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Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

• pessimizer 15y ago
  Stealing a cake is definitely theft, then.
• andreyvit 15y ago
  On morality: given how widespread the piracy is, we probably shouldn't assert that the moral side of the things is obvious here. Regarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change. (Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)
  • blottsie 15y ago
    The morality question isn't necessarily obvious, but the pervasiveness of a particular activity has nothing to do with its morality. Was slavery more morally correct when the majority approved of it, or at least looked the other way? Absolutely not.
    • kmm 15y ago
      Actually, it was. You can't judge the morality of practices from the past from your present point of view. You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one. Not to mention that software piracy is on a completely other level than slavery.
      • blottsie 15y ago
        > You can't judge the morality of practices from the past from your present point of view. Cultural relativism is certainly a valid school of ethical thought — one with which I happen to disagree. On matters like piracy, which is certainly less detrimental to society than slavery was, the consequences for believing what is popular and what is right are relatively low. But to suggest that you can apply this principle across the board, in all situations, is, in my view, absurd. You're suggesting there that we cannot judge anything that has happened in the past because our views on the matter are now different. But that means we cannot judge ANYTHING that has happened EVER because, by definition, now is different from then. > You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one. I'm not. I'm just not convinced that, because a certain activity is widespread, it is therefore morally correct.
        • icebraining 15y ago
          Has it been proven that "piracy" is detrimental at all to society?
        • kmm 15y ago
          I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. What I try to say is that you can't judge both piracy and slavery from your present point of view. I feel that because in the past slavery was commonly accepted, that it was morally justified then. In the same way, given the huge proliferation of piracy, I feel that copyright infringement is somewhat morally justified now. This view might change and in the same way, the morality of piracy might change too. I would take the common views of society as the definition of what is morally justified and what isn't. It is possible you see this in another way and that is fine (and not absurd). Also, this change in zeitgeist is continuous, not as discrete as you overstate it is. We are perfectly justified to judge what has happened yesterday. Judging what happened during World War II is murkier and judging what happened when slavery was still extant is an almost meaningless activity.
    • zerostar07 15y ago
      Morals are not natural laws. People did not generally feel guilty or immoral for using slaves until the morals themselves changed. Similarly today with piracy: it doesn't feel morally wrong enough to warrant legal action to the minds of many. There needs to be a larger discussion about what is intellectual property (in fact, whether it exists) in the digital age. Legal experts should be discussing these issues but they seem too occupied with chasing pirates.
      • cicero 15y ago
        If we are going to reduce morality to the way a majority feels about an issue, then in a democratic society, does it make any sense to differentiate between morality and legality? Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority? How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral? (Note: I believe morals are natural laws. They are just not as easy to discern as physical laws because it is harder for us to be morally neutral observers.)
        • zerostar07 15y ago
          Many people think that way about their own morals, that's the problem.
        • icebraining 15y ago
          If we are going to reduce morality to the way a majority feels about an issue, then in a democratic society, does it make any sense to differentiate between morality and legality? Of course it does, for two reasons: first, there is still a difference between the morality of an individual and of society as a group. Secondly, the fact that society fells something is wrong doesn't mean it has to feel OK with giving the State power to crush it. A good example is Free Speech. Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority? That would depend on a more pure and direct democracy. But generally they do; when the difference between them becomes too great, people tend to revolt. But you should remember what I said above: people might feel its wrong to legally punish wrong actions. There's no contradictions in this. How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral? Assuming morality is relative, there's no such thing as an immoral law, because morality is not a property of a thing, but a relationship between a person (or a group of them) and that thing. So I can say Proposition 8 is immoral, if I find it immoral. Which doesn't mean it's immoral for another person or society in general. Note: I believe morals are natural laws. I always found that interesting, because I never found any evidence for that. In what do you base your belief? Or is it pure faith?
• twelvechairs 15y ago
  About as poor a post on piracy as the rest of them - not dealing with half the issues. You could have just posted this in one of the previous threads.
• Apreche 15y ago
  The only problem I have with this article is this line: "since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?" Legally obliged to pay for? Yes. Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality.
  • Jem 15y ago
    > "Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality." I assume, therefore, that you invite those with an interest in sadomasochism to inflict pain on you? (No, I don't think sadomasochism and piracy are alike, but the idea of making and breaking laws based on what one person is happy to have done to them is IMO ridiculous.)
  • pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    So, your boss will be happy he doesn't have to pay you. The question is how're you going to afford to live and how long will you work for someone who doesn't pay you anything? Don't get me wrong I'm for communism and intentional communities; but are you really advocating that?
    • krig 15y ago
      Your argument makes no sense. If my boss doesn't pay me, I'm not working for him. Thus, he is no longer my boss. How is that relevant to the morality issue of piracy? Do you mean in the sense that if I pirate something, the creator of that something doesn't get paid and thus doesn't create the thing that I pirated? But that argument is backwards. If you mean that no more things will be produced in a world with piracy, that's demonstrably false. We've had rampant piracy since the first printing press, the world we live in now is not free from piracy, yet there's more creative work created every year.
      • 15y ago
• rejectedstone 15y ago
  It is easier to steal a Twinkie than it is to wait in line and have to pay for it, and then wait for your change. Then you have all those damn coins in your pocket...
  • shintoist 15y ago
    Maybe if you had to sign terms and conditions, you were unable to share it with friends, resell it and sometimes, sometimes you don't even get to eat it, because the wrapper wont recognize your hand!
• stasm 15y ago
  My thoughts exactly. You can't force a privately-owned company to sell you the product the way you want it to be sold. It's their right to make money the way they see fit, and if they decide it's okay for them to lose some of the clientele over DRM, it's their choice. Piracy in the name of protesting against DRM is borderline hypocrisy. As others already said, morality is subjective, but here are two other ways I'd personally support : - don't use the product, - pay for the license, pirate the product, get it touch with the company to explain your problem to them.
• fastviper 15y ago
  Hm.. this article is mental slavery. Also it misses the point that some laws are passed being backed up by well-paid lies. So breaking the law can no longer be any moral issue. Example: * speed limits * never-ending copyright * exporting cryptography
  • wazoox 15y ago
    People looks for excuses, and I suppose conflating different things like speed limits, copyright and cryptography is some way to nullify their possible importance. These are not on the same level: * speeding and more generally, driving misbehaviour are directly responsible for deaths. * Pirating software and music never killed anyone, but is about maximizing profits for some corporations. * limiting cryptography is about government control, and is almost only a political matter. Law can change the way people behave, notwithstanding their agreement : Speed limits have been enforced much more severely in France in the past few years and guess what, people are speeding much less now. I, myself, changed too: I used to drive at 180 kph quite casually, and I don't anymore. In the same time, road casualties fell significantly, though of course this is for a large part because cars are much safer than they used to be (thank you to Euro-NCAP). Almost everybody complains about the speed limits, the radars everywhere, higher fines, but it's hard to deny that the policy was efficient, and that it's good. Now copyright is an entirely different matter. Copyright is only about maximizing profits; extremely tight and severely enforced copyright, or the absence of it, wouldn't change our lives that much, anyway.
