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Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist

130 points by Uncle_Sam 16y ago

petercooper 16y ago
Quite right. The English definition of theft: "A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it". To thieve something, there must surely be some thing to thieve.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  At some point can this develop beyond a semantic discussion of the term "theft"? I agree it's sloppy to think that theft and intellectual property violation are interchangeable but the point has been made on here about a million times so it doesn't really add much to the debate.
  - cturner 16y ago
    I share the frustation, but I'll explain why I think it's important not to let an issue like that slide. A lot of the time the copyright debate is fought between people these world views. 1) Copyright opponents define propert as being like a car - something which one person has by denying it to another person. 2) Copyright advocates think of property as a "bundle of rights" enforced by the state. i.e. property is whatever a judge says it to be. People who insist on calling it theft are steering the debate towards the second definition - that theft is whatever a judge or politician says it is. It's crucial to knock back attempts to do that. That worldview believes the whim of the state is the root of philosophy, and fundamentally correct in its judgement of right and wrong. Property predates the state. It exists even in states that try to outlaw it. It's a strong algorithm that is useful for the efficient allocation of resources. Intellectual propert is neither a strong algorithm, nor a mechanism that leads to an efficient allocation of resources. It is not property. Intellectual property violations are not theft.
    - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
      No-one is saying that you're not right, we're just saying that this has been said so many times that it doesn't need saying again. Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again? (And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
      - sophacles 16y ago
        Human interaction is not code. Human discussion is not code. People are not code. Repetition is how people learn and understand things. Seeing a point once makes a person think "oh good point". Seeing many times forces them to think of it in different contexts and different ways. This allows them to understand it better. Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
        mattgreenrocks 16y ago
        And what determines what is important vs. what is not? Certainly something like spam is pure noise, but what justifies the repetition? I'm trying very hard not to see it as consensual groupthink, but coming up short. I see this in every community: a set of near-sacrosanct 'truths' emerges that inevitably must be defended, and part of that process involves repeating them, often under the guise of 'educating' others. IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods. If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
  - petercooper 16y ago
    If it's a debate about legal issues, it's crucial to not be ambiguous about definitions. We've seen what damage and abuses can occur when people get sloppy with legal terminology - the redefinition of "enemy combatants" in 2008, for example. "Theft" is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement isn't necessarily (though there are conditions that make it so in the US). Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
    - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
      "There are conditions that make it so in the US"? And every other western country (and pretty much every other developed nation full stop. Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. Whether that should be the case or not is a matter for debate, whether it is or not isn't.
      - petercooper 16y ago
        Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. In which jurisdiction? Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain. If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
        tedunangst 16y ago
        http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html
        Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  - ajscherer 16y ago
    If people are still referring to unauthorized copying as theft the point hasn't been made enough, regardless of how many times you've been forced to read it. In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
- anon_for_this_1 16y ago
  So if someone hires me to do some work for them, and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what is that? There is no 'thing' in that case. Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.
  - cturner 16y ago
    > So if someone hires me to do some work for them, > and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what > is that? Breach of contract. It's not related to property. > Piracy is similar. It's not. The dynamic of contract violation is not at all like the dynamics of rape, pillage or intellectual property violation.
    - anon_for_this_1 16y ago
      OK, so piracy is breach of contract. Still against the law and immoral, no?
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - petercooper 16y ago
        Someone hiring you and not paying you is a breach of contract but that's not the same as piracy. If I download the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, I've not breached a contract because I didn't enter into one (though I may have breached a contract with my ISP). The offense committed is copyright infringement and in many jurisdictions this is a civil offense rather than a criminal one (or, as in the US, there are conditions to turn it into a criminal one that very few downloaders would satisfy).
      - qjz 16y ago
        Not if the contract is itself illegal and/or immoral. A contract is not necessarily enforceable by virtue of it being a contract. But this is a straw man; the point is that the terms "piracy" and "theft" have been misappropriated to protect intellectual property, bringing along a lot of basic assumptions that can be justifiably challenged. Even the term "intellectual property" is vulnerable for the same reasons. The whole debate takes place in a virtual world where not everyone agrees to the same conditions. But the same could be said about the ownership of physical things, which probably originally meant whatever you possessed at the moment (a piece of food, a scrap of clothing, a hand weapon) and was eventually extended to mean whatever you could protect over longer periods of time (livestock, shelter, huge tracts of land). The concept of ownership is continuously evolving.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation of your creative work (it's one of the UN Human Rights, that). When I make something, I have the right to control how it is exploited commercially -- even if I simply don't want it to be commercially exploited! So when software I make is copied without my consent, I lose that right. If the infringement is large enough, I utterly lose it. (See also Trumpet Winsock). Property doesn't need to be physical objects. You can steal an idea just as much as you can steal lunch money. And you can steal my rights.
