7 ms·

The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me. Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is in

The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me. Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you. That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about, literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive. We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some cases, but I personally believe people would still create all kinds of stuff, if not more. Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a copyright violation. These words mean different things.

vimy 6y ago
Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.
- dcow 6y ago
  In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a world where the act of creating copies itself takes work. You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games. Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  > Theft is taking something without paying for it. According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial. For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    > According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. In many jurisdictions, it legally is. Morally, I agree that's bullshit.
- musicale 6y ago
  > Theft is taking something without paying for it But taking something without paying for it is not always theft; and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft. Most importantly, copyright infringement, unlicensed use, and piracy usually fall into the category of "IP theft," which differs from real theft of physical property in important ways such as the harm caused to the owner (e.g. potential lost sales or licensing revenue vs. losing a physical item) as well as associated penalties and remedies. > In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it. You're paying for the file and the rights to use it.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    >and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft. A lot of countries already have this. There's an additional tax on media storage devices such as CDs, HDDs etc. The money is then given to some copyright association that supposedly hands some of it out to the content creators.
    - account42 6y ago
      A lot of countries have copyright levies. In most of them this does unfortunately not give you the right to copy things freely. It really should though.
mindcandy 6y ago
The semantic details are a distraction. Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome. In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it. Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect. Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I am not pirating games (not since 2012 and then back in 2008 anyway). I am also a programmer, not quite the gray neckbeard but I've seen my fair share of Windows MFC and Java Swing back in the day (since we're talking about desktop GUI programs as well as games). And we all want to be paid for our work. But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right? I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO. Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws. One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy. We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off. Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
You're not stealing an object, you're stealing the use value of a product. As a rule, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. So effectively you're stealing that license and the income it would generate for the creator. Music and other media are the same. You don't pay for the bits, you pay for a license to access and enjoy those bits. Which is why it doesn't matter if the delivery system is paper tape, carrier pigeon, optical media, or instant download from a server.
- frongpik 6y ago
  Meh, that's a weak argument. The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object. In the world if matter, things have copies and we can count them. In the world of knowledge there's no such concept and it lives by different rules. RIAA and other luddites try to turn ideas into stones to sell them.
  - tester34 6y ago
    >The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object. so things that have low cost of materials / low cost of delivery, but high cost of skills required shouldn't be expensive? or what? I don't understand how is this even relevant that software can be distributed very cheaply. Creating software, or even better - the game requires significant investment and risk, so I don't understand how anyone would want to act as if that pirating was OK.
    - frongpik 6y ago
      I was trying to say that the reason we have this paradox of "pirated bytes" that simultaneously causes losses and doesn't cause losses is that we try to impose rules of the material world onto the world of ideas. I'd argue that software isn't built, but discovered and selling the same knowledge of how to sail the discovered island is a challenge, as we know. SaaS is essentially hiding that knowledge and selling bits of derived knowledge specific to each customer. SaaS doesn't attempt to sell the same knowledge twice. Otoh, the movies and music industry hasn't figured out this derived knowledge trick, so it struggles.
simonh 6y ago
People can give away stuff for free right now if they want, so I don’t see what you mean by the “if not more” comment. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, I joust wonder what you mean. A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre software never took over the world the way many of its proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many applications take more than just coding chops to create, it takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers, market research and domain experts dependent on the market segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take a huge capital investment to put all that together and that money needs to be made back somehow. Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It’s a serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can work wonders, but not all music and associated material can be produced in a bedroom.
- csallen 6y ago
  The world we have today is built around the laws we have today. People sink many tens or hundreds of millions into copyable content in part because they know the laws guarantee they'll be able to make a profit doing that. But if those laws didn't exist, we'd simply have a world where resources are allocated differently, and it's really quite impossible to say that world would be a worse one. You can imagine a world in which we have laws allowing broad recipes to be patented. For example, some restaurant chain might register the patent for spaghetti, and you could only ever eat spaghetti at their chain. 100 years from now, we'd likely have some MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains that spend ridiculous amounts of money on developing new and unique recipes they can monopolize. And someone from that era might say, "What if we stopped allowing this?" And someone could reply, "But tens of millions of dollars are spent on this. It's big business!" And they would be right ofc. It's a factually true statement. But… so what? I don't mind living in a world where everyone can remix everyone else's recipes, even if it means we don't end up with MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains. Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences. Not necessarily worse imo.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yesenadam 6y ago
> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. It seems you haven't considered the point of view of, say, someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living. I hope you can imagine how it would sound to that person when you tell them that the world is "actually just a better more abundant place now" you have got their music without paying for it, and they're out of a livelihood. I think that, at best, it would sound like you haven't thought much at all about what you're saying and how it applies to the real world and the people in it.
- dnautics 6y ago
  What? There's plenty of musicians that feel as the gp. Even solo full length animated movie makers.
  - manicdee 6y ago
    That's no comfort for the people trying to make a living from their work.
    - account42 6y ago
      And? People can adapt. [0] Creating laws to artificially restrict technological advancements in order to protect one specific class of jobs is insanity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations
      - manicdee 6y ago
        I'm not sure how you expect content creators to create content when they're not creating content anymore. How do they "adapt" to putting food on the table when they're not getting paid for the work they do?
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Aside from the unhelpful "What?", that seems like DH4 Counterargument in pg's disagreement hierarchy[0], subtype "arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said". Presumably "someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living", the people I was talking about, won't "feel as the gp". It doesn't seem like your criticism really touched on what I said. (Maybe you are also assuming "No-one is entitled to make a living selling their music" or something like that.) [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
httpsterio 6y ago
If I had a basic income and it'd be risk free to create arts, sure. If agree with you in that case. But games, music, visual art, after a certain degree require so much time and effort that it's not viable or fun to do as a hobby of you need to earn a living elsewhere. I would've out out my debut album out years ago if I didn't need to worry and stress about rent.
- account42 6y ago
  I agree that UBI would be a greate complement to a post-copyright world. That does not mean that it is required though, selling bits is not the only way to fund the creation of those bits.
jeswin 6y ago
> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. As a creator, there are many things I want people to copy, fork and share - all my open source stuff. Then there are things for which I expect to get paid for - my training videos. I'll be upset if someone started distributing or copying them for free. As a creator I should be able to make that decision - not the consumer. Or you are claiming that digital goods are not goods at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- csallen 6y ago
  Yes, this is why we have copyright law. But it's important to realize that the law is artificially creating a viable business model, and your expectation to get paid is based on that artificial creation. There are theoretically infinitely many business models that don't work well in reality, so nobody has them as a career, that we could create laws to artificially protect.
mping 6y ago
You can define theft as taking what was not given. Piracy is theft in this case.
- ric2b 6y ago
  If you show me a cool wood car you built and I go home and make one for myself, did I steal it from you? In what way is copying "taking something"?

