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It's funny to me that even on a community like HN, suggesting rights for content creators gets you downvoted immediately without explanation. As a content creat

by johnfn 10y ago

It's funny to me that even on a community like HN, suggesting rights for content creators gets you downvoted immediately without explanation. As a content creator myself, I side very strongly with you. Well, I don't think we should be jailing the Pirate Bay guys - that's quite extreme - but we definitely shouldn't be idolozing them either, as we often do. To be honest, all the people who try to moralize piracy be saying "oh content creators never would have made any money off things that were torrented anyways" or today's rationalization du jour remind me of slave owners that came up with post-hoc rationalizations for why slavery was totally fine. I'M NOT COMPARING FILESHARING TO SLAVERY. I'm just saying that in both cases, people made whatever decision they wanted to make and screw whoever it effected, and then once they had done that they scrambled to come up with some reason why it was actually okay. I find myself wishing for a karmic equalization such that everyone who espouses those rationalizations could feel the pain that I - like every content creator - has to bear for them. I know it will never happen, but it's an idealistic dream of mine.

shrimp_emoji 10y ago
>"oh content creators never would have made any money anyways" Are you referring to the "lost sale fallacy"? That's one argument, but another is that the content creators DO make money anyways. Particularly, if you make your content affordable (see textbook prices) and usable in whatever way I want (e.g., I can't play iTunes shows in MPC and have to rely on the platform I bought them on), my incentive to pirate your content goes down dramatically. Doing the latter is absurd, though; how do you protect your content from being shared? I don't know either. I guess I'll pirate decrypted copies of it. It IS "wrong", I don't pretend otherwise, but it's cutting the Gordian knot of unfavorable economic paradigms. Kind of like slavery. Except way less worse. See lost sale fallacy.
- baddox 10y ago
  I think the best example is Steam. A common sentiment online is "I don't pirate games any more because Steam makes it so easy to buy them, plus there are often incredible sales." I share this sentiment. A large part of Steam's success is that they built a better product than the one offered by piracy. That's worth paying for. Granted, this isn't a cure-all. I'm sure some people still pirate games, and it's probably impossible to estimate how many represent "lost sales." Moreover, games are one of the trickier things to pirate, often requiring some technical knowledge (using disk images, keygens, cracks, etc.). Music is obviously much easier to pirate.
  - Insanity 10y ago
    I completely agree. Steam was the reason I stopped pirating. For music, spotify did the trick :-)
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      How are artists doing under Spotify? Oh wait, that's not your problem.
      - baddox 10y ago
        How are artists doing with traditional album sales (digital or physical)? As far as I can tell, music sales have basically always been A) you're a huge artist and make lots of money or B) you're not huge and you can only make money touring.
      - Insanity 10y ago
        Are they doing better when people are pirating? The bands that I like, I buy the album from anyway just to support them. But for music that I listen to every now and then - they would not get me to buy their album. So they actually would either make no money from me, or a bit through spotify.
      - ionised 10y ago
        You're right, it's not his problem.
- diminoten 10y ago
  It just feels like you're holding the content creator hostage with your threats to steal their work if they don't do what you tell them to (price their content "reasonably"). If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable". Edit: I've said some unpopular things on HN today, so I'm now being rate limited in my responses. Here's my response to one comment: > Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it Yes, it absolutely does. You're working in the world of "is" not "ought". This is firmly an "ought" conversation. You "ought" not copy my book, because as part of me giving it to you in exchange for money, I asked you not to do that, and you agreed. > but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be. This is only true if people are willing to take my product without compensating me at all, which is exactly what I said originally is "holding the content creator hostage". If you don't pay my (possibly absurd) price, you don't get my work, period. There is no working moral framework in which you get to decide if you deserve to steal my work or not.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    >If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. Absolutely, and I think most people recognize that piracy is morally dubious at some level, but that it's more along the lines of speeding than grand theft. In fact, that model may be a good compromise. Instead of getting hauled to court and slapped with a multi-million dollar judgment for using filesharing software, or literally sent to jail, you get a $100 ticket for it. That sounds a lot better, doesn't it? >I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable". Intellectual property is not personal property. Personal property is an object or parcel that you can possess and pass down. There is one unit of it. You can protect it and stop people from taking it. It's a real physical thing that can't be trivially copied or spread. IP is a time-limited government-granted monopoly on thoughts ("intellect"), and it's much more dangerous and treacherous than we give it credit for. These are limitations on how people communicate, discuss, and share -- they are limits on speech. It's funny that we're so sensitive about censorship of political and religious speech in the U.S. and then so flippant about the extreme censorship in place on the use of cultural icons. You must not represent Mickey Mouse on terms that may upset or threaten The Walt Disney Company, or they will bare down on you with overwhelming force [0] -- in the case of TPB, Disney and its cohorts called on their proxies in the USG to threaten international economic sanctions if the speech, which didn't even originate from TPB (they merely indexed it), wasn't controlled to allow them to make more money. [1] That's insane. Kim Dotcom is another case where an international incident was caused on behalf of the copyright lobby. It's clear that they don't care what the law is in your country -- they can and will use military force to get you to stop speaking in a way that they feel threatens their profit. Why are we just casually ignoring this disgusting hijacking of our government by BigCorps? Copyright and patents have a purpose, but they are easily abused and need to be carefully monitored. We have let them go completely out of control. Before 1976, works were copyrighted for 28 years. I personally think that's a little long, but it's not horrifically unreasonable. There was an option to file an extension and double the term for up to 56 years of coverage. That has been retroactively multiplied by about 2.5x since, with copyright now lasting 2 full lifetimes by default (life of author + 70 years). If you make something at age 25 and live until 80, that's an absurd 130 years of copyright protection. And that's by no means an atypical case. Additionally, fair use is a nearly impossible defense for anyone who's not a megacorp, so it doesn't really help, and since software is a fundamental part of the functionality of most durable goods we possess, copyright's aggressive, near-eternal monopolistic protections have legally boxed people out of their own belongings. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894) Copyright is out of control, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they don't understand how deep it goes, and I'm sure that has nothing to do with big media companies controlling the political dialogue for the last 100 years... [0] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/8904090009_1_walt-disney-disney-world-disney-characters http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/89040900... [1] https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sanctions-by-the-us-over-the-piratebay https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sancti...
lettergram 10y ago
I don't believe most people think content creator's shouldn't get paid. My circle of friends have quite a few people who download stuff illegally. However, most just want to try it out / watch it and if they like it they'll pay money for it. The problem with content creation, is your content can suck. I think my favorite example of someone creating content and essentially letting it be copied (but asking everyone not to) is Louis C.K. [1] He made his stuff easy to download (hell I bought it), priced it reasonably, and asked everyone to please pay. I actually saw the comedy show first through a friend. I paid him because it was good, and I wanted more content. In the reverse case, I'm gambling that the content is not only good and worth my time to watch / read / look at, but that it's worth the $X I am being charged. I can see why people don't like this method, and why people download pirated software, movies, TV shows, etc. Edit: FYI I create a lot of content. Blogs, youtube videos, software. I find the Warren Buffet approach of giving everyone a fair deal, with a terms sheet that's readable works best. One thing I personally would love to see more of is a full or partial refund policy for every piece of content I buy. I guarantee 99% of people wont use it, but when a movie really sucks or a game doesn't live up to what's promised, you can get your money back. It incentivizes honesty, and it'll help you similar to how it helps stores like LL Bean (where it actually gets more people to buy your product(s)). [1] https://louisck.net/news/a-statement-from-louis-c-k https://louisck.net/news/a-statement-from-louis-c-k
- edem 10y ago
  Exactly my point. I see this every day when I see the nth installment of Call of Duty and it is simply a steaming pile of crap. Who wants to pay for something he can't even try and there is a decent chance of it being crap?
  - benwad 10y ago
    There are demos, reviews, and about a million voices on the Internet saying the new Call of Duty is crap. If you then go out and buy it then you should accept the risk it might be crap.
    - cr0sh 10y ago
reitanqild 10y ago
I'm happy to pay. Sometimes I try to pay but there is no option. I either have to be American or at least willing to lie about it and fake my ip address using a vpn to get access to plain old movies. Now, I don't use pirate bay or other pirated content.[0] But between geo limits and poor service I certainly can understand why they are popular. [0]: ok, once I downloaded a windows installation media for a version that we legally had bought but for some reason could not get from MS. Didn't use it anyway though as we were to risk adverse.
cookiecaper 10y ago
What happened with The Pirate Bay was a travesty. The issue doesn't even go to the root of copyright law, it just shows that the USG is more than willing to throw its weight around for the benefit of the rich and powerful in Hollywood. TPB was perfectly legal within the jurisdiction in which they operated. Rather than change the law, Sweden mounted a farcical prosecution after the US threatened sanctions if they didn't address the matter. TPB hosted no media on its own; it was a torrent site, and linked to torrent files that contained the hashes of files and a link out to a tracker that matched people who possessed those hashes with others. If you want to make that illegal, that has far-reaching complications for all kind of online services. That's why instead of making it illegal, they just said "This is pissing off some rich people, so you're going to jail." Most people support copyright in principle. It's the draconian extent to which modern copyright law has been stretched, again solely for the benefit of copyright holders and at the expense of the public that upsets people.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  We don't have a DVD player that works with all our discs, some copy prevention systems screw it up. So i download the movies. The torrent search site I used was closed, turns out Google works just as well (possibly better) with all the meta-data needed being hosted on Google servers (ie via "cache"). People have been extradited from UK to USA for giving the same information you can get from a Google search. It's mind blowing that we still want any of the companies that support that status quo to still exist. We need places like TPB to pressure for and raise issues of over-reach in copyright because the governments are refusing to stand up to media conglomerates (arguably for selfish financial reasons).
chongli 10y ago
What rights do you believe content creators should have? Most discussions I've seen suggest content creators ought to have fewer rights, not more rights. The absurd lengths of time for copyright come to mind. This idea that the family of an author, for example, ought to be entitled to royalties from book sales for many years after the author's death... That's a right enjoyed by no other profession or trade or job. It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. Personally, I think we should be seeking to reduce the amount of rent-seeking in our society, not increase it. That we glorify so many creators as celebrities and obsess over every minor detail of their lives makes my position an unpopular one, however.
- tertius 10y ago
  > That's a right enjoyed by no other profession or trade or job. It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. So children of the rich who own stocks cannot inherit those stocks? > It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. Oh, ownership. What a terrible idea!
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Maybe educate yourself on the existing arguments instead of expecting other people to do it for you?
lucideer 10y ago