  - rome 16y ago
    Ideas are not protected by copyrights. If you tell me about your idea, we both have it. Nothing was taken from you. If I take your pen, you no longer have it; thats theft.
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      Sorry, haven't been clear. "Ideas" was supposed to be slightly tongue-in-cheek -- compare "you can steal hearts as well as pens". The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation. That is what copyright protects.
    - teamonkey 16y ago
      The exclusive right to control the exploitation of your creations is something that can be stolen though, technically speaking. Because if someone else appropriates control over what can be done with your work, the exclusive control over it is taken away from you. By the definition earlier, that's theft.
      - Peaker 16y ago
        If nobody has exclusiveness afterwards, then it was just destroyed, not stolen.
        bonaldi 16y ago
        If I steal your car and then destroy it, it's not right to say it was "just destroyed". In both cases the original possessor is deprived of something.
- tedunangst 16y ago
  I'm curious what you think of "theft of services". The deprivation may only be temporary, not permanent, so would it be theft?
- Confusion 16y ago
  That definition is age old and unprepared for the future. It does not determine what the word theft was intended to mean. In other languages, the definition of 'theft' is not that strictly restricted to physical property.
iwwr 16y ago
Buying Minecraft is not just buying a program, it's a kind of license agreement; the buyer is expecting future updates and feature improvements. Whereas, software bought in a box comes as-is, at most with the occasional bugfix patch.
- pilif 16y ago
  That's not quite true according to their Terms and Service (http://www.minecraft.net/copyright.jsp http://www.minecraft.net/copyright.jsp), When you purchase the game, you pay for it as it is right now. Future updates are an added bonus. Sure. So far the game has been updated regularly, but they explicitly stated that they are not guaranteeing any updates.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    It's an informal agreement. As long as buying the program gives you automatic updates, there is less of a reason to pirate it.
    - rapind 16y ago
      Unless someone creates an independent installer / upgrader package that will grab updates from unofficial sites, I.e. torrents. In which case the pirated versions are again almost the same as the registered versions. Then the only difference is the lag between the official and pirated versions, which is generally very low for popular products. Convenience is the differentiator (itunes v.s. thepiratebay) and many consumers are willing to pay a premium for it. Regardless, if you just accept that a good portion of your market won't pay for your product and work around it you can still have a very successful business. Then focusing on techniques like convenience, reward systems, free t-shirts? etc. can increase your paying customers. Maybe suing them can too, but it's definitely not the only way.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    You're both right: When it was α, you got it forever, for free. Now that it's in β, you don't.
hnfwerr 16y ago
That's what I would call sharing. The problem with physical goods is that if you share it with someone, you don't have it anymore. With digital goods, you can share and still own the product, so both are happy. This works perfect for consumers, but not so good for the companies....
- rome 16y ago
  "This works perfect for consumers, but not so good for the companies...." The movie industry is thriving and they've been hit pretty hard by sharing. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
cturner 16y ago
I defended copyright charges in a civil suit in the late nineties. I was already skeptical about it, and the combination of my skepticism and the case caused me to start to argue against it openly. It has been and is thrilling to see the debate continue to turn against the idea. Ten years ago, the idea of questioning the justification of copyright was alien even to geeks and lawyers. People who copied lots themselves considered it to be cheeky, unjustified. The idea of questioning it hadn't thought about it, and wouldn't even raise the energy to consider that it might be worth questioning. The reaction to skepticism would always be that laugh that's reserved for contrarians, followed by a brief "doesn't compute" look and then a search for distraction. Things are shifting.
- reedlaw 16y ago
  I think in the 80s and 90s the idea of questioning wasn't thought of much because it (copyright) wasn't thought of much. No one thought to much about copying cassette tapes or floppy disks (at least where I grew up).
- Derbasti 16y ago
  Funny thing, Germany does not have copyright. Instead, it has creator-right, which is very similar and usually compatible with copyright, but not exactly the same. The difference is that copyright gives rights to the copyright holder, which may or may not be the author. With creator-right ('Urheberrecht'), these rights are always bound to the author and can not be sold. I think this is interesting, because I would agree more with Urheberrecht than with copyright.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
chopsueyar 16y ago
See "larceny".
psykotic 16y ago
Whenever a discussion on this subject devolves into bickering over the meaning of words, I feel an urge to smack the participants. It's completely irrelevant what you call it unless you are one of those curious people who considers private property to be almost an ontological category. Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. Protection of so-called intellectual property exists to the same extent. Counterfactual what-if reasoning is as valid or as suspect in this debate as in any other.
- _delirium 16y ago
  > Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. I agree with that view, but I suspect this issue comes up a lot because many people don't agree with it. A common view is that private property is a natural right of some sort, merely recognized by society, rather than a convention created by society. If you took that view, then whether intellectual property is legit turns largely on whether it is or isn't part of this natural-law category of "property" (which is what you find debate about in libertarian writings on IP, for example).
  - jellicle 16y ago
    Indeed. People are so used to the abstraction of "property" that they've forgotten it's an abstraction.
  - jules 16y ago
    Explain how any right is a natural right. This is a spectrum, some rights require more effort to protect than others. Private property rights require a great deal of effort to protect, as do intellectual property rights.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It's not really the effort to protect, but whether you see it as a choice society can legitimately make, or something inherent pre-existing society. Is private property something that a society should recognize or not recognize based on pragmatic reasons, like how well society functions as a result? Or is private property some sort of inherent/moral right (as e.g. John Locke and most libertarians argue)? A similar debate comes up with copyright: is it a privilege that we as a society choose to recognize as a means of encouraging the production of creative works? Or is it some sort of inherent/moral right of a creator to control the reuse of their works?
marcelvdg 16y ago
Surely lost sales must exist... Markus is obvioously doing ok, and pirated copies of his game are aiding virality, but still... Software, movies and music are now perceived as free. Which is one reason why many developers are now moving to closed platforms such as Apple's iOs where they are guaranteed payment for installations. That said, I can see the logic behind "going with the flow" when it comes to piracy, especially when cumbersome anti-piracy measures usually only harm legit, legal owners. (E.g. its more convenient to crack Digidesigns ProTools audio editing software and be able to run it on my laptop without any fuss, than to have to insert my legal USB dongle every time I boot the software). I think anti-piracy measures will work if they are baked into a product from day one. And I don't mean contrived, un-user-oriented measures, I mean doing it iOs-style or cloud-style. In iOs the users love the App Store - its an advantage, not a hindrance. And its the same with Cloud-based or hosted software. Its a selling point - its part of the offering. Me and some friends have a SaS app that we changed from free to a minimal monthly subscription. Logically, we saw a decline in sign-ups and follow-through by new users, but this was worth it cos we now make some money from the service. If the software had, instead, been a download, then my guess it that we never would have been able to profit of the small user-base that we have. The free version would be out there, and even though it took off we would never have seen any profits. And then we might not be motivated to cary on creating cool stuff.
greyman 16y ago
It's difficult to say regarding the lost sales. In relation with every pirated book, there are several groups of people: A) Got the pirated version, but wouldn't buy it if they couldn't get it free B) Got the pirated version, and therefore didn't pay for it C) Learned about the book because it was pirated, and then bought it. I don't have the statistics, but my guess is that most of the people are in the group A). Now the question is, which group is bigger, B or C. I don't know myself, and it probably depends on the book itself. But as I have seen, most anti-piracy proponents include the group A) into the lost sales category, while it clearly doesn't belong there.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  It's not just that some people include A into lost sales though, although that is the major problem. Some people are strongly against group A because they feel that they should not get whatever they pirated for free. You'll see this a lot in conjunction with the word "entitled". I can understand their point, too. Personally, I think the world is a better and richer place for more shared culture (see also group C, who likely exists largely because of A), and if that means people who weren't going to pay anyway freeload through piracy, so be it. If the would not convert to a sale, then they should essentially be ignored. The piracy that should be focused on is B, because that's the only one that actually has a real monetary effect.
- cemerick 16y ago
  Just about the only lick of sense in this discussion. I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good. I suspect you would have a better sense of perspective if people could create and use "paid" accounts on your shiny web services without paying. Anecdotes of (c) described in the parent are few and far between, and don't justify the instances of (b) or the unintended consequences / moral hazard of (a). (Disclosure: I sell software for a living, and have discovered [and reconciled] piracy of my products by very large organizations in the past. I imagine there are many other instances I'm not aware of.) [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
blub 16y ago
Funny thing how this obviously flawed analysis has popped up at the same time as the Trumpet Winsock piracy story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875. Small developers can get badly hurt by piracy.
- Deestan 16y ago
  The Trumpet Winsock story had to do with commercial actors "stealing" software and mass-redistributing it for profit. This story has to do with people "stealing" software for their own private use without paying. Given the existing level of confusion in all piracy discussions, I believe it is counterproductive to lump these two scenarios together.
  - blub 16y ago
    Do I make more money if a person as opposed to a commercial actor uses my software without paying?
  - benologist 16y ago
    "commercial actors "stealing" software and mass-redistributing it for profit." So basically exactly the same as torrent sites?
    - TheSOB88 16y ago
      Torrent sites don't have a financial incentive to get you to take the product, do they?
      - benologist 16y ago
        Other than the millions/billions of ad impressions every month they show along the way? No.
antihero 16y ago
I generally support examples like this, but it's important to note that Minecraft development budget is hardly anything compared to the investment of a major game studio, hence the lower price point.
bialecki 16y ago