vimy 6y ago

Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.

dcow 6y ago
In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a world where the act of creating copies itself takes work. You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games. Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
c1ccccc1 6y ago
> Theft is taking something without paying for it. According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial. For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.
- anoncake 6y ago
  > According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. In many jurisdictions, it legally is. Morally, I agree that's bullshit.
musicale 6y ago
> Theft is taking something without paying for it But taking something without paying for it is not always theft; and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft. Most importantly, copyright infringement, unlicensed use, and piracy usually fall into the category of "IP theft," which differs from real theft of physical property in important ways such as the harm caused to the owner (e.g. potential lost sales or licensing revenue vs. losing a physical item) as well as associated penalties and remedies. > In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it. You're paying for the file and the rights to use it.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft. A lot of countries already have this. There's an additional tax on media storage devices such as CDs, HDDs etc. The money is then given to some copyright association that supposedly hands some of it out to the content creators.
  - account42 6y ago
    A lot of countries have copyright levies. In most of them this does unfortunately not give you the right to copy things freely. It really should though.

mindcandy 6y ago

The semantic details are a distraction. Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome. In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it. Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect. Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.

pdimitar 6y ago
I am not pirating games (not since 2012 and then back in 2008 anyway). I am also a programmer, not quite the gray neckbeard but I've seen my fair share of Windows MFC and Java Swing back in the day (since we're talking about desktop GUI programs as well as games). And we all want to be paid for our work. But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right? I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO. Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws. One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy. We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off. Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

You're not stealing an object, you're stealing the use value of a product. As a rule, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. So effectively you're stealing that license and the income it would generate for the creator. Music and other media are the same. You don't pay for the bits, you pay for a license to access and enjoy those bits. Which is why it doesn't matter if the delivery system is paper tape, carrier pigeon, optical media, or instant download from a server.