> all the people who try to moralize piracy be saying "<insert strawman>" or today's rationalization du jour To explain your logical fallacy: The rationalisations haven't ever changed, they are not "du jour", and they have never included your one quoted example. The fact you've quoted an invented example that is easily falsifiable doesn't automatically discount other, valid rationalisations. > the pain that I - like every content creator - has to bear for them And this is the crux of the primary valid rationalisation. I don't believe the pain is causally attributable to piracy. I could be wrong, this is my subjective stance, but it is not only far from easily discountable, it's been continuously confirmed by research. There's even been repeated correlations shown with improvements of content-creators' lot as a result of piracy.[0][1] It is of course understandable for content-creators to be frustrated by piracy. Content-creators do genuinely struggle to make a reasonable living from their work, and the media tells us it's piracy's fault. Who are we to argue? [0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pi... [1] https://gigaom.com/2009/11/02/419-research-p2p-filesharing-no-barrier-to-music-sales/ https://gigaom.com/2009/11/02/419-research-p2p-filesharing-n...
- johnfn 10y ago
  I hate to do this but I don't have the energy to give you a full response. Arguing against all of HN simultaneously on this topic has been exhausting. :P I will say that if you've never heard the example argument I gave, that just means you haven't been arguing against proponents of piracy long enough. I see it trotted out often - in fact it may be one of the most popular arguments. (To be clear, the argument I was paraphrasing was "anyone who torrents wouldn't have bought your stuff, so it's fine.") And yes, I've heard the "but piracy is actually GOOD for business don't you see" arguments over and over too. And it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that these sort of studies take exactly the form and shape of what you'd expect the post hoc rationalizations to look like. And please don't say "but it's a study, that means it's true and accurate." Correlative studies can basically be made to prove anything. Until I see a double blind replicated study I will remain unconvinced. Anyways, like I said, sorry I can't go deeper here. I'm pretty exhausted by all this and will probably move to talk about aomething less contentious on HN. Like how great TypeScript is or something. :)
3pt14159 10y ago
I'm only happy that there is filesharing because the industry still hasn't figured out how to get me to pay without friction sometimes. Americans have it much easier than those of us in the rest of the world (even in Canada!) and frequently the only way of getting a movie at all, let alone with subtitles in the language that you need it in, is to pirate. Once someone API-ifies licensing so content creators are easily paid, works easily translated (with a reasonable cut going to the translator!), without any close source blobs to render the content, then of course I'll pick up the pitchforks against TPB, but in the mean time the industry is a mess. My girfriend and I pay for Netflix and Apple music and the occasional film, and HBO, and I pay $40 a month in support on Patreon, but it's death with a thousand cuts right now and TPB is a nice safety valve.
CriticalSection 10y ago
> rights for content creators I scratch my head when I hear talk of this, because the past century and a half has been a steady march in western economy and politics against rights for the original creators of wealth and content. Negligible rights for the original creators of wealth and content are the economic (and political and social) basis of the USA, and western Europe, and now the world. The only people who've talked like this have been communists, and I suppose anarchists. I mean this is obvious on the face of it. Who has all the rights in writing at a small startup, the angels and VCs, or the first hire? Before the first hire even comes on board, their first act will be to sign a paper giving away what little rights they had to the content they will be creating. Mainstream economic thought, from left Keynesianism to right wing schools say commodities are given value by their marginal utility ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value ). Your idea that creation or labor from creation has some moral value is an idea only espoused in the last century by communists ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ). It's not just you, I've seen the RIAA and MPAA make similar arguments, and I shake my head, because they're making the same arguments Lenin and Stalin made. By that I mean with regards to the words like "creator" and mention of the work done to create the content. Not that I make a judgement either way, but it seems to pass without notice how extremely radical your claim is, as it is economically way to the left of say, Paul Krugman's New York Times columns. The strange thing is that these old Marxist arguments are trotted out about something that is no longer not exactly a commodity. Because commodities are produced, and basically used once, whereas this content is created, and with the push of a button, at costs approaching free, it can be duplicated and distributed one billion times. So in some senses it is no longer a commodity. So just as it loses the properties of a commodity, these old arguments from 150 years ago about commodities come back.
pjc50 10y ago
> suggesting rights for content creators Unfortunately this is pretty much a zero-sum game: this means taking rights off other people, potentially including huge fines or jail time. And lots of people feel that they have no voice in whether their rights get taken away - and not just the "right to run a piracy website", but the right to repair their tractors, rip MP3s, have open-source software and so on. The heavy-handedness of the copyright industry has made a lot of permanent enemies.
smokeyj 10y ago
> I'M NOT COMPARING FILESHARING TO SLAVERY. I'm just saying that in both cases Yeah okay. Reminds me of a line from Silicon Valley. "Did you just compare the treatment of billionaires in America today to the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany?" "Absolutely. One could argue that billionaires are actually treated worse. And we didn't even do anything wrong!"
- johnfn 10y ago
  Somehow I knew that even if I put in a line in all caps, someone would still think I was comparing filesharing to slavery. :P
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 10y ago
    Please don't put lines in all caps: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
    - johnfn 10y ago
      Alright, but don't you understand what's going on here? If I don't emphasize that line, I'm going to inevitably get comments like "you're comparing filesharing to slavery which illegitimizes your entire argument." In the exact same way that GP did anyways, and in the same way that when I later said that saying that industries were dying illegitimized my argument because I didn't make it clear enough which industries those were. When people jump to using all caps, it's not because they love all caps. It's because the formatting provided to them by the platform isn't good enough to articulate their ideas clearly. I need more formatting options!
      - dang 10y ago
        The guidelines helpfully suggest which formatting option to use instead. Really though, if you have this conundrum, it's probably time to reconsider your slavery comparison.
pembrook 10y ago