I don't know whether it is or isn't piracy, but it's hard to take his opinion on this as representative or forward thinking because of how "special" Minecraft is (i.e. it's massively popular). Maybe his goal is to maximize revenue, but it doesn't seem like that. In that case, I'd be more interested in the perspective of someone who's pulling in 30k/year in sales and has the same 70% "lost sales" rate. When you're making millions, there's a threshold above which more money is just more money and doesn't really matter (depending on the person). But the difference between 30k/year and what might be 60-80k/year if there was a lower piracy rate would probably drive me nuts because that's the difference between making a living doing something and not.
- rome 16y ago
  Just because 70% of people pirate the software doesn't mean that 100% of them would have bought it.
  - bialecki 16y ago
    Right, that's why I said 30k/yr might become 60-80k/yr, implying that of those 70% maybe 40-80% would actually buy it if they couldn't pirate it.
    - rome 16y ago
      It's a number that may be impossible to account for. Heres a study concerning illegal music file sharers, it turns out that they spent more money on music than people who don't share music illegally. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloade... Just like radio (play for free) increases album sales for record labels. This suggests that "lost sales" may mean a product that is not worth buying to some.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  I'm glad you got something from the numbers in that article because I didn't. Something about 1% of the registered users coming in the last 24 hours? And a million out of 600,000 being such-and-such. Is there some place other than that puff piece to get real MineCraft numbers from?
olivercameron 16y ago
What gripes me most about pirates is that a lot still feel they have some form of entitlement for support. For example, I get emails all the time saying "I'll pay for the app, but only if you provide feature X and fix bug Y, until then, it's just not worth 99 cents.".
sanj 16y ago
If only that were actually true. Colin Messitt actually ran an experiment to figure this out. I reposted it about 15 years ago with his permission: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990420024127/http://scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose.html http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990420024127/http://scraw...
leon_ 16y ago
Oh please, can't we keep those piracy apologist posts away from HN? It's bad enough that gamasutra.com's comments are flooded with those "I pirate games because piracy = freedom"-kids. I don't think this kind of discussion would enrich HN in any positive way.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  This isn't a piracy apologist post. This is an article about the creator of a wildly successful game saying piracy isn't as big a deal as people make out of it.
citricsquid 16y ago
The thing almost everyone seems to be ignoring is Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it. It seems almost everyone is taking what he has said as justification of piracy, "oh well he's rich now and he doesn't mind piracy so it must be okay for me to pirate!". If we ask him whether or not he thinks people should pirate he'll not say "yes, do it" he'll say "Well I'd rather you bought it, but if you're not going to then you may as well play it for free as I'd rather you play my game than go without, and I'm not going to spend millions trying to stop you... but I'd prefer if you paid for it".
- naner 16y ago
  Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it. This is kind of where I always stood (I don't pirate personally, though). If you're selling some intellectual property, you can sell a bazillion copies with almost no production costs. You produce once and then copy for (almost) free. Now that everyone has the ability to copy, that massive advantage is somewhat tempered. It isn't quite the wild west, which is good. If piracy was easy and convenient it would eviscerate sales. Most people can't figure out or don't bother with piracy and blatant piracy is legally squashed (in the developed world, at least). There's not much you can do but accept it as a cost of doing business and soldier on.
pnathan 16y ago
What I hear is that there is a vested interest by the common consumer in Getting Stuff For Free. I like free stuff too. But believe me, I'd rather put in some registration features to "keep people honest" than to let myself be ripped off.
lotusleaf1987 16y ago
"No big studio picked up the film [Ink] for theatrical and home distribution. Double Edge Films pitched the movie directly to independent cinemas and to the DVD, Blu-ray and online distribution by themselves. After the release it became the most downloaded movies in file sharing torrent sites more accurately 400,000 times in a single week and exposed the film to a large audience, leading to higher DVD and Blu-ray sales in return. The independent filmmakers wrote in their newsletter that they had "embraced the piracy" and are "happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure." : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia
iterationx 16y ago
Piracy first increases product visibility and increases overall sales until a saturation point is reached. Once market visibility is achieved then piracy represents a loss of sales. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24446/is-there-a-list-of-software-companies-that-have-gone-out-of-business-due-to-pirac/24525#24525 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24446/is-ther... As for the X is or is not theft discussions, let's see what Richard Feynman has to say about it: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
mlellsworth 16y ago
Minecraft is mind boggling from a business perspective AND a gaming perspective. Are there any other communities that are similar to Minecraft that anyone can think of? I just find it fascinating that a game like Minecraft has such an involved ecosystem around it.
blahblahblah 16y ago
Actually, piracy is theft. Specifically, it's a form of robbery that takes place at sea. The attempt to equate the crime of copyright infringement with piracy is a gross misuse of the English language. When a ship of Somali bandits with AK47s boards your yacht, murders everyone on board (or leaves them stranded somewhere), and takes everything of value -- that's piracy. When a college student downloads warez, bittorrents "Pirates of the Carribean", or downloads the new Lady Gaga album through a P2P app -- that's copyright infringement. When the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA use the word "piracy" to describe the latter activity -- that's propaganda.

