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70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable

• funthree 16y ago
  What happens when 70% of people are okay with something, in a country ruled by the people?
  • scrrr 16y ago
    If America works like I think it does you also have to find a politician first, that isn't obliged to any big corporation and running with that flag.
  • jrockway 16y ago
    The other 30% fight all that much harder to take it away from the rest of us.
    • narag 16y ago
      No need to. The government will fund a campaign to educate people.
  • masklinn 16y ago
    Well I don't know, what happened to slavery in the south of the united states? Just because it's supported by "the public" does not mean it's good, smart or of any interest. Case in point, "the public" seems to like Fox News and Jersey Shore a lot. I never thought popularity was a good indicator of quality or correctness (though popularity may tell you what you need to be popular, that is a different issue), and that "the public"'s view aligns with mine on this topic is irrelevant, what is needed is still actual arguments. The only interest here is that it could make discussions on public policy re. piracy easier to have. Not holding my breath though.
    • wnoise 16y ago
      > Well I don't know, what happened to slavery in the south of the united states? That was supported by the majority of the whites. It's a bit different if you count the opinions of the slaves as well.
      • jongraehl 16y ago
        That's your objection to slavery?
        • wnoise 16y ago
          No, that's not my objection to slavery. That's my objection to using support of slavery as a false example to discredit the idea that popularity can be used as (sloppy) gauge of morality.
      • masklinn 16y ago
        You don't, slaves are not people, they don't get to vote and they are not polled. They're not the public.
  • regularfry 16y ago
    Witches get burnt, slaves get bought and sold, and religious persecution is rampant.
    • uvdiv 16y ago
      That's different; that only happens when you have ignorant, unthinking people who do not critically examine their own ethics when to do so would challenge social norms and/or their own material interests.
      • Bvalmont 16y ago
        Think people getting monster sued only to be made an example of.
      • regularfry 16y ago
        Different to what? You've just described humanity.
  • _delirium 16y ago
    There can be odd disconnects between what people think is okay versus how they'd vote if they had a chance to vote on an actual law, though. For example, the number of people in favor of legalizing marijuana is quite a bit smaller than the number of people who don't honestly think it's a bit deal if you smoke marijuana. For various reasons, a lot of people are in the category of: don't think it's a big deal, but still don't want it to be legal.
    • chopsueyar 16y ago
      The "number of people in favor of legalizing marijuana" is a fundamentallly different group than the "people who don't honestly think it's a bit deal if you smoke marijuana". There may be some overlap, but there are also people who support decriminalization, not legalization, and some who support neither.
  • praptak 16y ago
    "[...] in a country ruled by the people" Name one.
    • benjiweber 16y ago
      Switzerland
      • benohear 16y ago
        Snap :-)
    • benohear 16y ago
      Switzerland
  • cabalamat 16y ago
    The music industry bribes politicians to do what they want.
  • Goronmon 16y ago
    Depends. How many people drive over the speed limit? How many people think speed limits to increase to match the speeds most people drive?
• arethuza 16y ago
  Is anyone else sick of the use of the term piracy to try and make copyright infringement sound more threatening?
  • motters 16y ago
    Yes, although alternative terms like "forbidden sharing" aren't quite as catchy and don't have the associated glamour factor from dramatic swashbuckling movies.
    • arethuza 16y ago
      What's wrong with "copyright infringement"?
      • foljs 16y ago
        Or copyright violation? Or Intellectual property theft? Or felony?
  • lutorm 16y ago
    The problem, I think, is that we need to discriminate between maybe-questionably-fair-use copyright infringement (like sharing) and real, for-profit, hawking of pirated goods.
  • joebananas 16y ago
    Daniel Defoe used the word piracy in this sense way back in 1703, so I think there is precedence.
  • kingkilr 16y ago
    I might, but then I remember http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01452/pirate-bay_1452458c.jpg http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01452/pirate-bay...
  • chopsueyar 16y ago
    Yar!
  • 16y ago
• ahrens 16y ago
  At first I saw the source (torrentfreak) and thought it would be a survey of their users... But it actually seems like it is a viably study with a good spread of the subjects. I am actually not that surprised. First of all, it's a Danish study. As I am myself living in the south of Sweden, I know that we and the danish have similar views, and that piracy is pretty well accepted here. Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread. Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into the selection of the group that answered. The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use, is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use. Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.