I would love to see the HN community response if suddenly SaaS start-ups could be easily pirated or app pirating becomes as easy as streaming a movie. How many would feel the same way when it involves 2,000 hours of their own work coding and marketing the product being pirated? The internet's culture of normalized piracy and stealing is part of the reason why we can't get anybody to pay even $1 for something on the internet while they will happily hop over to Starbucks every morning and drop $6.50 Hence why intrusive bloated dystopian advertising is the only way to stay afloat for most sites. Would you rather pay directly for someone's work you like or sell your privacy/attention to get it for "free?" I see the world heading in the direction of the latter. A dystopian future indeed.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Yeah I don't think of the Pirate Bay people as criminals either, but most of the people who use the service just want something for nothing and I too am sick of the bullshit rationalizations from people helping themselves to the labor of artists without being willing to pay for it, going back these many years. Most pirates are abusive people, plain and simple.
wfo 10y ago
The downvote, at least from me, was because: 1) Suggesting that posting/reading an interview with someone with radical views is "glorifying" them. How dare we listen to the opinions of others? 2) The post implicitly accepts the fact that the culture on HN does not particularly consider Sonde to be a "criminal" but simultaneously calls him one one without argument -- it is nothing more than a nasty smear. 3) Suggesting the current online culture is not "respectful" of content-creators, a point which I think is patently false and is again made without reason, explanation, argument or support. I think the move you and your parent have made which I find disturbing is to call these people "content creators". As if "content" is some commodity that should be bought and sold like pounds of steel or rice. Your phrasing pre-assumes your position; most of the time people are thinking specifically about "artists". And what they produce is not something bland, generic, and revenue-driven like "content", it's art. Many artists don't care if you pirate their work and are happy to say so. Most artists broadcast their art on public airwaves for free for anyone to listen to or watch and are delighted to do it. So delighted that paying for the privilege was so common it had to be made illegal. Art is generated in the context of culture, and culture is a common societal good. Art created in our culture in some sense belongs to us all. The beatles albums, in my view, belong to the public after this long. It is disgusting someone should be able to "own" art that is central to our common cultural history and extract rent from people who want to enjoy it. Especially when the "owner" is just a wealthy capitalist who has decided they want to own thoughts and art, not an actual artist who had anything to do with creating it. I think as a society we should allow artists a reasonable period where they can, in good faith (which is rarely realized because of the way almost all contracts work to brutally exploit non-savvy artists), make money from their art, but after a decent period of time it no longer belongs to them. It belongs to the public. It certainly should not be sold and traded like a commodity. That's the artistic version of patent trolling -- buying intellectual property rights with the sole purpose of sucking money out of them and stifling art/culture/creation, and it should be illegal.
Svenskunganka 10y ago
People don't torrent because they want free stuff, people torrent because the legal alternatives are shit. Take Netflix for example, any non-US citizen who actually pay equally much as a US-citizen gets treated with geo-blocking, geo-restriction and generally just discriminated against because so many content creators are either stupid and gives away their copyright to a studio for... I don't even know what, greed perhaps, or they are stuck in an old-school mindset from VHS-era that doesn't play well with the internet. And for those that don't believe me, just look at Spotify. The day Spotify was released was the day music torrenting was defeated. You just have to offer your customers a deal they can't say no to. Game piracy and video piracy is still high. That's because these industries hasn't evolved with the internet like music has. Games are doing fine, thanks to Steam, but there are cases like Battlefield 1 for example. If you would want everything in that game, you'd have to pay $140 + $20 / month (Game + DLCs + Premium). How about I just pay $20-30/month for Steam and I can play all games in their library and the money gets split between games depending on how much I play them? Hollywood is shit, Netflix is trying but the copyright holders are being stupid. They expect that regular people are going to subscribe to 6 different services just because they can't play ball with each other, only to get geo-restricted and even lower quality than what torrents offer. The result is people pirating and the copyright holders pouring billions into anti-piracy (extortion) companies, probably making less money than if they'd play ball.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  I tend to wonder about entities like Steam (well, Valve) and Spotify - and their customer base. I wonder "What will happen when one of these companies goes away?" (ie, go out of business or such) You may think "well, that could never happen" - and you'd be right there next door to the pioneer on the prairie, standing at the railway station waiting for his shipment of a plow direct from Sears. ...been paying attention to what is happening with Sears lately? Or what about Radio Shack? Companies come and go - and usually when they go, if they are a company publishing or selling IP in some manner, that IP goes away with them, or it becomes "locked away" (technically) because the owners of the IP (that is, those who may have bought it in the fire-sale when the company tanked, or afterward) don't know what to do with it (or even that it may be worth something) - and so it sits (and maybe, just maybe, one day we'll see it again - but in most cases, its gone forever). I can point to any number of distributors of music, magazines, and books where it is impossible to get a copy of what they distributed; if you're lucky, archive.org may have a copy - but in many cases, those copies are long lost (ever seen the magazine called "Horseless Carriage"? It was one of the early precursors to magazines like "Car and Driver" today, covering a new-fangled invention. Good luck finding all of the issues which were published. Good luck finding the proofs or whatever was used back then, either. All of that IP, which many would love a copy of - myself included - gone, with the exception a what you can still find that has been scanned in). One of these days, Valve or Spotify will go under. Will you still be able to play your music catalog? Will you be able to pass it down to your heirs when you pass away? What about your games that you "bought"? Will you still be able to play them (what happens when the servers go away?) or pass them or... No - it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen tomorrow. But I expect to see it happen, sometime. The results probably will get ugly.