130 points by Uncle_Sam 16y ago

Quite right. The English definition of theft: "A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it". To thieve something, there must surely be some thing to thieve.

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
At some point can this develop beyond a semantic discussion of the term "theft"? I agree it's sloppy to think that theft and intellectual property violation are interchangeable but the point has been made on here about a million times so it doesn't really add much to the debate.
- cturner 16y ago
  I share the frustation, but I'll explain why I think it's important not to let an issue like that slide. A lot of the time the copyright debate is fought between people these world views. 1) Copyright opponents define propert as being like a car - something which one person has by denying it to another person. 2) Copyright advocates think of property as a "bundle of rights" enforced by the state. i.e. property is whatever a judge says it to be. People who insist on calling it theft are steering the debate towards the second definition - that theft is whatever a judge or politician says it is. It's crucial to knock back attempts to do that. That worldview believes the whim of the state is the root of philosophy, and fundamentally correct in its judgement of right and wrong. Property predates the state. It exists even in states that try to outlaw it. It's a strong algorithm that is useful for the efficient allocation of resources. Intellectual propert is neither a strong algorithm, nor a mechanism that leads to an efficient allocation of resources. It is not property. Intellectual property violations are not theft.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    No-one is saying that you're not right, we're just saying that this has been said so many times that it doesn't need saying again. Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again? (And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
    - sophacles 16y ago
      Human interaction is not code. Human discussion is not code. People are not code. Repetition is how people learn and understand things. Seeing a point once makes a person think "oh good point". Seeing many times forces them to think of it in different contexts and different ways. This allows them to understand it better. Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
      - mattgreenrocks 16y ago
        And what determines what is important vs. what is not? Certainly something like spam is pure noise, but what justifies the repetition? I'm trying very hard not to see it as consensual groupthink, but coming up short. I see this in every community: a set of near-sacrosanct 'truths' emerges that inevitably must be defended, and part of that process involves repeating them, often under the guise of 'educating' others. IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods. If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
- petercooper 16y ago
  If it's a debate about legal issues, it's crucial to not be ambiguous about definitions. We've seen what damage and abuses can occur when people get sloppy with legal terminology - the redefinition of "enemy combatants" in 2008, for example. "Theft" is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement isn't necessarily (though there are conditions that make it so in the US). Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    "There are conditions that make it so in the US"? And every other western country (and pretty much every other developed nation full stop. Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. Whether that should be the case or not is a matter for debate, whether it is or not isn't.
    - petercooper 16y ago
      Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. In which jurisdiction? Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain. If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
      - tedunangst 16y ago
        http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html
      - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
- ajscherer 16y ago
  If people are still referring to unauthorized copying as theft the point hasn't been made enough, regardless of how many times you've been forced to read it. In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
anon_for_this_1 16y ago
So if someone hires me to do some work for them, and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what is that? There is no 'thing' in that case. Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.
- cturner 16y ago
  > So if someone hires me to do some work for them, > and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what > is that? Breach of contract. It's not related to property. > Piracy is similar. It's not. The dynamic of contract violation is not at all like the dynamics of rape, pillage or intellectual property violation.
  - anon_for_this_1 16y ago
    OK, so piracy is breach of contract. Still against the law and immoral, no?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - petercooper 16y ago
      Someone hiring you and not paying you is a breach of contract but that's not the same as piracy. If I download the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, I've not breached a contract because I didn't enter into one (though I may have breached a contract with my ISP). The offense committed is copyright infringement and in many jurisdictions this is a civil offense rather than a criminal one (or, as in the US, there are conditions to turn it into a criminal one that very few downloaders would satisfy).
    - qjz 16y ago
      Not if the contract is itself illegal and/or immoral. A contract is not necessarily enforceable by virtue of it being a contract. But this is a straw man; the point is that the terms "piracy" and "theft" have been misappropriated to protect intellectual property, bringing along a lot of basic assumptions that can be justifiably challenged. Even the term "intellectual property" is vulnerable for the same reasons. The whole debate takes place in a virtual world where not everyone agrees to the same conditions. But the same could be said about the ownership of physical things, which probably originally meant whatever you possessed at the moment (a piece of food, a scrap of clothing, a hand weapon) and was eventually extended to mean whatever you could protect over longer periods of time (livestock, shelter, huge tracts of land). The concept of ownership is continuously evolving.
bonaldi 16y ago
The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation of your creative work (it's one of the UN Human Rights, that). When I make something, I have the right to control how it is exploited commercially -- even if I simply don't want it to be commercially exploited! So when software I make is copied without my consent, I lose that right. If the infringement is large enough, I utterly lose it. (See also Trumpet Winsock). Property doesn't need to be physical objects. You can steal an idea just as much as you can steal lunch money. And you can steal my rights.
- rome 16y ago
  Ideas are not protected by copyrights. If you tell me about your idea, we both have it. Nothing was taken from you. If I take your pen, you no longer have it; thats theft.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    Sorry, haven't been clear. "Ideas" was supposed to be slightly tongue-in-cheek -- compare "you can steal hearts as well as pens". The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation. That is what copyright protects.
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    The exclusive right to control the exploitation of your creations is something that can be stolen though, technically speaking. Because if someone else appropriates control over what can be done with your work, the exclusive control over it is taken away from you. By the definition earlier, that's theft.
    - Peaker 16y ago
      If nobody has exclusiveness afterwards, then it was just destroyed, not stolen.
      - bonaldi 16y ago
        If I steal your car and then destroy it, it's not right to say it was "just destroyed". In both cases the original possessor is deprived of something.
tedunangst 16y ago
I'm curious what you think of "theft of services". The deprivation may only be temporary, not permanent, so would it be theft?
Confusion 16y ago
That definition is age old and unprepared for the future. It does not determine what the word theft was intended to mean. In other languages, the definition of 'theft' is not that strictly restricted to physical property.

