That'd be Argumentum ad logicam. The 'Torrents work just fine until the movie industry learns what the music industry learned the hard way.' approach is bordering on a two wrongs make a right fallacy itself.
You're the one who brought morals into the conversation. The original statement is 100% correct: torrents do work just fine. Their morality was not mentioned until your reply.
If we remove morals from the debate, then the whole F/LOSS movement is meaningless. By ending the statement "...until the movie industry learns what the music industry learned the hard way." implies a moral lesson and as such is an appeal to morals. The value being proffered, that DRM is fundamentally wrong and shouldn't be allowed as it affects the end users rights (a moral issue if ever there was one) is lost when work is taken without consent to teach that lesson. My point stands, irrespective of whether a trite fallacy is relied upon. So no, I didn't bring moral into the discussion. The discussion is fundamentally a moral issue. So please, drop the faux indignation and lecturing, it's not appreciated
The Free Software and Open Source movements have strong practical arguments in their favor; there's no need to invoke morality to promote F/LOSS. Arguments against DRM are similarly pragmatic; the cost to all computing simply isn't worth the tiny perceived benefit to a very few. The lesson to be learned by DRM proponents is not a moral one; it is the very practical lesson that people don't want it.
From the FSF "As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us." A statement laced with moral reasoning. The whole 'about' page is a full of fallacies, no least appeal to emotion. Not for one minute do I with the FSF's raison d'être, I hasten to add, merely I use it point out how utterly poorly that logic is applied in these discussions.
"The cost to all computing simply isn't worth the tiny perceived benefit to a very few" So morally it's wrong. That pragmatism comes from the moral imperative or the perceived masses.
"...it is the very practical lesson that people don't want it." Why? Because it affects their perceived freedoms, ergo moral reasoning.
To glibly dismiss the moral imperative of F/LOSS simply wrong. Heck, Stallman, the EFF and the FSF rely heavily on argumentum ad consequentiam, argumentum ad metum and argumentum ad passiones in a not-insignificant amount of their literature and all of those to varing extent rely on moralising.
You seem to use a very loose definition of "moral." I don't see any morality inherent in logical statements of the form A->B, B is widely undesirable, therefore A is widely undesirable. If that's a moral argument, then by your definition, there's no such thing as pragmatism or logic.
> I don't see any morality inherent in logical statements of the form A->B, B is widely undesirable, therefore A is widely undesirable.
The moral (or, at least, subjective; whether the particular subjective distinction is "moral" or something else is somewhat of a an arbitrary distinction) part is "B is widely undesirable". Desirability is not a factual premise.
> If that's a moral argument, then by your definition, there's no such thing as pragmatism or logic.
Well, no; that is a moral argument (or at least, an argument that rests on a subjective premise), and it is also an application of logic. Logic doesn't provide premises, it applies based on premises which are either sensory observations (which are inherently subjective) or a priori postulates (which are often subjective moral/aesthetic/etc. value propositions.)
Logic exists, it just doesn't get you to any kind of conclusions about the way things should be or what things you should do without starting with premises that are about the way things should be or what you should do.
> "...until the movie industry learns what the music industry learned the hard way." implies a moral lesson and as such is an appeal to morals.
It implies no such thing. It merely implies that DRM is a net loss for the industry, and that the music industry has already learned this but the movie industry has not.