by johnfn 10y ago

shrimp_emoji 10y ago

>"oh content creators never would have made any money anyways" Are you referring to the "lost sale fallacy"? That's one argument, but another is that the content creators DO make money anyways. Particularly, if you make your content affordable (see textbook prices) and usable in whatever way I want (e.g., I can't play iTunes shows in MPC and have to rely on the platform I bought them on), my incentive to pirate your content goes down dramatically. Doing the latter is absurd, though; how do you protect your content from being shared? I don't know either. I guess I'll pirate decrypted copies of it. It IS "wrong", I don't pretend otherwise, but it's cutting the Gordian knot of unfavorable economic paradigms. Kind of like slavery. Except way less worse. See lost sale fallacy.

baddox 10y ago
I think the best example is Steam. A common sentiment online is "I don't pirate games any more because Steam makes it so easy to buy them, plus there are often incredible sales." I share this sentiment. A large part of Steam's success is that they built a better product than the one offered by piracy. That's worth paying for. Granted, this isn't a cure-all. I'm sure some people still pirate games, and it's probably impossible to estimate how many represent "lost sales." Moreover, games are one of the trickier things to pirate, often requiring some technical knowledge (using disk images, keygens, cracks, etc.). Music is obviously much easier to pirate.
- Insanity 10y ago
  I completely agree. Steam was the reason I stopped pirating. For music, spotify did the trick :-)
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    How are artists doing under Spotify? Oh wait, that's not your problem.
    - baddox 10y ago
      How are artists doing with traditional album sales (digital or physical)? As far as I can tell, music sales have basically always been A) you're a huge artist and make lots of money or B) you're not huge and you can only make money touring.
    - Insanity 10y ago
      Are they doing better when people are pirating? The bands that I like, I buy the album from anyway just to support them. But for music that I listen to every now and then - they would not get me to buy their album. So they actually would either make no money from me, or a bit through spotify.
    - ionised 10y ago
      You're right, it's not his problem.
diminoten 10y ago
It just feels like you're holding the content creator hostage with your threats to steal their work if they don't do what you tell them to (price their content "reasonably"). If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable". Edit: I've said some unpopular things on HN today, so I'm now being rate limited in my responses. Here's my response to one comment: > Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it Yes, it absolutely does. You're working in the world of "is" not "ought". This is firmly an "ought" conversation. You "ought" not copy my book, because as part of me giving it to you in exchange for money, I asked you not to do that, and you agreed. > but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be. This is only true if people are willing to take my product without compensating me at all, which is exactly what I said originally is "holding the content creator hostage". If you don't pay my (possibly absurd) price, you don't get my work, period. There is no working moral framework in which you get to decide if you deserve to steal my work or not.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  >If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. Absolutely, and I think most people recognize that piracy is morally dubious at some level, but that it's more along the lines of speeding than grand theft. In fact, that model may be a good compromise. Instead of getting hauled to court and slapped with a multi-million dollar judgment for using filesharing software, or literally sent to jail, you get a $100 ticket for it. That sounds a lot better, doesn't it? >I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable". Intellectual property is not personal property. Personal property is an object or parcel that you can possess and pass down. There is one unit of it. You can protect it and stop people from taking it. It's a real physical thing that can't be trivially copied or spread. IP is a time-limited government-granted monopoly on thoughts ("intellect"), and it's much more dangerous and treacherous than we give it credit for. These are limitations on how people communicate, discuss, and share -- they are limits on speech. It's funny that we're so sensitive about censorship of political and religious speech in the U.S. and then so flippant about the extreme censorship in place on the use of cultural icons. You must not represent Mickey Mouse on terms that may upset or threaten The Walt Disney Company, or they will bare down on you with overwhelming force [0] -- in the case of TPB, Disney and its cohorts called on their proxies in the USG to threaten international economic sanctions if the speech, which didn't even originate from TPB (they merely indexed it), wasn't controlled to allow them to make more money. [1] That's insane. Kim Dotcom is another case where an international incident was caused on behalf of the copyright lobby. It's clear that they don't care what the law is in your country -- they can and will use military force to get you to stop speaking in a way that they feel threatens their profit. Why are we just casually ignoring this disgusting hijacking of our government by BigCorps? Copyright and patents have a purpose, but they are easily abused and need to be carefully monitored. We have let them go completely out of control. Before 1976, works were copyrighted for 28 years. I personally think that's a little long, but it's not horrifically unreasonable. There was an option to file an extension and double the term for up to 56 years of coverage. That has been retroactively multiplied by about 2.5x since, with copyright now lasting 2 full lifetimes by default (life of author + 70 years). If you make something at age 25 and live until 80, that's an absurd 130 years of copyright protection. And that's by no means an atypical case. Additionally, fair use is a nearly impossible defense for anyone who's not a megacorp, so it doesn't really help, and since software is a fundamental part of the functionality of most durable goods we possess, copyright's aggressive, near-eternal monopolistic protections have legally boxed people out of their own belongings. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894) Copyright is out of control, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they don't understand how deep it goes, and I'm sure that has nothing to do with big media companies controlling the political dialogue for the last 100 years... [0] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/8904090009_1_walt-disney-disney-world-disney-characters http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/89040900... [1] https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sanctions-by-the-us-over-the-piratebay https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sancti...