iwwr 16y ago

Buying Minecraft is not just buying a program, it's a kind of license agreement; the buyer is expecting future updates and feature improvements. Whereas, software bought in a box comes as-is, at most with the occasional bugfix patch.

pilif 16y ago
That's not quite true according to their Terms and Service (http://www.minecraft.net/copyright.jsp http://www.minecraft.net/copyright.jsp), When you purchase the game, you pay for it as it is right now. Future updates are an added bonus. Sure. So far the game has been updated regularly, but they explicitly stated that they are not guaranteeing any updates.
- iwwr 16y ago
  It's an informal agreement. As long as buying the program gives you automatic updates, there is less of a reason to pirate it.
  - rapind 16y ago
    Unless someone creates an independent installer / upgrader package that will grab updates from unofficial sites, I.e. torrents. In which case the pirated versions are again almost the same as the registered versions. Then the only difference is the lag between the official and pirated versions, which is generally very low for popular products. Convenience is the differentiator (itunes v.s. thepiratebay) and many consumers are willing to pay a premium for it. Regardless, if you just accept that a good portion of your market won't pay for your product and work around it you can still have a very successful business. Then focusing on techniques like convenience, reward systems, free t-shirts? etc. can increase your paying customers. Maybe suing them can too, but it's definitely not the only way.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  You're both right: When it was α, you got it forever, for free. Now that it's in β, you don't.

hnfwerr 16y ago

That's what I would call sharing. The problem with physical goods is that if you share it with someone, you don't have it anymore. With digital goods, you can share and still own the product, so both are happy. This works perfect for consumers, but not so good for the companies....

rome 16y ago
"This works perfect for consumers, but not so good for the companies...." The movie industry is thriving and they've been hit pretty hard by sharing. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

cturner 16y ago

I defended copyright charges in a civil suit in the late nineties. I was already skeptical about it, and the combination of my skepticism and the case caused me to start to argue against it openly. It has been and is thrilling to see the debate continue to turn against the idea. Ten years ago, the idea of questioning the justification of copyright was alien even to geeks and lawyers. People who copied lots themselves considered it to be cheeky, unjustified. The idea of questioning it hadn't thought about it, and wouldn't even raise the energy to consider that it might be worth questioning. The reaction to skepticism would always be that laugh that's reserved for contrarians, followed by a brief "doesn't compute" look and then a search for distraction. Things are shifting.

reedlaw 16y ago
I think in the 80s and 90s the idea of questioning wasn't thought of much because it (copyright) wasn't thought of much. No one thought to much about copying cassette tapes or floppy disks (at least where I grew up).
Derbasti 16y ago
Funny thing, Germany does not have copyright. Instead, it has creator-right, which is very similar and usually compatible with copyright, but not exactly the same. The difference is that copyright gives rights to the copyright holder, which may or may not be the author. With creator-right ('Urheberrecht'), these rights are always bound to the author and can not be sold. I think this is interesting, because I would agree more with Urheberrecht than with copyright.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

chopsueyar 16y ago

See "larceny".

psykotic 16y ago

Whenever a discussion on this subject devolves into bickering over the meaning of words, I feel an urge to smack the participants. It's completely irrelevant what you call it unless you are one of those curious people who considers private property to be almost an ontological category. Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. Protection of so-called intellectual property exists to the same extent. Counterfactual what-if reasoning is as valid or as suspect in this debate as in any other.

