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How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for software or movies or music? I've read various reasons why people don't want to pay.
by azag0 10y ago
How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for software or movies or music? I've read various reasons why people don't want to pay. That's fine. But then simply don't read it.
- rhaps0dy 10y ago> How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for software or movies or music? Perhaps it is? I've almost never had anyone remark that I was doing something bad when not paying for a software or movie or music.
- stop_thief 10y agoWell it is bad. You're basically a thief, no matter how you try to justify it to yourself. Really, you should be ashamed, rather than nonchalantly unconcerned about your behaviour.
- Fifer82 10y agoYou have to care to be ashamed.
- monochromatic 10y agoTheft != copyright infringement.
- stop_thief 10y agoAh, that tired old linguistic argument that completely misses the point.
- contras1970 10y agoif copyright infringement is theft, then theft is surely murder?
- stop_thief 10y agoIllogical. Please show your working.
- kuschku 10y agoAh, that tired old PIRATE-COPIER-MURDERER-TERRORIST argument. You do realize that copyright protection is an invention to prevent artists from being fucked over by commercial publishers, and was originally not intended to limit people from copying content noncommercially?
- stop_thief 10y agoAn interesting history lesson, but irrelevant to the current discussion.
- monochromatic 10y agoIf I steal your car, I've deprived you of the use of your car. If I copy your program, have I deprived you of the use of your program? How is that a linguistic argument?
- stop_thief 10y agoBecause you're using an unreasonably narrow definition of theft that doesn't include intangibles.
- icebraining 10y agoTell that to the SCOTUS: interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. By the way, the infringer was acquitted, since the court agreed he hadn't "stolen, converted or taken by fraud", despite even making money from his infringing activities.
- stop_thief 10y agoA counterpoint to this interpretation of the Dowling verdict - http://lawtheories.com/?p=1881 http://lawtheories.com/?p=1881: > This lack of “physical removal,” as required by the statute, meant that Dowling’s infringing copies were not “the sorts of goods whose interstate shipment § 2314 makes criminal.” But this doesn’t mean that Dowling’s acts of infringement in creating the physical records were not themselves acts of theft or conversion.
- icebraining 10y agoUnconvincing argument. The court's statement, as I reproduced above, is not about the specifics of the statute, otherwise it would have said "it's theft, just not physical removal". The wording is very clear. The example of the other case (which, by the way, was only a District Court decision) also seems weak. AFAIK (IANAL), the fact that copyright law preempted state law doesn't mean the two are equal, it just means that both theft and copyright infringement occurred - which is easily seen to be the case, since physical plans were actually removed from a place.
- distances 10y agoThat's a bit beside the point parent was making: it's true that music piracy is somehow usually not frowned upon, at least based on my anecdotal experience. People don't see it as a thing to explicitly avoid, any more that they would avoid sharing someone's (copyrighted) photo in Facebook.
- tracker1 10y agoI expect that when I click a link via google, that I get the same content that google gets. It took years for google to demote expertSexChange and now that WSJ is fully paywalled, they shouldn't get a pass on this.
- kaspiCZ 10y agoLet's pretend you developed a piece of software you want to sell. People download it without paying you. What do you do in that case?
- beefield 10y agoRethink my business model?
- kofejnik 10y agoit's a logical fallacy to assume that people who downloaded your work would have discovered it and actually paid for it if there was no free option a lot of artists would PAY to get millions of downloads/views
- hacknat 10y agoYou mean pirated? It's a logical fallacy to assume that your otherwise non-discovery makes your decision moral.
- gaius 10y agoLet me know when you can pay rent or buy groceries with retweets.
- vonklaus 10y agoit's unclear if you do not realize thousands of people make their living full-time as promoters on social media. They literally pay rent with money that was paid to them proportionate to their retweets. Or if this was hyperbole to underscore your disagreement with a freemium business model
- abiox 10y agothis seems like an equivocation
- abiox 10y ago> it's a logical fallacy to assume that people who downloaded your work would have discovered it and actually paid for it if there was no free option it's a "logical fallacy" to assume they wouldn't
- hacknat 10y agoWell, hear it now. I'm judging you.
- hadfgdasf 10y agocrickets
- tonfa 10y agoAlso there are still countries where downloading copyrighted materials is not illegal (distributing it usually is, though).
- abtinf 10y ago> the Journal also started letting people read for free links that are shared on social media by subscribers and staffers. Because the publisher explicitly allows it.
- azag0 10y agoNo. The publisher wants their subscribers to be able to share the stuff they pay for with other people. If you use that feature to read for free any content they publish, you misuse it. Now, I am very much against any DRM, I don't even really believe that intellectual property should be protected by law, but I believe that content creators have legitimate (but not necessarily legal) right to be paid for their content. (If they want to have legally enforceable income, they need to find different schemes.) If you avoid paying, you're denying them that right. Again, I don't think this should be covered by law, but I also don't think it's fair.
- briandear 10y agoDon't believe IP should be protected? So every single author out there should not get paid? If their content isn't protected, they it's illogical to suggest they should also get paid. Anyone could reproduce that content and redistribute it. That's ludicrous. Film crews ought not be paid? Because if they can't sell their work, then what are they supposed to eat while making movies? Without IP protection, you no longer have new medicines. If the answer is "the government," then the question is -- where does the tax money come from to pay for it? If you wiped out IP law, you'd destroy a significant portion of the economy. The only people that would make any money would be those that control land or raw materials. Innovation would disappear.