    • learc83 15y ago
      In the United States speed limits are not enforced for safety. They are instead a revenue stream for local government. Relative speed kills, and if police were really concerned about safety they would prevent people from driving too slowly for traffic conditions as well as too fast. I'll give you a similar example from recent news. Over the last few years, many towns have installed red light cameras. However, many local governments have discovered that red light cameras work too well. After people got used to them, they stopped running red lights, and the revenue from citations dried up. Guess what happened? Towns started removing red light cameras even though they enforced safer driving.
• realschool 15y ago
  The author makes a good point, everyone wants to blame someone else and not take responsibility.
• wazoox 15y ago
  I solved this problem the "hard" way a long time ago. I don't use windows, at all, but GNU/Linux (Yeah, I'm this sort of guy, too). And you know what, as time goes by it's actually less and less of an actual problem; heck, I was even able to buy games for my box this year, thank you Humble Bundle! OK, this isn't free software, but at least you don't feel like you've been anally raped with barbed wire. And music? Well, I still buy CDs, mostly; the time when CDs came with DRM apparently faded away, so I don't even need to screen for this anymore (yes, I've actively boycotted some artists because of this for a while). From time to time, for music I don't actually care about, I buy mp3s from Amazon. I don't write this to emphasize my moral superiority but to emphasize that it isn't that hard. You don't agree with their policy? don't buy the frigging stuff.
  • kmm 15y ago
    I did the same thing, some five years ago. But what if someone can't go to Linux or OS X because this person needs software that is Windows-only or doesn't have the time or knowledge to learn a new operating system? Just shouting "don't buy the frigging stuff" isn't going to stop them.
    • wazoox 15y ago
      > this person needs software that is Windows-only Frankly, when I first migrated I spent a long time making Wine to work properly with various pieces of software, and I finally never actually used it because there are alternatives to about everything. Maybe they're not always as good as their counterparts, but in the end they get the job done. I've shared word documents with OpenOffice, I've drawn billboards and websites with Inkscape and GIMP, and it's good enough.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • sequoia 15y ago
    I agree with you but I'm voting down. There's no need to use violent rape analogies when talking about someone requiring you to activate over the phone. Turn it down a notch please.
• acg 15y ago
  If copyright were just to protect the investment of a company in development of an artist or product I'd broadly agree with this argument. Where copyright seems objectionable to me, is where the initial cost of development was non-existent or large profits have been made for years. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Royalty_amounts_sought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Royalty_a... For some copyright to last 95 years seems more like profiteering than protection of the creative industries considering creation is often based on the work of others. I don't condone piracy, but I think piracy would be far less socially acceptable if: - the creator can be seen to benefit from their work - copyright better resembled its original intent of protecting investment in the creation of something new and not staking ownership over the work of others.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    Playing "happy birthday to you" in public might be a legit act of civil disobedience . Pirating last weeks blockbuster isn't.
    • bitmonk 15y ago
      That's an opinion. Stating opinion as fact is a worthless contribution, in fact a detriment, to healthy discussion. I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way: Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.
      • jiggy2011 15y ago
        What's your point? I should prefix every sentence with "I think", people here are smart enough to put things in context. Legal means of acquiring music is pretty simple. Legal DRM Free MP3 downloads are built into my music player and I'm a linux user.
• kmm 15y ago
  The law is nothing but a piece of paper. I'm glad it exists, as it provides a framework that protects me from harm and allows me to life my live, but I feel no moral obligation at all to follow it. This style of argumentation is starting to tire me. Obviously, this author thinks piracy is morally wrong. Other people have no such moral qualms about piracy. Both points of view are fine! But implicitly or explicitly using morality as an argument for or against piracy is a bad style of argumentation and is almost an ad hominem. If I were to say that I am for piracy and someone told me that this was morally wrong, I would pay no attention to this person. But if he were to say that he personally feels piracy is morally wrong AND if he were to give me an argument as to why he feels that way, I would listen to this argument and at least think about it.
  • mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    Except moral relativism is not any more defensible. Suppose the creator of a work asks you to pay for it, but a pirate chooses not to. Why shouldn't we call the pirate an asshole? They've disrespected the terms of use set by the author, as well as the author themselves. It's that simple.
    • Karunamon 15y ago
      I'm perfectly okay with the "Pirates are assholes" stance. I am an asshole. I admit this. What I'm not okay with is when industry groups distort facts by trying to get one crime confused as a completely separate crime. Make no mistake.. both are crimes, but the attempt is to bring the loaded meanings of one term to a completely different word. It's factually incorrect, and it needs to stop. It's that simple.
      • mattgreenrocks 15y ago
        +1 to you, and this is correct. The industry doesn't get called out by Congress when it claims billions of dollars of lost revenue by people who wouldn't have paid either way. Of course, I've come to believe that intellectual honesty is a cognitive luxury for most people; especially politicians.
• rplst8 15y ago
  "if you want to protest the crappy way these companies treat their customers, don't buy their stuff. but you can't have your cake and eat it. protest by not using or having it at all. they have something you want; even if you don't agree with their methods, it is still theirs to decide what to do with. all you are doing is supporting the industry in their drive to stamp out pirates; instead, support legal ways of obtaining this content through spotify and others. " The one fault I see with this argument (mainly related to music) is this: There is no way to simply boycott the the recording companies' products without boycotting the artists as well. Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover. While US contract law supports this arrangement, the model is broken in today's world of digital distribution.
  • larrik 15y ago
    That's a good point. The next best thing may be to only buy used CDs. Then you legally get the music AND annoy them at the same time. Of course, you COULD actually boycott the artists. There are tons of independent musicians on the internet you can support. If you think that only the big label ones are worth your time and money, then clearly your opinions on the big labels themselves are unfounded. (Just to be clear, all of the above "you"s refer not to the parent, but to everyone in general)
  • michael_dorfman 15y ago
    Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover. And that's the artist's choice. The artist could choose to distribute their work in some other fashion. So, if you want the artist's product, you have to buy it via the means chosen by that artist.