_delirium 16y ago
> Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. I agree with that view, but I suspect this issue comes up a lot because many people don't agree with it. A common view is that private property is a natural right of some sort, merely recognized by society, rather than a convention created by society. If you took that view, then whether intellectual property is legit turns largely on whether it is or isn't part of this natural-law category of "property" (which is what you find debate about in libertarian writings on IP, for example).
- jellicle 16y ago
  Indeed. People are so used to the abstraction of "property" that they've forgotten it's an abstraction.
- jules 16y ago
  Explain how any right is a natural right. This is a spectrum, some rights require more effort to protect than others. Private property rights require a great deal of effort to protect, as do intellectual property rights.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It's not really the effort to protect, but whether you see it as a choice society can legitimately make, or something inherent pre-existing society. Is private property something that a society should recognize or not recognize based on pragmatic reasons, like how well society functions as a result? Or is private property some sort of inherent/moral right (as e.g. John Locke and most libertarians argue)? A similar debate comes up with copyright: is it a privilege that we as a society choose to recognize as a means of encouraging the production of creative works? Or is it some sort of inherent/moral right of a creator to control the reuse of their works?

marcelvdg 16y ago

Surely lost sales must exist... Markus is obvioously doing ok, and pirated copies of his game are aiding virality, but still... Software, movies and music are now perceived as free. Which is one reason why many developers are now moving to closed platforms such as Apple's iOs where they are guaranteed payment for installations. That said, I can see the logic behind "going with the flow" when it comes to piracy, especially when cumbersome anti-piracy measures usually only harm legit, legal owners. (E.g. its more convenient to crack Digidesigns ProTools audio editing software and be able to run it on my laptop without any fuss, than to have to insert my legal USB dongle every time I boot the software). I think anti-piracy measures will work if they are baked into a product from day one. And I don't mean contrived, un-user-oriented measures, I mean doing it iOs-style or cloud-style. In iOs the users love the App Store - its an advantage, not a hindrance. And its the same with Cloud-based or hosted software. Its a selling point - its part of the offering. Me and some friends have a SaS app that we changed from free to a minimal monthly subscription. Logically, we saw a decline in sign-ups and follow-through by new users, but this was worth it cos we now make some money from the service. If the software had, instead, been a download, then my guess it that we never would have been able to profit of the small user-base that we have. The free version would be out there, and even though it took off we would never have seen any profits. And then we might not be motivated to cary on creating cool stuff.

greyman 16y ago

It's difficult to say regarding the lost sales. In relation with every pirated book, there are several groups of people: A) Got the pirated version, but wouldn't buy it if they couldn't get it free B) Got the pirated version, and therefore didn't pay for it C) Learned about the book because it was pirated, and then bought it. I don't have the statistics, but my guess is that most of the people are in the group A). Now the question is, which group is bigger, B or C. I don't know myself, and it probably depends on the book itself. But as I have seen, most anti-piracy proponents include the group A) into the lost sales category, while it clearly doesn't belong there.

jokermatt999 16y ago
It's not just that some people include A into lost sales though, although that is the major problem. Some people are strongly against group A because they feel that they should not get whatever they pirated for free. You'll see this a lot in conjunction with the word "entitled". I can understand their point, too. Personally, I think the world is a better and richer place for more shared culture (see also group C, who likely exists largely because of A), and if that means people who weren't going to pay anyway freeload through piracy, so be it. If the would not convert to a sale, then they should essentially be ignored. The piracy that should be focused on is B, because that's the only one that actually has a real monetary effect.
cemerick 16y ago
Just about the only lick of sense in this discussion. I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good. I suspect you would have a better sense of perspective if people could create and use "paid" accounts on your shiny web services without paying. Anecdotes of (c) described in the parent are few and far between, and don't justify the instances of (b) or the unintended consequences / moral hazard of (a). (Disclosure: I sell software for a living, and have discovered [and reconciled] piracy of my products by very large organizations in the past. I imagine there are many other instances I'm not aware of.) [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

blub 16y ago

Funny thing how this obviously flawed analysis has popped up at the same time as the Trumpet Winsock piracy story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875. Small developers can get badly hurt by piracy.

Deestan 16y ago
The Trumpet Winsock story had to do with commercial actors "stealing" software and mass-redistributing it for profit. This story has to do with people "stealing" software for their own private use without paying. Given the existing level of confusion in all piracy discussions, I believe it is counterproductive to lump these two scenarios together.
- blub 16y ago
  Do I make more money if a person as opposed to a commercial actor uses my software without paying?
- benologist 16y ago
  "commercial actors "stealing" software and mass-redistributing it for profit." So basically exactly the same as torrent sites?
  - TheSOB88 16y ago
    Torrent sites don't have a financial incentive to get you to take the product, do they?
    - benologist 16y ago
      Other than the millions/billions of ad impressions every month they show along the way? No.

antihero 16y ago

I generally support examples like this, but it's important to note that Minecraft development budget is hardly anything compared to the investment of a major game studio, hence the lower price point.

bialecki 16y ago

I don't know whether it is or isn't piracy, but it's hard to take his opinion on this as representative or forward thinking because of how "special" Minecraft is (i.e. it's massively popular). Maybe his goal is to maximize revenue, but it doesn't seem like that. In that case, I'd be more interested in the perspective of someone who's pulling in 30k/year in sales and has the same 70% "lost sales" rate. When you're making millions, there's a threshold above which more money is just more money and doesn't really matter (depending on the person). But the difference between 30k/year and what might be 60-80k/year if there was a lower piracy rate would probably drive me nuts because that's the difference between making a living doing something and not.

