4 ms·

Piggybacking off of this comment, I’d be very curious to know the HN sentiment on piracy as a whole Net good, net bad, somewhere in between?

• bruce511 4y ago
  As one who makes a living selling software, I'm against piracy, and would prefer people to be honest. I prefer not to pirate myself if it's avoidable. That said, I'm aware my stuff is pirated, for various reasons, and I pretty much ignore that. Pirate users might turn into customers one day. I make minimal effort to prevent piracy, mostly to make sure the experience for paid users is as simple and streamlined as possible. I prefer to consume my media via paid channels, and that is easy and convenient (and cheap) to do (now) so that's much easier to do now than it was 20 years ago. My attitude to open source licensing is the same. I'll happily integrate MIT licensed material into commercial offerings, but I respect the rights of GPL authors, and I understand that is off the table. I believe authors have a right to choose the license they want, commercial, open or free, and it's up to me to respect that right.
• nl 4y ago
  It's a mistake to think there is a general "HN sentiment" In general my view is "piracy bad, working around geo-blocks ok". Interestingly this roughly reflects the view of regulators in my jurisdiction[1]: > The Productivity Commission (PC) in December 2016 recommended that the Government make it easier for consumers to access legitimate copyright-protected content by: > amending the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) to make clear that the circumvention of geo-blocking technology by consumers is not an infringement of copyright; and > avoiding international obligations that would prevent or ban consumers from circumventing geo-blocking technology. > the ACCC supported the PC’s recommendation, [1] https://incompetition.com.au/2017/12/blocking-geo-blocking/ https://incompetition.com.au/2017/12/blocking-geo-blocking/