• saturn 16y ago
  Only 70%? In my social circle it would be 100%, and has been for years. Ironically I still spend more on media than anyone else I know, piracy or no ..
  • InclinedPlane 16y ago
    That's hardly ironic at all, it's merely counter-intuitive if you accept the notion that sharing == piracy (see my other post). If you reject that notion then the idea that greater enthusiasm for media by way of sharing should be correlated with greater media expenditures follows quite logically and directly.
  • electromagnetic 16y ago
    I know a few people who exclusively buy their media, but only for convenience. However these never got big into the PC gaming so never got hit with the bullshit of copy protection chewing up so many cycles that you can't run at full graphics despite being able to handle it. So you download a hack, allegedly violating the DMCA, and can play your game how you're supposed to be able to. What happens next time you want to play a game? You download it because they made that the less hassle way.
  • nestlequ1k 16y ago
    Same here. I spend a huge amount on movies, tv shows (box sets), and itunes music store. But I also don't mind a single bit hopping on Pirate Bay to download something. If it's good, it always ends in me spending money on something. Still, I consume more media than I buy. Like 70% of the public, I'm perfectly ok with that.
• InclinedPlane 16y ago
  As I've pointed out before piracy is a misnomer. Sharing has always been an integral part of the way people are exposed to and consume art. There are even institutions that have been built up to support such things for older media: libraries, used book stores, radio stations, museums. We treasure and value such institutions because they help to preserve and to spread our art and our culture. However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual behavior). To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat. P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.
  • Silhouette 16y ago
    > Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). Part of the problem with the piracy debate is that advocates of unrestricted personal use copying tend to pitch it as sticking it to The Man, where the man in question is a big name movie studio that puts annoying unskippable messages on the front of every DVD or a record label that charged absurd prices for CD singles for a few years. This is a problem because (a) many smaller companies and individuals rely on copyright protection just to make a living, and (b) many copyright-protected works are developed because they are useful rather than because they are inherently fun to work on, artistic, or otherwise worthy of volunteer effort. In their haste to show that Big Media "can afford it", critics of copyright seem amazingly willing to overlook the number of small businesses from inde games developers to niche publishing houses that have been going to the wall in recent years as the Internet has made copying quick, easy, and practically free. There is a valid argument when assessing damages from copyright infringement that not every copy made necessarily represents a lost sale. You can't know for sure either whether everyone would have bought the product at its legal asking price or whether the free but illegal distribution channels have positive effects on legal sales because of secondary effects like advertising. However, there is also a valid argument that we don't really know how much work would be created in a world where copyright was fully respected or could be strictly enforced, but never gets made because the current illegal activity makes it too risky to get a project off the ground in the first place. > It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related. People used to make that sort of argument about driving after a couple of pints at lunch time and about driving while using a phone. They were always better than everyone else, and what harm did it really do? And yet, today there is no doubt in the mind of anyone who has seen the real evidence, or worse, the result of a driver who overestimated their competence and caused a crash, that we should not condone bad driving just because it means some people will have to suffer some minor inconvenience. The trouble with the copyright debate is that while we have ample empirical data to support policy on driving law at this point, we simply don't know exactly the effects of different models for promoting content distibution to consumers while still incentivising the original creation and sharing by artists.
• kingofspain 16y ago
  Are the AA's and their equivalents not shooting themselves in the foot? Framing the argument in the way they have done (piracy is KILLING art) might work for a while but sooner or later a thinking person will come to realise that it really doesn't. Home taping didn't kill anything. Of course, if everyone suddenly stopped buying and only used torrents then the system would collapse, but will that happen? If everyone stopped paying taxes the country would collapse too. No country has an army big enough to enforce that. You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's demonstrably untrue. It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon. No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than virtually anyone in history.
  • towelrod 16y ago
    Look at something like this: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01ebook_g.html?ref=media http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo... So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks pretty good. I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5 range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.