lettergram 10y ago

I don't believe most people think content creator's shouldn't get paid. My circle of friends have quite a few people who download stuff illegally. However, most just want to try it out / watch it and if they like it they'll pay money for it. The problem with content creation, is your content can suck. I think my favorite example of someone creating content and essentially letting it be copied (but asking everyone not to) is Louis C.K. [1] He made his stuff easy to download (hell I bought it), priced it reasonably, and asked everyone to please pay. I actually saw the comedy show first through a friend. I paid him because it was good, and I wanted more content. In the reverse case, I'm gambling that the content is not only good and worth my time to watch / read / look at, but that it's worth the $X I am being charged. I can see why people don't like this method, and why people download pirated software, movies, TV shows, etc. Edit: FYI I create a lot of content. Blogs, youtube videos, software. I find the Warren Buffet approach of giving everyone a fair deal, with a terms sheet that's readable works best. One thing I personally would love to see more of is a full or partial refund policy for every piece of content I buy. I guarantee 99% of people wont use it, but when a movie really sucks or a game doesn't live up to what's promised, you can get your money back. It incentivizes honesty, and it'll help you similar to how it helps stores like LL Bean (where it actually gets more people to buy your product(s)). [1] https://louisck.net/news/a-statement-from-louis-c-k https://louisck.net/news/a-statement-from-louis-c-k

edem 10y ago
Exactly my point. I see this every day when I see the nth installment of Call of Duty and it is simply a steaming pile of crap. Who wants to pay for something he can't even try and there is a decent chance of it being crap?
- benwad 10y ago
  There are demos, reviews, and about a million voices on the Internet saying the new Call of Duty is crap. If you then go out and buy it then you should accept the risk it might be crap.
  - cr0sh 10y ago

reitanqild 10y ago

I'm happy to pay. Sometimes I try to pay but there is no option. I either have to be American or at least willing to lie about it and fake my ip address using a vpn to get access to plain old movies. Now, I don't use pirate bay or other pirated content.[0] But between geo limits and poor service I certainly can understand why they are popular. [0]: ok, once I downloaded a windows installation media for a version that we legally had bought but for some reason could not get from MS. Didn't use it anyway though as we were to risk adverse.

cookiecaper 10y ago

What happened with The Pirate Bay was a travesty. The issue doesn't even go to the root of copyright law, it just shows that the USG is more than willing to throw its weight around for the benefit of the rich and powerful in Hollywood. TPB was perfectly legal within the jurisdiction in which they operated. Rather than change the law, Sweden mounted a farcical prosecution after the US threatened sanctions if they didn't address the matter. TPB hosted no media on its own; it was a torrent site, and linked to torrent files that contained the hashes of files and a link out to a tracker that matched people who possessed those hashes with others. If you want to make that illegal, that has far-reaching complications for all kind of online services. That's why instead of making it illegal, they just said "This is pissing off some rich people, so you're going to jail." Most people support copyright in principle. It's the draconian extent to which modern copyright law has been stretched, again solely for the benefit of copyright holders and at the expense of the public that upsets people.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
We don't have a DVD player that works with all our discs, some copy prevention systems screw it up. So i download the movies. The torrent search site I used was closed, turns out Google works just as well (possibly better) with all the meta-data needed being hosted on Google servers (ie via "cache"). People have been extradited from UK to USA for giving the same information you can get from a Google search. It's mind blowing that we still want any of the companies that support that status quo to still exist. We need places like TPB to pressure for and raise issues of over-reach in copyright because the governments are refusing to stand up to media conglomerates (arguably for selfish financial reasons).

chongli 10y ago

What rights do you believe content creators should have? Most discussions I've seen suggest content creators ought to have fewer rights, not more rights. The absurd lengths of time for copyright come to mind. This idea that the family of an author, for example, ought to be entitled to royalties from book sales for many years after the author's death... That's a right enjoyed by no other profession or trade or job. It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. Personally, I think we should be seeking to reduce the amount of rent-seeking in our society, not increase it. That we glorify so many creators as celebrities and obsess over every minor detail of their lives makes my position an unpopular one, however.

tertius 10y ago
> That's a right enjoyed by no other profession or trade or job. It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. So children of the rich who own stocks cannot inherit those stocks? > It puts authors in a category with land owners and capitalists. Oh, ownership. What a terrible idea!
anigbrowl 10y ago
Maybe educate yourself on the existing arguments instead of expecting other people to do it for you?

lucideer 10y ago

> all the people who try to moralize piracy be saying "<insert strawman>" or today's rationalization du jour To explain your logical fallacy: The rationalisations haven't ever changed, they are not "du jour", and they have never included your one quoted example. The fact you've quoted an invented example that is easily falsifiable doesn't automatically discount other, valid rationalisations. > the pain that I - like every content creator - has to bear for them And this is the crux of the primary valid rationalisation. I don't believe the pain is causally attributable to piracy. I could be wrong, this is my subjective stance, but it is not only far from easily discountable, it's been continuously confirmed by research. There's even been repeated correlations shown with improvements of content-creators' lot as a result of piracy.[0][1] It is of course understandable for content-creators to be frustrated by piracy. Content-creators do genuinely struggle to make a reasonable living from their work, and the media tells us it's piracy's fault. Who are we to argue? [0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pi... [1] https://gigaom.com/2009/11/02/419-research-p2p-filesharing-no-barrier-to-music-sales/ https://gigaom.com/2009/11/02/419-research-p2p-filesharing-n...