• jiggy2011 15y ago
  I don't know about the morals of this but I do know that if we hadn't pirated as gratuitously for the last 10 years we wouldn't have DRM or Walled Gardens to the extent we do today. I think the content industries will decide we can't be trusted with our toys anymore and move them all to the cloud where we can peek at them for a monthly fee.
  • larrik 15y ago
    I disagree. In my experience as a consultant and graphic designer (actually fronting for my wife, I'm not really a designer), everyone who isn't a young internet-savvy type just freaks out at the idea that people might "steal" stuff of their website. They constantly ask if there is way to let users/visitors see PDFs or other parts of their website without people being able to download them. I, of course, tell them that downloading is actually an unavoidable requirement to the user seeing anything at all, etc. Some simply don't post as much as they would have. My point is that DRM would likely always be the first idea a content owner thinks of when they consider putting something on any digital medium. (Also consider that DRM existed long before the internet, in the earliest software and games. It just wasn't as fancy.)
• mikeash 15y ago
  I don't really understand these posts that simply declare that the correct choice is not to use their stuff, that piracy is wrong, and it's not your choice. I happen to agree with the overall conclusion that one should seek alternatives in these cases, but this is just an argument by shouting. It's foolish to simply declare, "it's not your choice". Clearly, people think it is their choice. If you want to convince them, you had better back it up with reasoning. The right to control is simply not an obvious, mostly-universally-held right like the right not to be murdered or the right to physical property. The copyright debate is getting awfully stale. I wish the participants would come up with something new to say instead of just constantly declaring that piracy is not allowed on one side and that piracy doesn't hurt anybody on the other side.
  • funkah 15y ago
    I agree. It seems folks have dug in and staked out their positions, much as they have with abortion, and are now just screaming at each other from across the chasm. Awfully stale indeed.
    • alexqgb 15y ago
      At the same time, some positions are clearly less informed than others. And there seem to a fair number of mindless idiots on either side, serving no purpose aside from getting the mindless idiots on the other side so riled up that the screaming din makes intelligent debate exceedingly difficult in any remotely public setting. The reality is that copyright law evolved over the course of three centuries during which the ability to duplicate and distribute was exceedingly capital-intensive, and therefor, practiced only on an industrial scale, by well capitalized industrialists. Not surprisingly, the law became industrial law, with all the trappings (like expensive corporate lawyers) that are par for the course at that level, but entirely out of reach for independent citizens. Regardless of your position, we can all agree that if the power to duplicate and widely distribute HAD been available to independent citizens for the last 300 years, then the contours of copyright law (if there even were such a thing) would look VERY different today. In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost. Trying to make it work would be like trying to impose a law that only permits domestic imports via rail on the state of Hawaii. So now that we have the internet, the law needs to change - a lot. And under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it's pure insanity to think that the people won't have a major say in deciding exactly how far property right should be allowed to go in the intellectual realm. We already place very firm boundaries on their scope by way of Fair Use, limited terms, support for the Public Domain, and so on. And it's high time we placed a few more.
• insickness 15y ago
  One can say that record labels brought the piracy problem on themselves by looking to create barriers to content while pirates worked to create access to content. However, it's erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to pirate because the industry created barriers to their own content. It's counterproductive to the anti-censorship movement. Instead, we should focus on the fact that the music industry has been anti-effective and is now using censorship to compensate for their reluctance to change.
  • tux1968 15y ago
    You're right, and it's just as erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to payment every time someone shares a new copy of his creation. Competing interests will often be in conflict, and that's what we're seeing in this debate. You can safely translate "a right to piracy" to "no moral obligation to respect copyright". Once the moral argument is dismissed, all that remains is pragmatic conflict resolution. One side could be destroyed, a compromise could be found, or a protracted conflict could ensue. In any case, moral arguments from either side are mostly useless.
• JulianMorrison 15y ago
  The law is just a thing I follow to avoid inconvenience, when necessary. It's completely distinct from my morality. And, my morality simply does not see copying as stealing, pirating, thermonuclear mass-murder, or whatever blood curdling words you use to label it. It remains copying, and is fine.
  • lachyg 15y ago
    Why don't you see it as immoral or stealing? These companies spend millions on these movies, countless people work on them and depend on them for their wages (not just the actors, but the support crew, the caterers, the make up artists, the lighting crew, editing, post production, script writers, casting agents, location scouts, etc etc). They then charge people a small price for the right to view their work (either in the form of a subscription to Netflix, a movie ticket, an iTunes sale, or a DVD). Yet you think it's moral and fine to have this without paying the authors?
    • JulianMorrison 15y ago
      Because basically, I don't think that the trouble they go to creates an obligation in me in regard of my network, my hard drive, my screen.
      • hnal943 15y ago
        What a convenient morality you have. "I get to have what I want and have no obligation to anyone else." To bad it doesn't scale.
        • v0cab 15y ago
          (I agree with JulianMorrison.) Why doesn't it scale?
          • DanEdge 15y ago
            Because people who don't pirate stuff are subsidising those who do and if nobody paid for anything, new stuff wouldn't get made (or at least it wouldn't be available from those people who relied on the income from sales to make a living).
• etherael 15y ago
  Piracy isn't as desirable as a straight boycott of the parties that are currently trying to break the Internet, but at least pirates aren't feeding the beast. Those companies deserve complete destruction for what they have done
  • lachyg 15y ago
    What have they 'done'?
    • etherael 15y ago
      They have tried to destroy the internet, remember yesterday? As long as they exist they will keep on trying and as an existential threat to the internet I can't see how anyone can excuse continued support for them in any way. Better a boycott, but failing that piracy is still more ethical than feeding the beast.
      • lachyg 15y ago
        There is nothing ethical about pirating.
        • etherael 15y ago
          There is even less ethical about financially supporting companies that tried to buy laws that would destroy the net as we know it.
          • kingkilr 15y ago
            So you're claiming that anyone who buys a DVD or a CD is acting unethical? Support that.
            • etherael 15y ago
              Not if the item was produced by a a party other than the parties pushing for SOPA and its ilk. I think piracy is generally bad, I just think financing groups that want to destroy the internet is worse. Think of it as a transmogrification of the MPAA mandated warnings at the beginning of movies telling you that if you buy from pirates you're supporting drugs / terrorism / human smuggling / pick your poison. If you buy from SOPA supporters, you're supporting the death of the internet.
• mhb 15y ago
  Is Trademark Infringement Fraud?: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trademark-infringement-fraud/251358/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trade...
• jriddycuz 15y ago
  Yes, you actually can decide that you're not going to pay content distributors. If you regard IP as an illegitimate idea, then you can act on that.
