We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry,
but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any
nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and
thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting
with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to
devise an honest way to make money.
I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how
widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims
about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough
that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having
laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we
consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse.
Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us
don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this:
if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the
content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as
the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast
scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple
our computers.
We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess
are with the artists being ripped off by both sides.
Note that the Rails Tutorial is neither part of Hollywood nor part of the music industry. It is distributed as DRM-free files that don't restrict your freedom in any way. When you make a purchase at railstutorial.org, the proceeds go directly to the "artist" (which in this case happens to be me).
As the author of the tutorial, I would of course rather you obtain the files legally. But if you do find an illegal copy, end up learning Rails, and get a high-paying job as a Rails developer, please tell your employer how you learned it. :-)
I don’t think the majority of people here condone piracy. It’s the practice of criminalizing people who don’t acquire stuff legally because they either can’t (e.g. the content not being available in their country) or won’t (because the distribution model puts the consumer in a unfavorable position) that rubs people the wrong way.