johnfn 10y ago
I hate to do this but I don't have the energy to give you a full response. Arguing against all of HN simultaneously on this topic has been exhausting. :P I will say that if you've never heard the example argument I gave, that just means you haven't been arguing against proponents of piracy long enough. I see it trotted out often - in fact it may be one of the most popular arguments. (To be clear, the argument I was paraphrasing was "anyone who torrents wouldn't have bought your stuff, so it's fine.") And yes, I've heard the "but piracy is actually GOOD for business don't you see" arguments over and over too. And it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that these sort of studies take exactly the form and shape of what you'd expect the post hoc rationalizations to look like. And please don't say "but it's a study, that means it's true and accurate." Correlative studies can basically be made to prove anything. Until I see a double blind replicated study I will remain unconvinced. Anyways, like I said, sorry I can't go deeper here. I'm pretty exhausted by all this and will probably move to talk about aomething less contentious on HN. Like how great TypeScript is or something. :)

3pt14159 10y ago

I'm only happy that there is filesharing because the industry still hasn't figured out how to get me to pay without friction sometimes. Americans have it much easier than those of us in the rest of the world (even in Canada!) and frequently the only way of getting a movie at all, let alone with subtitles in the language that you need it in, is to pirate. Once someone API-ifies licensing so content creators are easily paid, works easily translated (with a reasonable cut going to the translator!), without any close source blobs to render the content, then of course I'll pick up the pitchforks against TPB, but in the mean time the industry is a mess. My girfriend and I pay for Netflix and Apple music and the occasional film, and HBO, and I pay $40 a month in support on Patreon, but it's death with a thousand cuts right now and TPB is a nice safety valve.

CriticalSection 10y ago

> rights for content creators I scratch my head when I hear talk of this, because the past century and a half has been a steady march in western economy and politics against rights for the original creators of wealth and content. Negligible rights for the original creators of wealth and content are the economic (and political and social) basis of the USA, and western Europe, and now the world. The only people who've talked like this have been communists, and I suppose anarchists. I mean this is obvious on the face of it. Who has all the rights in writing at a small startup, the angels and VCs, or the first hire? Before the first hire even comes on board, their first act will be to sign a paper giving away what little rights they had to the content they will be creating. Mainstream economic thought, from left Keynesianism to right wing schools say commodities are given value by their marginal utility ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value ). Your idea that creation or labor from creation has some moral value is an idea only espoused in the last century by communists ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ). It's not just you, I've seen the RIAA and MPAA make similar arguments, and I shake my head, because they're making the same arguments Lenin and Stalin made. By that I mean with regards to the words like "creator" and mention of the work done to create the content. Not that I make a judgement either way, but it seems to pass without notice how extremely radical your claim is, as it is economically way to the left of say, Paul Krugman's New York Times columns. The strange thing is that these old Marxist arguments are trotted out about something that is no longer not exactly a commodity. Because commodities are produced, and basically used once, whereas this content is created, and with the push of a button, at costs approaching free, it can be duplicated and distributed one billion times. So in some senses it is no longer a commodity. So just as it loses the properties of a commodity, these old arguments from 150 years ago about commodities come back.

pjc50 10y ago

> suggesting rights for content creators Unfortunately this is pretty much a zero-sum game: this means taking rights off other people, potentially including huge fines or jail time. And lots of people feel that they have no voice in whether their rights get taken away - and not just the "right to run a piracy website", but the right to repair their tractors, rip MP3s, have open-source software and so on. The heavy-handedness of the copyright industry has made a lot of permanent enemies.

smokeyj 10y ago

> I'M NOT COMPARING FILESHARING TO SLAVERY. I'm just saying that in both cases Yeah okay. Reminds me of a line from Silicon Valley. "Did you just compare the treatment of billionaires in America today to the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany?" "Absolutely. One could argue that billionaires are actually treated worse. And we didn't even do anything wrong!"

johnfn 10y ago
Somehow I knew that even if I put in a line in all caps, someone would still think I was comparing filesharing to slavery. :P
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't put lines in all caps: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - johnfn 10y ago
    Alright, but don't you understand what's going on here? If I don't emphasize that line, I'm going to inevitably get comments like "you're comparing filesharing to slavery which illegitimizes your entire argument." In the exact same way that GP did anyways, and in the same way that when I later said that saying that industries were dying illegitimized my argument because I didn't make it clear enough which industries those were. When people jump to using all caps, it's not because they love all caps. It's because the formatting provided to them by the platform isn't good enough to articulate their ideas clearly. I need more formatting options!
    - dang 10y ago
      The guidelines helpfully suggest which formatting option to use instead. Really though, if you have this conundrum, it's probably time to reconsider your slavery comparison.