• grandinj 15y ago
  We granted a limited legal monopoly to certain parties in order to encourage the growth of certain industries. Over time, that bargain has been severely corrupted by those industries. Piracy is the consequence. I'm sure that with time, and a more balanced approach to the granting of such monopolies, piracy will become less and less of a problem.
• sixbrx 15y ago
  I think the big drivers of music consumption must still depend on traditional media and corporations in a big way. Otherwise we'd have tech specialists hooking up directly with musicians and together they would have delivered the death blow to the traditional music distributors already. I think what's missing is the combination of talent-search + promotion. Most users just won't be proactive about searching through a bunch of no-name bands to find some music worth listening to.
• jxcole 15y ago
  Ok. I hope I'm not going against the rules of HN discourse here but I'd like to go out on a limb and say any article in which the author doesn't bother capitalizing the first word in his sentences is not an article I'm going to bother to read. One of the few things I miss about the world before the internet is a proper adherence to grammar. If he were ESL, I would be more forgiving, but this post just smacks of lazy writing.
  • joshmanders 15y ago
    you won't take 2 minutes to read the article for what it's worth, but will take 3+ minutes to write that you won't read it because he didn't capitalize his first word? haha. edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.
    • leoedin 15y ago
      It's an 85 word comment. Unless the author is unusually slow at typing (which is quite unlikely given the largely programmer-based audience here), it probably took them about a minute to write the comment. Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.
      • joshmanders 15y ago
        More more poking fun at the fact that he took more time to reply about why he wont read the article (which is ridiculous) than it would have taken to just read it and respond with valuable input instead of being snobby about it.
        • jarek 15y ago
          Reading this article, let alone reading and responding with valuable input, takes more time than writing a two-line comment, and not just because it's hard to scan sentences written without capital letters.
  • 15y ago
• tintin 15y ago
  Someone mentioned 3D printers in another post and got downvoted for it. But think about it. You invested a lot of time into creating an object everybody likes. People can get it in a online shop and it will be send to there address. Now a clever guy scans the object with a 3D scanner and is putting the model online. Everybody can now downloading the model on The Pirate Bay and print it at home. And they all say: "fuck that online store, it is way too much hassle and costs too much". It's a difficult discussion. Therefore I think it's way to easy to just call making a copy not stealing. Edit: the post by randomdata: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479581
• nerdfiles 15y ago
  Are we paying for a Premium or are we paying for the thing we actually want? They're taking things into their own hands by installed junk- and malware on my product. They're assuming I'm a thief before I've even walked through the door. Why should I pay for the time they wasted to deal with people who do purportedly "break the law." Moreover, it's not like with the music or software industries, these people lock themselves inside ivory towers and come out with a genius idea. Granted, there are genius ideas worth protecting, but those ideas protect themselves by their own internal integrity and passion of the thinker/creator/etc. Copyright law gives creators an artificial sense of entitlement, and the idea that their content is privileged somehow. That's the _default_ for a majority of the products we buy. And it simply isn't obviously true. There's too much clutter in the market as it stands for people to argument from absolutism like with in this article. A majority of this copyright discussion has an unrealistic assumption about _the state of things as they are now_. There's no transparency in these products. No sincerity.
• kingkilr 15y ago
  Not that I disagree with a word of this article, but he's accepting the premise of those two articles: that the distribution mechanisms are a worse UX than pirating. My response: Are you high? Once upon a time I pirated content, he's an approximate recap of what my expierience looked like: * Search pirate bay * Look at 2000 results, none of which look right. * Ok, found one. * Crap it's French with Arabic subtitles. * Ok this one looks good. * Shit, no seeders. * Ok, this one has seeders and is english. * Go get a bagel because it's going to take an hour to download. Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio, or hulu: * Search. * Press play. In my time using Netflix, rdio, hulu, and last.fm for my media needs there has been one title I couldn't find. EDIT: I'll be clear, my comments on these services apply exclusively to the US, I know nothing about the status of these services elsewhere.
  • Jugglernaut 15y ago
    Then again Netflix isn't available in Europe and there are huge holes in the catalogue of any streaming service. With that said I think Netflix will be huge in Europe or at least in my native Sweden. As for your pirate bay experience here is how it goes today: 1. Search for content. 2. Sort by seeders. 3. Click magnet link. 4. Start streaming from uTorrent. Total time consumed maybe a minute.
    • coob 15y ago
      Netflix is available in the UK
      • TheCapn 15y ago
        If its "available" in the UK in the same way that it is "available" in Canada then you're lying to yourself. They gimp the offerings on the foreign netflix due to licensing issues and it really hurts the service. I tried netflix but cancelled because the catalog of things aren't worth it.
  • DaveChild 15y ago
    Well, that's fine for people in the US. But for everyone else (i.e., the vast majority) for whom Hulu, netflix, etc are not available, the legal onlines alternatives are for the most part crap or missing the content you want.
• eslachance 15y ago
  My only issue here is "but don't decide to take the law into your own hands...it's not your decision." It's unfortunate that people feel that laws are simply things that are imposed on us by above and are outside our power. You don't simply bend over for the law to screw you over. Laws are there to be changed, they are there to be improved and prevented so that we can all benefit from them in the right way. But hey, if you want to bend over, be my guest.
  • roguecoder 15y ago
    Exactly. Jury nullification is a long-standing (and some argue necessary) part of democratic systems of justice. Basically, if laws are stupid and imposed on us by powerful people, juries should just refuse to enforce them. It is too bad this has fallen by the wayside. In general I think "it's the law" is a terrible reason to do anything: all it really does is shift the cost curves. Businesses routinely break the law when the fine is less than the money they make, but if regular people do the same thing suddenly it's Eeeevil.
• alper 15y ago
  Just this is enough justification: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EbhbPbkypPY/S4lILqwD3GI/AAAAAAAABsw/XXPtZ28lEu0/s400/dvd-piracy.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EbhbPbkypPY/S4lILqwD3GI/AAAAAAAABs...
• joshontheweb 15y ago
  Fact: People will pirate your software if you make it a pain to pay for it. Fact: People will pay for your software if you make it easy to pay for. Windows has proven this with their DRM. Apple has proven this with their app stores and itunes. In a slightly unrelated note: This is why I wish there was an app store for web apps. The web needs easy way to sell access to web apps like in the app store. If all I had to do was click 'purchase' and enter my password to get access to web apps like turntable.fm for a reasonable price, I would gladly pay. This would open up a whole new revenue model for web apps. There is a whole class of web apps that are trying to rely on ads now but don't have the millions of visitors a month to make that feasible. A web app store could provide a place for these lower traffic but still very useful and relevant products. I envy mobile developers since they have this avenue as an option. Anyone else feel this way?