    • kingofspain 16y ago
      I can understand that, but I can also see the other side. Editors, proofreaders, marketing, binding, printing, sales, distribution etc etc. The author doesn't pay for those. With ebooks you can drop the binding & printing but the rest still applies. I'll concede there will be cases where the mark up is over the top, but you aren't just paying for the actual words.
    • robryan 16y ago
      I'm a relatively poor startup founder and I can't say the $5 different is yet to sway me on ebooks, quiet happy to pay $10, although I'm not the fastest reader around. Above $10 though pushes it and $20 feels over the mark to me unless it's something directed at a niche audience.
• wazoox 16y ago
  I've just read this in "Against intellectual monopoly" page 296 ( http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi... ) : Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially expert. Still, it is a relevant topic: property rights are never enforced only by the law-and-order system, or even by costly private monitoring of other people's behavior. Broadly accepted and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality. Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen : Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce originator profits and hurt innovation, but that is a utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical concern is that whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the public library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the author of the fruits of his labor and participated in reducing the author's power to control his self- expression. Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries are not illegal, but the law's injustice would be no reason for a moral person to do unjust things. The existence of children's sections would be particularly heinous, as encouraging children to steal. To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a considerable amount of guilt on copiers, since legal enforcement of copying by individuals is so difficult. To partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons. First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while failing to deter the target misbehavior. Second, it would reduce the effectiveness of guilt in other situations, by pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring copying by individuals, the increased incentive for creation of new products, is relatively small. I thus conclude that people _should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.
  • davidw 16y ago
    So what do they propose to avoid the underproduction of "information goods"?
    • cabalamat 16y ago
      I can't speak for them; my viewpoint is that since information goods are non rivalrous and non excludable, they are likely to be underproduced, and therefore it makes sense to fund them from public subsidy. But how to channel taxes to produce the information goods people want? My proposal is to set up a series of "Content Compensation Funds" and taxpayers get to choose which fund their taxes go to -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
• petercooper 16y ago
  The term 'socially acceptable' makes the conclusion hard to pin down. I'd say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's right or that people should do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable." What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what I believe to be right.
  • hasenj 16y ago
    You could be of the minority that thinks X is wrong, but why should the law enforce your opinion on X?
    • gjm11 16y ago
      No one's suggesting that it should. He's just pointing out that if you ask people "is X socially acceptable?" then the results may be quite different from if you ask "do you accept X?", and they may well be less interesting or useful. Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and 60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because everyone knows that most people approve. Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the "is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone "knows" that most people disapprove. (How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)
      • DavidSchor 16y ago
        According to the article the question was something I would translate to: "To what degree do you accept piracy of music from the internet on a scale from 1 to 10. Not at all accepting = 1. Sceptical = 2-6. Accepts it = 7-10"
• robryan 16y ago
  Interesting thought, if piracy did manage to put a big dent into say the profitability of books, would we then see a lot more projects popping up on sites like kickstarter which would probably be very popular given the diminished choice in the market for readers.
• sigzero 16y ago
  Really? Almost none of my friends finds it acceptable. Maybe they are skewing the data to support their position. That never happens though.
  • jasonlotito 16y ago
    There is a good example of data skewing here: http://bit.ly/dZvy2g http://bit.ly/dZvy2g =)
  • gjm11 16y ago
    Yeah, that's almost as unusual as someone giving precedence to the small, biased sample of "people I know well" over the results of a survey of a much larger sample where some attempt has been made to avoid bias.
  • natch 16y ago
    Maybe you live in a bubble. That never happens though. But more seriously, maybe none of your friends have had the experience of buying an LP, then later paying again for the same music on cassette, (and maybe 8-track and minidisc) and then again on CD. And then maybe they weren't aware that the industry conducted a huge PR campaign to let people know that when they buy music, they are just paying for a license, not for the physical artifact. Of course they only did this after people had already switched to CDs. If we had known this before, we could have asked for crossgrades of the license from LP/single/tape/8-track/minidisc/whatever to CD. And maybe your friends didn't hear about things like "Plays For Sure(TM)", Microsoft's DRM scheme that tricked millions of people into paying for music which Microsoft then decided would not play any more. For those of us who did hear about these things, after paying for the same music three times, we're ready to just download our fucking songs that we already paid for.
