Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.

They say it is piracy.

Downright stealing from other people, that’s what downloading is. You’re taking something for sale and not paying for it. Do you shoplift, or break into houses? Why should you download for free?

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community.

Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland's apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly "stealing" code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale "theft" of code from another website. Of course it's not "theft" it's copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with.

I have often been called a fool for paying for software that everybody else pirates. Suddenly, I was neither paying for software nor stealing it. I felt relieved, literally. I was no longer a fool, and I had stood my moral ground. My data was accessible and safe. My whole computer was safe, for that matter, as months went by with neither virus nor operating system crash.

Software patent law must be simplified if not completely abolished. The concept that a routine or function is somehow "intellectual property" is ridiculous. How many times have you had an idea and found out someone else had the same idea? Patents were designed to prevent stealing of ideas but two independent people creating the same idea are not stealing from each other.

There are new anticircumvention rules from the US Copyright Office. Several are very good changes, such as allowing you to bypass a technological protection measure to use snips from a movie or video if your purpose is educational or for comment or criticism, and there's more flexibility for phone apps if interoperability is the goal.

Simple reminder of how copyright works; pass it on

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, which are essentially mathematics, which is pure knowledge and hence is not patentable) is the fact that software is anyway covered by copyright law.