• ap22213 15y ago
  I think that many people seem to believe that property is some intrinsic thing. But, in fact, property is a socially construed thing and a granted privilege. Furthermore, property means many things, and there are many different kinds. Each kind should be treated differently. Most of the confusion of 'piracy' (such a strong word, btw) stems from people misusing concepts related to physical objects and translating them equally to ephemeral things like 'intellectual-property' and 'digital-property'. The later things should be treated differently (in this person's opinion). 'Stealing' is a bad word. It's an age-old word that causes physical reaction in many. We learn very early on not to 'steal'. But, downloading a digitally compressed song is not the same thing as taking a toy from another kid. At some point, power has shifted from owning physical objects to these new sorts of things that aren't physical. We need new laws and new social norms. We need fair reasonable treatment, for these things. Sadly, the power-holders are writing the laws that grant themselves the most privileges. Instead, the society should write the laws that beget the best society.
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• tgrass 15y ago
  McArdle at the Atlantic explores this more in depth: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/how-much-does-file-sharing-resemble-stealing-and-does-it-matter/251277/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/how-much... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trademark-infringement-fraud/251358/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trade...
• jmduke 15y ago
  I completely agree (and its hypocritical of me, because I pirate too much for my own good, but due to financial reasons rather than 'moral' ones.) Pirating Windows still helps Microsoft, because its another computer not using a competing OS. That being said, I think it is a salient point that a pristine distribution system will curb the effects of privacy; Valve's Steam distribution venue is a great example of this.
• yangez 15y ago
  This article is interesting to read and think about from a theoretical perspective. Practically, though, it is completely and utterly useless. Fact 1: Pirating is possible and fairly easy across the board. Fact 2: Some content creators try to limit access to maintain "exclusivity" or to keep margins high. These guys get destroyed by piracy. Fact 3: Other services strive to make it as easy as possible to get their products legally - Steam, iTunes, the Louis CK experiment. Their stuff is pirated a lot less and they generate a bunch of goodwill on the side. These are facts, and no appeal to morality is going to change that. You can't just tell someone to suck it up and say it's not their "decision". Of course it's their decision - everyone decides whether or not to pirate! It is ABSOLUTELY their decision. The way to curb piracy is not to appeal to people's morality and tell people they SHOULD or SHOULDN'T do something. It's never going to work. Curb piracy by making it easier, safer, and more reliable to purchase legally rather than pirate. Articles like this do nothing but reinforce the author's sense of moral superiority.
  • Skroob 15y ago
    As creators, we can curb piracy by making it easier, safer and more reliable to purchase legally. As users, shouldn't we curb piracy by not pirating things?
    • Tim-Boss 15y ago
      As users we should, wherever possible, purchase media from the easier, safer and more reliable LEGITIMATE sources, and carry on pirating wherever the opposite is true ("locked down" content such as DRM, rootkits, cumbersome convoluted registrations and ages-long anti-piracy messages on legal media!) To put it another way, it seems we need a "carrot" (legally purchasing) approach to the 'good guys' creators/developers and "stick" (illegally downloading) approach to the arseholes who put rootkits on music CD's etc. ...thats my humble opinion anyway
    • burke 15y ago
      From a long-term perspective, it's probably more effective, as a user, to pirate everything that's not easily available for legal purchase, with the intent of making outdated, overpriced distribution channels unprofitable. I'm not trying to make the argument that this is ethical or anything, but purely from the perspective of solving the "piracy problem", I believe it would be the most effective.
• lhnz 15y ago
  > don't decide to take the law into your own hands...it's not your decision. If it's not my decision that means I should not be held responsible for what I do.
• shintoist 15y ago
  And here I thought civil disobedience was a proud American tradition.
• davorb 15y ago
  I do not feel that I am morally obliged to pay and I believe that the laws should be changed. We have IP rules when it comes to a musical composition and architecture. Why not in other areas such as hairstyles or recipes?
  • v0cab 15y ago
    Right. I'm a language teacher and I don't get paid when a student gets a job and uses something I taught him. I also don't get paid if that student becomes a language teacher and reuses lesson ideas he got from me.
• rodly 15y ago
  Property has the contingency of being owned. If it is not owned by anyone then it can be declared public property or non-usable estate. I will never understand why people seem to view digital content as different from physical content. The only difference is it lacks a sense of tangibility. You can only consume it with your eyes and "touch it" with your input devices. I believe as humans we tend to err on the selfish side far too often. If you found a $100 bill on the street you would quickly pick it up and walk away. If you found a $100 bill on the bank floor would you follow the same discourse? Of course you wouldn't. You might rationalize it is the right thing do to or you fear reprisal for taking it. The barrier to entry on any endeavor is the most substantial factor on whether you will commit. Meaning, people would steal and kill at a tremendous frequency if we didn't put consequences in place for such actions. Pirates (us, me, you) are simply children getting away with theft, in the infancy of the internet.
• TheCapn 15y ago
  I don't understand pirates that think downloading the content is a form of protest. If you want to make a change and win then you have to think like your opponent. This is how the greedy suits think: "Our product has sold X copies, but Y people downloaded it. That means there are X+Y people interested in my product! We must make it so X+Y people buy it and 0 download it!" NO! Stop! Bad pirates! By downloading the product you're telling the company you want their offerings but are too lazy or greedy or whatever. Vote with your wallet and avoid the product! That way when the suit looks at his charts he can figure out why no one wanted the product in the first place. If his inbox is chock full of "drop the DRM" then maybe he'll consider it. You are not making a stance by stealing it. You're reaffirming their decision to put on DRM and pass anti-piracy laws. You're giving them the excuse to invade your rights/privacy. Stop it.
  • sophacles 15y ago
    Stop with the disingenuous false dilemmas. A perfectly valid message is "we want what you offer on better terms". The actions strongly broadcast that message, perhaps better than just having an offering that doesn't sell. If everyone keeps playing this stupid "there can be only 2 positions in any argument" game, we end up with posts like this - completely ignorant of a multitude of other options. Stop it and consider that this may not be binary.