frongpik 6y ago
Meh, that's a weak argument. The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object. In the world if matter, things have copies and we can count them. In the world of knowledge there's no such concept and it lives by different rules. RIAA and other luddites try to turn ideas into stones to sell them.
- tester34 6y ago
  >The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object. so things that have low cost of materials / low cost of delivery, but high cost of skills required shouldn't be expensive? or what? I don't understand how is this even relevant that software can be distributed very cheaply. Creating software, or even better - the game requires significant investment and risk, so I don't understand how anyone would want to act as if that pirating was OK.
  - frongpik 6y ago
    I was trying to say that the reason we have this paradox of "pirated bytes" that simultaneously causes losses and doesn't cause losses is that we try to impose rules of the material world onto the world of ideas. I'd argue that software isn't built, but discovered and selling the same knowledge of how to sail the discovered island is a challenge, as we know. SaaS is essentially hiding that knowledge and selling bits of derived knowledge specific to each customer. SaaS doesn't attempt to sell the same knowledge twice. Otoh, the movies and music industry hasn't figured out this derived knowledge trick, so it struggles.

simonh 6y ago

People can give away stuff for free right now if they want, so I don’t see what you mean by the “if not more” comment. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, I joust wonder what you mean. A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre software never took over the world the way many of its proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many applications take more than just coding chops to create, it takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers, market research and domain experts dependent on the market segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take a huge capital investment to put all that together and that money needs to be made back somehow. Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It’s a serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can work wonders, but not all music and associated material can be produced in a bedroom.

csallen 6y ago
The world we have today is built around the laws we have today. People sink many tens or hundreds of millions into copyable content in part because they know the laws guarantee they'll be able to make a profit doing that. But if those laws didn't exist, we'd simply have a world where resources are allocated differently, and it's really quite impossible to say that world would be a worse one. You can imagine a world in which we have laws allowing broad recipes to be patented. For example, some restaurant chain might register the patent for spaghetti, and you could only ever eat spaghetti at their chain. 100 years from now, we'd likely have some MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains that spend ridiculous amounts of money on developing new and unique recipes they can monopolize. And someone from that era might say, "What if we stopped allowing this?" And someone could reply, "But tens of millions of dollars are spent on this. It's big business!" And they would be right ofc. It's a factually true statement. But… so what? I don't mind living in a world where everyone can remix everyone else's recipes, even if it means we don't end up with MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains. Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences. Not necessarily worse imo.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yesenadam 6y ago

> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. It seems you haven't considered the point of view of, say, someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living. I hope you can imagine how it would sound to that person when you tell them that the world is "actually just a better more abundant place now" you have got their music without paying for it, and they're out of a livelihood. I think that, at best, it would sound like you haven't thought much at all about what you're saying and how it applies to the real world and the people in it.

dnautics 6y ago
What? There's plenty of musicians that feel as the gp. Even solo full length animated movie makers.
- manicdee 6y ago
  That's no comfort for the people trying to make a living from their work.
  - account42 6y ago
    And? People can adapt. [0] Creating laws to artificially restrict technological advancements in order to protect one specific class of jobs is insanity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations
    - manicdee 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you expect content creators to create content when they're not creating content anymore. How do they "adapt" to putting food on the table when they're not getting paid for the work they do?
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Aside from the unhelpful "What?", that seems like DH4 Counterargument in pg's disagreement hierarchy[0], subtype "arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said". Presumably "someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living", the people I was talking about, won't "feel as the gp". It doesn't seem like your criticism really touched on what I said. (Maybe you are also assuming "No-one is entitled to make a living selling their music" or something like that.) [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

httpsterio 6y ago

If I had a basic income and it'd be risk free to create arts, sure. If agree with you in that case. But games, music, visual art, after a certain degree require so much time and effort that it's not viable or fun to do as a hobby of you need to earn a living elsewhere. I would've out out my debut album out years ago if I didn't need to worry and stress about rent.

account42 6y ago
I agree that UBI would be a greate complement to a post-copyright world. That does not mean that it is required though, selling bits is not the only way to fund the creation of those bits.

jeswin 6y ago

> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. As a creator, there are many things I want people to copy, fork and share - all my open source stuff. Then there are things for which I expect to get paid for - my training videos. I'll be upset if someone started distributing or copying them for free. As a creator I should be able to make that decision - not the consumer. Or you are claiming that digital goods are not goods at all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
csallen 6y ago
Yes, this is why we have copyright law. But it's important to realize that the law is artificially creating a viable business model, and your expectation to get paid is based on that artificial creation. There are theoretically infinitely many business models that don't work well in reality, so nobody has them as a career, that we could create laws to artificially protect.

mping 6y ago

You can define theft as taking what was not given. Piracy is theft in this case.

ric2b 6y ago
If you show me a cool wood car you built and I go home and make one for myself, did I steal it from you? In what way is copying "taking something"?