• saw-lau 16y ago
  Sometimes I feel I'm the only person left in the world who a) still buys media; b) doesn't mind doing it; c) thinks it's wrong to pirate things; and d) doesn't consider it my right to be able to consume any media I want, and the only reason I'm not doing it is because it's priced too high - IMHO, DVDs, CDs, etc. are luxury goods. Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.
  • tluyben2 16y ago
    You are not the only person; I buy when I can. But the emphases on can here; in Europe where I live, you get, via the web, news about every new tv show, movie, game and book immediately after it comes out. And then you have to wait for ages (depending on the popularity) before you can watch / buy it here. Digital products like ebooks, games, movies and tv shows should not have a geo limiting factor to them; they are digital. As long as they do, I don't see how copying can be prevented. Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in the EU. Lame. If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a long time after release and if everything was easier to use, I believe copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the same time US citizens get it? (I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from other countries I can immediately buy, but that might differ depending on your taste.)
  • hasenj 16y ago
    The 70% figure surprised me; I expected 90% or higher.
  • Tichy 16y ago
    Well I just bought a new TV that can play DivX and XVid. I don't think I can watch Netflix or anything like that, because Samsung does not yet implement it (?maybe Netflix, but I am not in the US, so no use for me). What I could probably do is bittorrent movies and watch them on my TV. I occasionally rent movies from the store, but I always overpay because it takes me too long to return them. Somehow bittorrent seems like the only sensible option. I wouldn't mind paying, but they don't let me.
• Bvalmont 16y ago
  Everyone is copying media. _EVERYONE_. How can it NOT be socially acceptable ? The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.
  • mistermann 16y ago
    Lending a game is not exactly the same thing as piracy, in that case there is one copy that is being shared. When you pirate something, two people have a copy and can use at the same time in different locations.
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    • lutorm 16y ago
      Not if the game is installed on another computer. I assume he meant lending a computer game disk and not a physical game console.
    • jasonlotito 16y ago
      Thought game. If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay? If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility? If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible? Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account? What if it required a password? Note, I'm not trying to push the agenda that piracy is right. Rather, that piracy isn't as easy as saying someone copied a file. Edit: I really want to stress I'm not trying ot make a point. Even I can't answer all these questions easily.
      • aplusbi 16y ago
        >If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay? Ethically I believe this to be equivalent to lending a book/cd/whatever to a friend (this has been done, actually, as a protest/stunt. A guy attempted to sell an mp3 from iTunes on eBay). >If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility? Distributor, generally. I feel this is similar to receipt of stolen property. In most places you are only liable if you knew it was stolen. >If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible? Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but ignorance is rarely a successful defense. >Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account? Why wouldn't you be? >What if it required a password? How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password? Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part of the problem. There is (seemingly) no way have one without the other. If I want the ability to lend an ebook to a friend then I must also have the ability to give a copy to my friend. There are some systems in place to attempt to reconcile this, but they are either limited (you can lend it x number of times) or take away some other right (for example, it might take away the right to have a backup copy).
• WorkingDead 16y ago
  If copyright laws were reasonable then people would not find it acceptable to break them.
  • foljs 16y ago
    Yes. Same for murder laws. If they were reasonable, if they allowed, say, to kill your unfaithful spouse or cheating business partner, people would not find it acceptable to break them.
  • rick888 16y ago
    If tax laws were reasonable, then people would not find it acceptable to break them.
• reedlaw 16y ago
  Maybe that's because illegal copying violates no natural law and is in fact allowable under a common understanding of property rights. If I own a hard drive, I can store anything I want on it. Copyright limits that natural property right by saying you can't store certain media or images that have been designated as "copyrighted" on your own property. This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.
  • forensic 16y ago
    >This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies. Which partially explains why most cultures and nearly all ancient societies had little to no intellectual development. Thinkers gotta eat or they won't exist. Intellectual property feeds the families of most of the people on HN.
• mistermann 16y ago
  Something that's always irked me is that the recording industry, and artists themselves, seem to have this notion that every advance in technology should benefit them, despite them often having no effort in the development of these technologies. Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in return.
  • rick888 16y ago
    I doubt it. Most of these warnings and previews that you mention are the direct result of piracy. I also don't think the movie and music industry are going to play that game anymore. in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies. Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap). Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own music without a label. Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?