    • TheCapn 15y ago
      My point isn't so much about how we go about things but more of a plea to have people work on their opponent's terms in order to win. Each side on the issue is drawing their line in the sand but that line is too far from one another to ever reach a form of compromise or conclusion. There's this large valley between what the piracy community wants and what the industry is willing to give. Which side is willing to crack first? While pirates get their jollies there's still too much of a community of people that are paying for the products that keep industries afloat. Are we going to try and convert enough consumers to finally "hurt" the industry? Will that even be enough once the government tacks a law onto consumer products that goes towards the industry companies? What about the "legal" approach. Is boycotting going to work? Is telling the companies the exact message you wrote going to change anything? Actions definitely speak louder than words but is pirating something going to send that message or will it send the message "we want what you offer"? I agree with your statement that its not binary. Nothing is black and white in this situations. But the people vocally advocating piracy are doing no better where they say "my way or the highway". I maybe shouldn't offer up too much opinion on the matter because there's evidence on both sides of the matter that show both progress and regression. On one hand we're seeing more services like netflix offering things on terms "pirates" want: convenient, accessible and quality. But on the other end we're seeing things like worse DRM and new bills. Have we really made progress or not?
• zobzu 15y ago
  "it is not your decision" I disagree. It is. Free will is something you still cannot remove. Sorry. Even doing the most horrible things are still your decision. There might be consequences, but that's another story.
• akg 15y ago
  > if there is no legal way for you to enjoy it, unfortunate though it is, tough. write to them. email them. call them to protest. but don't decide to take the law into your own hands...it's not your decision. To that point, I would like to add another option: create an alternative. Things that are seemingly broken are opportunities for creating something better.
• Iv 15y ago
  I agree on software : alternative exists and the real way to say "fuck off" is to use the corresponding free software alternative or to develop it. This is true to the extent where Microsoft plays the rules of competition and IT correctly. If a government or a provider gives me a document in a format that Microsoft does not publish, they are effectively trying to make competition impossible and I feel entitled to pirate their software. On music, I could not disagree more : there is a lack of a solution to pay artists directly. 90% of the artists I know today, I know from friends or web radio. I would like to repay them directly. I have no way of doing that. The alternative is just not there. Some artists accept direct donations but majors try to prevent that. This anti-competitive behavior makes it totally OK in my opinion to pirate music. Oh, and don't tell me I am rationalising. I stopped being part of this game several years ago. I don't buy music, I don't download tunes (unless it is authorised by the band like Partition 36). I decided this whole show was stupid when I got my first DRMed CD and that I didn't want to fight on it or break any law. Nowadays the situation is such that this conflict can't be ignored anymore. "Piracy" is used as a pretext to put forward net filtering, restrictive laws, and tools of censorship. I don't give a fuck about music and musicians. I can do without. I respect them and they deserve a pay, but the current system is completely FUBAR and its insanity is creeping in other domains. It should be stopped before it is too late.
• ernesth 15y ago
  You can't keep a movie on your hard drive and watch it too? Are you sure?
• awfabian2 15y ago
  We, the human race, made up property. And we made up intellectual property. So if you want to argue to me about morality and legality, save it. Those aren't arguments, those are superstitions and/or conventions. Tell me why a convention should be observed. If content creators don't get paid, perhaps less content will get generated. Perhaps there will be legal consequences like getting sued by the MPAA or RIAA. But, again, give me actual reasons, not superstition and/or convention.
• Raphael 15y ago
  You can pirate all you want and justify it as disobeying unjust laws. Let's see if the government throws everyone in jail for copying data.
• alextingle 15y ago
  The author has a fundamental misunderstanding of what laws mean, and how they change. In England, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas day? Why? Because centuries ago England was governed by a despotic, fundamentalist Christian regime that did not approve of Christmas celebrations. Should I then refrain from eating the mince pie? No. I and millions of my fellow countrymen eat mince pies, and most are completely unaware of the existence of Cromwell's mean spirited law. Why is this crime tolerated by the authorities? Because they do not go about like Robocop, enforcing laws as though they are some kind of computer program. Instead they understand that laws are a crude human attempt to model current social norms. Those social norms change over time and often the written laws don't keep up with the pace of that change. The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. It's perfectly rational and normal for activists to hasten that process by defying the law, and encouraging others to do likewise. Obviously, the copyright lobby will react by trying to strengthen the laws, and step up enforcement. That's fair enough too. Which side will win? Well opinions vary, but to suggest that breaking the law is in itself an immoral and irredeemable act, is naive.
  • astrodust 15y ago
    Those who say "Only those with something to hide will have something to fear" are those that fail to recognize we're all criminals. We've all broken some sort of law at some point in time, and most break dozens of laws every day in the course of their life. There are so many things that are technically illegal. There are too many laws that aren't up to date with what people expect to be able to reasonably do.
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  • davidw 15y ago
    Now people downloading tons of content are "activists"? I don't buy it. If they're doing so publicly as a challenge... maybe, but that doesn't seem like the case for many people who are doing it.
• danielsoneg 15y ago
  I think it's worth bringing up a factor mentioned here a while ago - Piracy serves as a useful market signal. The fact that people are pirating content means there's demand - if they're pirating it, but nobody's paying for it, that means the rights holders are creating a product people want, but the price & delivery mechanism aren't right yet. That's an awful lot better information than just that people aren't buying something - and I'd argue it's one of the signals that got the record industry to actually start taking DRM-free music sales seriously. Obviously it's not a great signal on price - piracy's always going to have the lowest price - but knowing there's demand means you can start to adjust your strategy to try to capture some genuinely lost sales.
  • nlawalker 15y ago
    Price and delivery mechanism are an important part of the product. In fact, with digital piracy, they're arguably more important than the content: there's always demand for free stuff that can be stored indefinitely without any loss in quality or functionality, doesn't take up any physical space and doesn't require any effort to obtain. See the hundreds of posts on Reddit with screenshots of Steam sale aftermaths and the admission that they'll never be able to play most of it. Free is magic. It's place on the supply/demand curve is far away from "one cent." That said, I think that in general you are right. We just need more publishers to get brave and try experimenting with pennies-on-the-dollar sales and other stuff.
