I'm not a big moral relativist, but "ethics" when viewed by a resident of Compton in the early 2000's might appear in a slightly different light than many other places I can think of.
I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...
(Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.)
All people believe their racism is justified, all are wrong.
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It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster.
I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.
I had my PC setup with all the file sharing programs, hammering my cable modem 24/7, downloading movies and music. DVD's were $10 and audio CD's were $5.
My main competition was bootleg movies on regular CD's that you could buy at flea markets, gas stations and party store but they had terrible quality. Not just because they had to fit on a CD but many of them were shot in the theater with a handheld video camera, not rips from IRC channels. They were only $5, though.
It was way too much work driving around dropping discs off and I couldn't use my laptop for learning Cocoa, so I stopped doing it after a few months.
It was also (to us) INCREDIBLY expensive to buy a CD burner, so before either of us could get one, we made cassette tapes of the albums, and sold those.
The weirdest thing for me to think about looking back on it is how many of my peers still had cassette tape players in the year 2000.
This was a pretty inspirational story, I really enjoyed it. He seems like a smart guy, and I am sure he enjoys playing ball, obviously a very successful guy. He picked an avenue and followed through going pro. If he had more opportunities it would be interesting to see if he turned out as an academic or entrepreneur or if having to fight for everything he had is what made him so great.