    • nitrogen 16y ago
      $1/song is still pretty expensive when trying to legitimately purchase a hypothetical 16GB iPod-sized music collection.
      • rick888 16y ago
        $1 is less than the cost of a 20 oz Pepsi, a gallon of gas, and a gallon of milk. If songs were an average of 3MB each, you would need to purchase around 5,300 songs to fill a 16GB iPod. Buying 5,300 of anything isn't going to be cheap.
    • __david__ 16y ago
• cabalamat 16y ago
  Piracy is socially acceptable, but politicians are passing ever more draconian laws in a futile attempt to prop up the music industry's obsolete business model. If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.
• smogzer 16y ago
  piracy is the opiate of the youth.
• fields 16y ago
  Did Apple keep the other 30%?
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• spacemanaki 16y ago
  This was a Danish study, does anyone know the size of their sample? Did it include other Europeans, anyone from North America, Asia? I would imagine it would make a bit of a difference in the results, and would be interesting to compare.
  • sesqu 16y ago
    My Danish isn't too hot, but I make it N=1146, Danish only.
• _delirium 16y ago
  Three big caveats that the linked article doesn't sufficiently mention: 1. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud, copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc. 2. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70% figure is everyone who answered anything except 1. But clearly a 2 out of 10 is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only 20% gave an answer >= 7. 3. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal, home use. --- From the report (rough translation): Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for one's own use. Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in 2010. In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%. The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%, rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy. The views are different however for making money on illegal music downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact, three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve pirated music online and resell it to friends. The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7.
  • aw3c2 16y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, torrentfreak is a tabloid.
    • mambodog 16y ago
      Torrentfreak is a blog.
• ancymon 16y ago
  I hope it won't discourage people to become sailors…
• s00pcan 16y ago
  I really doubt that software piracy would be illegal if put to a public vote.
• kgtm 16y ago
  Socially acceptable or not, anti-piracy advocates fail to realize that if i am pirating something, i had no intention to buy it. They really, really fail to see this. You can inflate the amount of money you are losing because of me all you want, the reality remains. And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money. Go Minecraft.
• iterationx 16y ago
  How do you do a poll? I'd be more interested in: X% of HN finds piracy acceptable
• rick888 16y ago
  The taxes are so high in Denmark, I'm not surprised. Most people don't have that much money left over to spend on things like music and movies.
  • rtp 16y ago
    Do you have a source on that? I live in Sweden, have an average wage, and we have pretty high taxes, yet I could potentially buy a lot of movies and CDs if I wanted to, and I gather Denmark doesn't have that much higher taxes than Sweden, so that is why I'm asking.
• libpcap 16y ago
  I find it acceptable. eMule, PeerBlock, and verycd.com have always been my friends.
• natch 16y ago
  I tried very hard to pay Oscars.com this year to get a stream of the Academy Awards event. They would not take my money. I tried three different browsers and two different credit cards. No go. Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online. This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.
• njharman 16y ago
  "best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate" No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense. Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption. Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.
• bena 16y ago
  I hope this highlights the fallacy of using consensus to determine what is ethical: "70% of the public finds rape socially acceptable" Would we be having the same conversation?
  • wnoise 16y ago
    That would be a reasonable counterpoint if 70% of the public did find rape socially acceptable.
• hernan7 16y ago
  It's not surprising that piracy is becoming more acceptable, since for much of the world the opposite of "piracy" is "giving money to the US". (Independently of how much the numbers in this particular poll were manipulated.)
• slavak 16y ago
  This reminds me of a quote from Penny Arcade[1]: 'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes. Imagine what these people must think of libraries.' The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading. [1]http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/
  • forensic 16y ago
    If you ever thought you owned the words in a book, you were mistaken.
    • Helianthus16 16y ago
      in certain ideologies subscribed to by some anti-imaginary-property proponents, this statement applies to the author of those words as well.
• kstenerud 16y ago
  Wow... I didn't expect these sorts of tabloid headers to occur on Hacker News. That's usually a Reddit thing. Shouldn't Hacker News be a cut above, where people first read and understand an article, and then post it to HN with a succinct, relevant, and most importantly TRUTHFUL title?