• angersock 15y ago
  Gah. Wish I could downvote articles for being useless. Can we stop submitting these things? This article, without even touching on annoying design and style choices, is bad. It contributes nothing to the discussion of copyright. It is four paragraphs long, and devoid of useful thought. ~ It's short enough, let's tear through it: "over on hacker news, there are two articles in which the authors are justifying their decisions to pirate music and windows because their respective industries don't make it as easy to get hold of their content as the pirate bay does. as the first author argues "because you are not offering a good service" he is going to pirate his music and films from now on and "the time has come for you to fuck off", the second writes "i am not buying any more software" until microsoft "address the service problem that is causing piracy". " Okay, so, first paragraph is sloppy quoting of the articles mentioned this week at HN. The hackjob of quoting misses the flavor of the original articles, and skips some nuances. That would be fine--but it took the author an entire paragraph to sum up what could've been said in one line: "Here and here are two articles causing discussion about piracy on Hacker News." Done. Finished. Had they done that, I could've gotten through their miserable little post that much faster. " sorry what? yes, drm is broken. yes, copyright doesn't work very well. yes, pirating is easier. since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them? i am steering clear of the word 'steal' because many will argue that it is not 'stealing' under the strict definition of the word; the content creator still has the song, software etc. " The author says, in effect, "suck it up, stop pirating." The author does so with some hilarious painful-to-read phrasing. I'm not asking for art, mind you, in all posts--I just prefer that the written word (especially when submitted to HN!) have something behind it more than mallspeak. In addition to being worded like a petulant teenager angry about missing the last ship to the Pirate Bay, the author claims that there is a moral obligation to pay for material, but doesn't explain what that obligation is or from what it derives. The author doesn't so much assail the idea of piracy as show a sort of slow-witted wonder that you can get copies of things without buying them. Drooling into the keyboard and blinking, it slowly dawns on the imbecile that people can do this. The author comes dangerously close to diverging onto a useful thought about the nature of stealing and how it applies to copyright infringement, but then manages at the last minute to pull ignorance from the jaws of victory and flits off to the next paragraph. " if you want to protest the crappy way these companies treat their customers, don't buy their stuff. but you can't have your cake and eat it. protest by not using or having it at all. they have something you want; even if you don't agree with their methods, it is still theirs to decide what to do with. all you are doing is supporting the industry in their drive to stamp out pirates; instead, support legal ways of obtaining this content through spotify and others. " The author makes several assertions again here: companies treat their customers badly, piracy isn't effective, piracy somehow supports the industry, companies can decide what they can do with their IP unconditionally, etc. This is talking-point vomit, a pile of mealy-mouthed and poorly-articulated sayings lacking backing or explanation. This contributes nothing to the conversation, and serves only to underscore the intellectual laziness of the author. These claims are all very interesting and exciting to debate, mind you, but that requires an attention span and maturity that the author seems to simply not have. " if there is no legal way for you to enjoy it, unfortunate though it is, tough. write to them. email them. call them to protest. but don't decide to take the law into your own hands...it's not your decision. " At last, sweet release! The author has finished the article with a stunted attempt at encouraging protest, and yet again manages to miss a wonderful opportunity to consider the role of piracy as peaceful protest. The author also makes some baseless assertions without provided reasoning in regards to "taking the law into your own hands" and its desirability--again, an interesting philosophical starting point lost on the moron penning the paragraph. ~ Look, I'm not going to launch into crazy copyright and anti-copyright discussion here, but for fuck's sake can we start posting articles on this topic that try to display critical thought? This is insulting.
• nchuhoai 15y ago
  Shameless plug on the same topic: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3485295 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3485295 You can have your opinion on laws, but not the right to defy them
• norswap 15y ago
  You can't have dots and no capital letters.
• skylervm 15y ago
  Someone needs to be paid to be able to continue producing the things you enjoy. Otherwise they stop getting made. So before I get any further, I think artists, developers, etc. need to be compensated for their work. It should be illegal to copy someone else's digital goods and sell them for a profit (ie. copying a cd whether you paid for the original or not and reselling it). That doesn't mean I think copyright holders need to be compensated in the same way they have in the past. We're in the midst of trying to figure out how exactly to do that. Louis CK's movie, Radiohead's In Rainbows, Kickstarter... they're all examples of people trying to figure out how this all works moving forward. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. Eventually, we'll figure out a system that does. We're going through a cultural shift in the way we obtain information. We forget that buying and individually owning books, movies, music, etc. is a relatively new thing and wasn't always the norm. But because there are entire industries built around these things, organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have an obvious interest in keeping things they way they are. People should be allowed to share as they want without repercussion. Some people will pay for things, others won't and some can't even if they wanted to. That's never going to change no matter how many laws are passed trying to stop it. People shouldn't be denied access to materials just because they didn't or can't pay for them. Libraries are essentially what the internet has become except on a much smaller scale. One person / institution / organization buys all the books, cds, movies, etc. and lends them to others for free. Some will argue the differences is there are a limited number of copies that can be lent out at any one time. And while that's true, it's irrelevant. Just because that's the way things have been doesn't mean that's the way they need to be. As more libraries expand their digital content, the lines between our views on libraries, piracy and the sharing of information will become increasingly blurred. We're living in a time when people have access to information like never before. People are being exposed to music, books and films they never would have before. We're learning things we never would have been able to 10 years ago. Walls and barriers to learning and education are being torn down. Those are all good things that we should be celebrating, not trying to destroy.
• diiq 15y ago
  Civil disobedience, the most puissant form of protest, is breaking a law you believe to be unjust, and suffering the consequences if necessary. If you break a law you believe to be unjust and expect to suffer no consequences, that's silly, but not immoral. If you break a law you believe is just, then you're kinda evil.
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  • dino5050 15y ago
    Civil Disobedience doesn't involve you getting free stuff. Please don't equate piracy to civil disobedience, it cheapens the meaning of the word.
  • tikhonj 15y ago
    Expecting to suffer no consequences is only silly if the probability of enforcement is high. If repercussions are unlikely then it isn't even silly.
  • Czarnian 15y ago
    Refusing to move to the back of the bus. Sitting down in the middle of the street to block the movement of troops from point a to point b. Walking from Montgomery to Selma. Downloading the Inbetweeners. One of these things is not civil disobedience. In fact, trying to cast piracy as a form of civil disobedience is insulting to the people who actually got arrested, beaten by police, attacked by dogs, had the firehose turned on them, were tear-gassed, run over, and suffered any number of real consequences as they publicly defied laws and a society that were unquestionably wrong. To cast content piracy as civil disobedience, one must accept that the act of murder is an act of civil disobedience because the murderer believes the law against it is unjust.
    • diiq 15y ago
      I do.
• naughtysriram 15y ago
  kill the patenting system and everything comes back to normal...
• jrockway 15y ago
  I disagree with this. Pirating makes the problem apparent to the MPAA; people want their products, but the existing distribution channels are not working. If people didn't pirate the MPAA's products, then the MPAA would conclude that nobody wanted their products anymore. That wouldn't result in positive change for people that like movies but want to play them under Linux, for example. Piracy proves that DRM only hurts the people willing to pay money for the product. It has no effect on piracy whatsoever. In fact, DRM may be causing piracy.
• guard-of-terra 15y ago
  It's an interesting debate. But may I eat your cake and still have mine? For example, I go to cinema to see local movies and watch local tv series on legal services, but torrent american/english films and tv series (the main reason is that there's no way I can get them legally and in time - american services refuse me as a customer). Same with books. This way I have my cake and I ate yours, and it's not obvious to me how it's not a win for me.