rome 16y ago
Just because 70% of people pirate the software doesn't mean that 100% of them would have bought it.
- bialecki 16y ago
  Right, that's why I said 30k/yr might become 60-80k/yr, implying that of those 70% maybe 40-80% would actually buy it if they couldn't pirate it.
  - rome 16y ago
    It's a number that may be impossible to account for. Heres a study concerning illegal music file sharers, it turns out that they spent more money on music than people who don't share music illegally. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloade... Just like radio (play for free) increases album sales for record labels. This suggests that "lost sales" may mean a product that is not worth buying to some.
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
I'm glad you got something from the numbers in that article because I didn't. Something about 1% of the registered users coming in the last 24 hours? And a million out of 600,000 being such-and-such. Is there some place other than that puff piece to get real MineCraft numbers from?

olivercameron 16y ago

What gripes me most about pirates is that a lot still feel they have some form of entitlement for support. For example, I get emails all the time saying "I'll pay for the app, but only if you provide feature X and fix bug Y, until then, it's just not worth 99 cents.".

sanj 16y ago

If only that were actually true. Colin Messitt actually ran an experiment to figure this out. I reposted it about 15 years ago with his permission: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990420024127/http://scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose.html http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990420024127/http://scraw...

leon_ 16y ago

Oh please, can't we keep those piracy apologist posts away from HN? It's bad enough that gamasutra.com's comments are flooded with those "I pirate games because piracy = freedom"-kids. I don't think this kind of discussion would enrich HN in any positive way.

mkr-hn 16y ago
This isn't a piracy apologist post. This is an article about the creator of a wildly successful game saying piracy isn't as big a deal as people make out of it.

citricsquid 16y ago

The thing almost everyone seems to be ignoring is Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it. It seems almost everyone is taking what he has said as justification of piracy, "oh well he's rich now and he doesn't mind piracy so it must be okay for me to pirate!". If we ask him whether or not he thinks people should pirate he'll not say "yes, do it" he'll say "Well I'd rather you bought it, but if you're not going to then you may as well play it for free as I'd rather you play my game than go without, and I'm not going to spend millions trying to stop you... but I'd prefer if you paid for it".

naner 16y ago
Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it. This is kind of where I always stood (I don't pirate personally, though). If you're selling some intellectual property, you can sell a bazillion copies with almost no production costs. You produce once and then copy for (almost) free. Now that everyone has the ability to copy, that massive advantage is somewhat tempered. It isn't quite the wild west, which is good. If piracy was easy and convenient it would eviscerate sales. Most people can't figure out or don't bother with piracy and blatant piracy is legally squashed (in the developed world, at least). There's not much you can do but accept it as a cost of doing business and soldier on.

pnathan 16y ago

What I hear is that there is a vested interest by the common consumer in Getting Stuff For Free. I like free stuff too. But believe me, I'd rather put in some registration features to "keep people honest" than to let myself be ripped off.

lotusleaf1987 16y ago

"No big studio picked up the film [Ink] for theatrical and home distribution. Double Edge Films pitched the movie directly to independent cinemas and to the DVD, Blu-ray and online distribution by themselves. After the release it became the most downloaded movies in file sharing torrent sites more accurately 400,000 times in a single week and exposed the film to a large audience, leading to higher DVD and Blu-ray sales in return. The independent filmmakers wrote in their newsletter that they had "embraced the piracy" and are "happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure." : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia

iterationx 16y ago

Piracy first increases product visibility and increases overall sales until a saturation point is reached. Once market visibility is achieved then piracy represents a loss of sales. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24446/is-there-a-list-of-software-companies-that-have-gone-out-of-business-due-to-pirac/24525#24525 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24446/is-ther... As for the X is or is not theft discussions, let's see what Richard Feynman has to say about it: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

mlellsworth 16y ago

Minecraft is mind boggling from a business perspective AND a gaming perspective. Are there any other communities that are similar to Minecraft that anyone can think of? I just find it fascinating that a game like Minecraft has such an involved ecosystem around it.

blahblahblah 16y ago

Actually, piracy is theft. Specifically, it's a form of robbery that takes place at sea. The attempt to equate the crime of copyright infringement with piracy is a gross misuse of the English language. When a ship of Somali bandits with AK47s boards your yacht, murders everyone on board (or leaves them stranded somewhere), and takes everything of value -- that's piracy. When a college student downloads warez, bittorrents "Pirates of the Carribean", or downloads the new Lady Gaga album through a P2P app -- that's copyright infringement. When the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA use the word "piracy" to describe the latter activity -- that's propaganda.