linus Torvalds. In fact it's extremely unlike the current tech wealth of the planet would exist without the GPL. The growth of the internet is almost entirely Linux based and most of what isn't Linux is free software.

Personally I tend to favour allowing usage (as in library usage) to anyone but would expect any modifications to the library back. The problem is the wording of such semi-copyleft licenses have allowed all sorts of abuse. Cedega still abuses the Wine project, whatever the evangelists want to say about Wines move to LGPL. This pushes a lot of people towards stricter full copyleft licenses. A few people handle it via GPL with a very narrow exception but naturally any such modification to a license is a tricky legal business unless you have a lawyer handy.