- azag0 10y agoObviously, this is too complex a problem to discuss here, so I'll make only a few points: (1) It isn't really relevant for my point about paying the publishers. If anything, IP protection makes my point stronger. (2) I'm not suggesting to abolish IP protection, because I'm not sure I'm right. That's why I said I believe IP protection is not needed. I know I cannot argue my opinion sufficiently. (3) My biggest issue with IP protection is that since there is no unambiguous definition of what IP is, all IP laws are necessarily too restrictive. Leading e.g. to the current craziness with patents. (4) Film crews out to be paid. There are different models of financing than copyright. Music industry got pretty far with the transition. (5) As for drugs, the governments should announce which drugs are needed, and when companies deliver such drugs, they should get a one-time payment. In present language, the governments would buy the copyright from the companies and release the recipes to public domain. It would be financed from health insurance. Etc, etc. But again, I know there are holes in my reasoning.
- monochromatic 10y agoEverything on the web used to be free. We got used to that.
- tomjen3 10y agoIt is, music, software and movies are pirated illegally too.
- icebraining 10y agoCan you pirate legally? Sounds like a pleonasm.
- mirimir 10y agoI'd be happy to pay, under these conditions: 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; and 2) payments accepted via Bitcoin, or other methods which can be anonymized.
- mason55 10y agoThen just wait 18 hours for you $0.03 transaction to be confirmed so you can read the article.
- mirimir 10y agoNo, not that way. Put 100 USD worth in an account, for instant debit.
- sah2ed 10y ago> 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; Unfortunately, this kind of micropayment will not work for most people and perhaps more importantly will lead to less revenue for the publisher. Clary Shirky has written about why micropayments [0] is the wrong model for consuming content more than a decade ago. [0] http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
- mirimir 10y agoWell, ads are currently placed through a micropayment system. And there's no reason that customers would need to make individual decisions, any more than advertisers do.
- beejiu 10y agoYou can often loan out movies, music, books and sometimes software from a local library, free of charge. (At least in the UK.) It was also common to loan a friend a CD back when CDs were a thing. Perhaps it is more pervasive now, but I don't think it is fair to say that everybody who consumes media pays for it.
- jdavis703 10y agoThis is the equivalent of reading a magazine in the bookstore and not buying it. It would be different if you walked out the store without paying.
- dopamean 10y agoI don't they're the same at all. In your example if you walk out of the store with the magazine the store has to cover the cost of the magazine. If you stay in the store and read it then the content provider didn't get paid for someone consuming their content however the magazine is still there. The store could still sell it. The l.php script basically allows someone to read the magazine without paying for it. The only entity that loses something in that situation is the content provider.
- clarry 10y ago> The only entity that loses something in that situation is the content provider. What do they lose?
- zeamaize 10y agoWhy the hell should I pay for poor journalism that is riddled with ads? There is a reason I subscribe to Netflix but not Hulu.
- todd3834 10y agoHulu has an ad free plan
- mynameisvlad 10y agoThey really should have been more vocal in announcing its release. I find that a lot of people still believe the only available options are ad-supported. I had only discovered it when I wanted to resubscribe for other reasons; I probably would have done it earlier if I had known the option was available.
- tedmiston 10y agoBecause there is no Spotify or Netflix for written content.
- kuschku 10y agoAre you willing to pay each month SPIEGEL: $ 9.40 FAZ: $ 44.90 WSJ: $ 30.85 Guardian: $ 6.99 KN: $ 19.99 ----------------- Total $112.13 just to read a handful of articles per newspaper? I’m sorry, I’m a student, I don’t even have Netflix because that’s too expensive.
- maxerickson 10y agoWhich culture are you talking about? Lots (lots!) of people view and collect media without paying for it.
- ctrl_freak 10y agoThe reason I posted the workaround is because I feel like the publisher is trying to have their cake and eat it too. In other words, they enjoy the publicity they get from having their articles shared on Google, Facebook, Hacker News, but these sites usually don't want to feature articles that require their users to pay, so WSJ sets up a soft paywall that lets some of these users view the article for free. But of course that becomes a bit of a blurry moral line. If I start browsing Google News in the hopes of stumbling upon a WSJ article so I can read it for free, is that immoral? What about if I google the headline of an article I'm interested in? Automatically setting my referer to facebook.com whenever I visit wsj.com probably goes too far, but then where do you draw the line? Anyway, I feel very strongly that either everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.
- paulddraper 10y ago> everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here. Then we'll have the laments: oh the ads, the humanity; or, why does all journalism suck?
- tracker1 10y agoI'm fine with their paywall... however, they should no longer come up on google news... their rules have been quite clear, and why google is letting WSJ skate on the issue is beyond me.
- k_lander 10y agoi would be perfectly fine with this. just give me a way to exclude wsj from my newsfeed and search results without me having to install a trusted browser extension
- sneak 10y agoIf they don't want people to read for free, the WSJ should simply not serve it. We're free to send them any Referer headers we wish... in a request. It's up to them to reply however they wish.