• chrisbennet 15y ago
  You are never going to convince anyone of something that they can't allow themselves to think. If you're stealing you will use all kinds of convoluted logic to pretend that you aren't. The real value of the post is that it lets some of know that not everyone was raised by wolves.
• cracell 15y ago
  Why is it ok for copyright holders to have a monopoly over the distribution of their content? If we go to the core of copyright law the original intention as I understand it was to encourage creation of stuff and my assumption is that the point of having such created is to have it distributed in an easily accessible manner. Yet we have no issue under the law with companies only selling to one distributor or just crippling it with DRM. Why? Why don't we expect companies to make their content accessible to everyone and not just a in the ways they choose. I completely understand this when it comes to small resource limited companies. But I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the huge companies that feel they should be able to pick and choose who gets their content. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing that I should get their content for free. But I should be able to get it from various sources at a comparable price. In what way do exclusivity agreements help us? They give large businesses huge advantage over small businesses. How can someone compete with Hulu when the content owners won't license their content to anyone else at a comparable rate? (Yes I know Hulu is owned by the content creators but isn't that a conflict of interest when you only let your own properties distribute it over the web?) I'm not sure what the answer is. But I don't see how allowing companies to have a monopoly over the distribution of their content helps individuals or businesses in the long term.
• tikhonj 15y ago
  The problem with this article is that he does not provide a compelling argument. Or, more accurately, he does not provide an argument at all: he just repeats that unauthorized copying is wrong. As far as I can tell, he took "piracy is wrong" as an axiom. Which would be fine, except the article is arguing that "piracy" is wrong. Arguing that an axiom--or something you're basically treating as an axiom--is true is trivial and tautological.
• evolve2k 15y ago
  SUSPECT AUTHENTICITY This site consists of only this article and almost nothing personally remarkable about who the author is. It is also the users very first post to HN on an account created the day after the blackout. Anyone else find this suspicious? willdamas do you have any affiliations you might like to declare?
• mrdingle 15y ago
  There is nothing immoral about copying data. It is a bummer that you worked so hard and didn't make the money that you thought you were going to but no one owes you that money and It's selfish to think distribution is going to work the way you want it to. From henceforth and until the sun explodes, there will be massive amounts of piracy. Thats it. Seriously. Factor it into your business plan. Think about it before you write your next song. If you still don't have a creative urge, then good, do something else. If that software isn't economically viable then good, do something else. But I guarantee you people will continue to make wheel barrows full of money regardless. And there will be music, and movies, and poetry and software. And there will be more of it than ever before. This is actually a huge blessing in disguise. You no longer need to pay someone to distribute your creations, you no longer need marketing to reach your fans, you no longer need middle men. And best of all, you no longer have to worry about piracy. Because it is now fact. So stop pretending like copyright law isn't fucked up. Stop pretending like you can have the same business model you did 5 years ago. Stop pretending like music, or movies, or software are going to cease to exist and make some fucking money. Welcome to 2012.
• noonespecial 15y ago
  I'm still not sure why so many people care if its "right" or "wrong" to pirate stuff like this. It gets pirated. Making the product easier to buy would mean it gets pirated less, not more. Companies don't seem to get it. This fact is interesting. The pirate is a datapoint, not a moral lesson.
• martinkallstrom 15y ago
  Author Paolo Coelho operated a blog called Pirate Coelho where he published torrents to all his books. He still does this because it makes him rich. For example, in Russia nobody bought his books, sales were up to 15 000 books in two years. So he leaked the russian translations via BitTorrent. Soon, he saw that people started talking about them. Some time later, he saw the sales increasing. A lot. In one year sales of his physical books crossed 1 million in Russia. Source is himself. Now, his publishers have finally realized the connection, so he doesn't need the anonymous pirate blog anymore. Instead, he links to the torrents from his own offical blog. He is also an avid SOPA protester: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/ http://paulocoelhoblog.com/
  • res0nat0r 15y ago
    That is his right to do so. It is also the right of other authors to be against free bittorrenting of their books because they believe it hurts their pocketbook. The key is the creator of the material makes this decision, not the consumer.
    • martinkallstrom 15y ago
      Actually, he did this illegally. His publisher had the copyright to all translations, not himself. So he routinely asked "to see them" and then routinely leaked them on The Pirate Bay. Again, this is according to himself.
      • res0nat0r 15y ago
        Notice how this was the content creators choice to put his works online for free. Since he didn't own the works it is still technically wrong, but it is also wrong for Joe Blow consumer to decide to put up copies online of content from creators without their permission. Why do I keep getting downvoted for stating a fact? It is against the law to put online content you don't own copyright to. Not sure why this is incorrect.
    • kaffiene 15y ago
      There are no "rights" at play here. There is only what the law allows or does not allow and since that is the very point being disputed, to say that breaching the law is not allowed because that's what the law says is completely circular.
• guscost 15y ago
  I don't watch Boardwalk Empire because HBO won't sell it to me online. I'm sure as hell not buying cable, and I'm also not going to bother spending the time finding and watching some crappy rip online when there are other things to do. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
• etfb 15y ago
  Quite right. That earlier rant about the moral superiority of piracy was just embarrassing. Nobody who produces anything of value needs to be told that they should be giving it away for free. They can choose to give it away, but being required to do so is another matter entirely. If everybody who believes that copyright is completely unnecessary were to die today, the total amount of useful, worthwhile art produced by the world would not decrease.
• micah63 15y ago
  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - Jesus
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• pippy 15y ago
  Will has a good point, but I disagree on a fundamental level. There's three massive core problems with the current media model: 1) Modern media has failed to adapt. When I reinstalled windows I used a pirated version. The key on the side of my case was awkward to read. Games industry nailed it: look at Steam. 2) Entertainment is a waste of time and people know that - if someone can't download a movie they're not going to run out and buy it. They're going to watch cats fall down on youtube. 3) When companies no longer prioritize their own products people lose respect for them. This SOPA/PIPA drama is simply making #3 worse
• dlikhten 15y ago
  The answer to the author is two fold: 1) laws are made to be challeneged, especially if society does not approve. See alextingle's response. 2) If I make a widget in a widget factory. You can get widgets from me or from Frank down the block. Getting it from Frank is illegal. However to use the widget (that you love) you must stick a pipe in your ass. Frank gives it to you at a bargain price and no pipe in ass requirements. The only way to tell me "its not ok to overcharge me and force me to stick pipes in my ass, even if I love the product" is to buy it from Frank. Otherwise you buy it from me, live with the ass-pipe and pray for change.