pembrook 10y ago

I would love to see the HN community response if suddenly SaaS start-ups could be easily pirated or app pirating becomes as easy as streaming a movie. How many would feel the same way when it involves 2,000 hours of their own work coding and marketing the product being pirated? The internet's culture of normalized piracy and stealing is part of the reason why we can't get anybody to pay even $1 for something on the internet while they will happily hop over to Starbucks every morning and drop $6.50 Hence why intrusive bloated dystopian advertising is the only way to stay afloat for most sites. Would you rather pay directly for someone's work you like or sell your privacy/attention to get it for "free?" I see the world heading in the direction of the latter. A dystopian future indeed.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Yeah I don't think of the Pirate Bay people as criminals either, but most of the people who use the service just want something for nothing and I too am sick of the bullshit rationalizations from people helping themselves to the labor of artists without being willing to pay for it, going back these many years. Most pirates are abusive people, plain and simple.

wfo 10y ago

The downvote, at least from me, was because: 1) Suggesting that posting/reading an interview with someone with radical views is "glorifying" them. How dare we listen to the opinions of others? 2) The post implicitly accepts the fact that the culture on HN does not particularly consider Sonde to be a "criminal" but simultaneously calls him one one without argument -- it is nothing more than a nasty smear. 3) Suggesting the current online culture is not "respectful" of content-creators, a point which I think is patently false and is again made without reason, explanation, argument or support. I think the move you and your parent have made which I find disturbing is to call these people "content creators". As if "content" is some commodity that should be bought and sold like pounds of steel or rice. Your phrasing pre-assumes your position; most of the time people are thinking specifically about "artists". And what they produce is not something bland, generic, and revenue-driven like "content", it's art. Many artists don't care if you pirate their work and are happy to say so. Most artists broadcast their art on public airwaves for free for anyone to listen to or watch and are delighted to do it. So delighted that paying for the privilege was so common it had to be made illegal. Art is generated in the context of culture, and culture is a common societal good. Art created in our culture in some sense belongs to us all. The beatles albums, in my view, belong to the public after this long. It is disgusting someone should be able to "own" art that is central to our common cultural history and extract rent from people who want to enjoy it. Especially when the "owner" is just a wealthy capitalist who has decided they want to own thoughts and art, not an actual artist who had anything to do with creating it. I think as a society we should allow artists a reasonable period where they can, in good faith (which is rarely realized because of the way almost all contracts work to brutally exploit non-savvy artists), make money from their art, but after a decent period of time it no longer belongs to them. It belongs to the public. It certainly should not be sold and traded like a commodity. That's the artistic version of patent trolling -- buying intellectual property rights with the sole purpose of sucking money out of them and stifling art/culture/creation, and it should be illegal.

Svenskunganka 10y ago

People don't torrent because they want free stuff, people torrent because the legal alternatives are shit. Take Netflix for example, any non-US citizen who actually pay equally much as a US-citizen gets treated with geo-blocking, geo-restriction and generally just discriminated against because so many content creators are either stupid and gives away their copyright to a studio for... I don't even know what, greed perhaps, or they are stuck in an old-school mindset from VHS-era that doesn't play well with the internet. And for those that don't believe me, just look at Spotify. The day Spotify was released was the day music torrenting was defeated. You just have to offer your customers a deal they can't say no to. Game piracy and video piracy is still high. That's because these industries hasn't evolved with the internet like music has. Games are doing fine, thanks to Steam, but there are cases like Battlefield 1 for example. If you would want everything in that game, you'd have to pay $140 + $20 / month (Game + DLCs + Premium). How about I just pay $20-30/month for Steam and I can play all games in their library and the money gets split between games depending on how much I play them? Hollywood is shit, Netflix is trying but the copyright holders are being stupid. They expect that regular people are going to subscribe to 6 different services just because they can't play ball with each other, only to get geo-restricted and even lower quality than what torrents offer. The result is people pirating and the copyright holders pouring billions into anti-piracy (extortion) companies, probably making less money than if they'd play ball.

cr0sh 10y ago
I tend to wonder about entities like Steam (well, Valve) and Spotify - and their customer base. I wonder "What will happen when one of these companies goes away?" (ie, go out of business or such) You may think "well, that could never happen" - and you'd be right there next door to the pioneer on the prairie, standing at the railway station waiting for his shipment of a plow direct from Sears. ...been paying attention to what is happening with Sears lately? Or what about Radio Shack? Companies come and go - and usually when they go, if they are a company publishing or selling IP in some manner, that IP goes away with them, or it becomes "locked away" (technically) because the owners of the IP (that is, those who may have bought it in the fire-sale when the company tanked, or afterward) don't know what to do with it (or even that it may be worth something) - and so it sits (and maybe, just maybe, one day we'll see it again - but in most cases, its gone forever). I can point to any number of distributors of music, magazines, and books where it is impossible to get a copy of what they distributed; if you're lucky, archive.org may have a copy - but in many cases, those copies are long lost (ever seen the magazine called "Horseless Carriage"? It was one of the early precursors to magazines like "Car and Driver" today, covering a new-fangled invention. Good luck finding all of the issues which were published. Good luck finding the proofs or whatever was used back then, either. All of that IP, which many would love a copy of - myself included - gone, with the exception a what you can still find that has been scanned in). One of these days, Valve or Spotify will go under. Will you still be able to play your music catalog? Will you be able to pass it down to your heirs when you pass away? What about your games that you "bought"? Will you still be able to play them (what happens when the servers go away?) or pass them or... No - it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't happen tomorrow. But I expect to see it happen, sometime. The results probably will get ugly.