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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? Becaus

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 The Internet has made copyright law outdated.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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
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.
- alextingle 15y ago
  Some are activists. Most are simply conforming to new social norms.
VMG 15y ago
What happens if everybody eats mince pie on Christmas? Life goes on as usual. What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
- learc83 15y ago
  Most authors make far less than minimum wage after everything is said and done. Yet they keep producing books. There may not be a windows 9, but you can bet there will be 200 flavors of Linux.
- DrHankPym 15y ago
  You say that like it's a problem. Look at it this way: Does Ubuntu or OS X suffer from being pirated? Not really. Windows needs to figure this out for themselves.
  - VMG 15y ago
    It likely is a problem for all those people who pirate Windows
  - comicjk 15y ago
    We certainly don't want all OSs confined to closed hardware like OS X. Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't work for annoying grunt programming - note the poor driver support in many Linux distros. For some tasks, someone needs to be paid.
    - treeform 15y ago
      A big couse in pour drivers support is that companies dont publish specs to their devices. If there was only one dominant free OS like linux, companies that make hardwire would want their devices to work with it and so will write drivers or at least publish full spec.
    - 15y ago
kiba 15y ago
The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Sir, what make you think our situation is historically unique? If you read the history of copyright, you would realize that our is not so special. Rather, the current situation is a continuation of debates that started centuries ago.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  The ability for 1/2 the people on the planet to distribute content without meaningful cost barriers is vary new. It's caused people to create and publish far more interesting content in a single day than you can consume in a single day. We are transiting through a tipping point where locating and filtering content is becoming more valuable than creating it. Consider, on average do you enjoy reading HN posts? In what ways are people compensated for creating them how is copyright relevant for that compensation? PS: Imagine a clearing house where authors pay random people to read their works in the hope that they might simply up vote it and even paying those who down vote their content.
  - Volpe 15y ago
    Have you been to a bookstore recently? I think you need to look up the printing press and it's relation to the copyright law debate. The internet (on that front) is not as new and amazing as you think. btw 1/2 the people on the planet are not on the internet it's actually more like 1/3, and of that a smaller subset 'create content'.
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      Printing enough books so that 10 million people can read what you created costs ~1/2 a million dollars. Hosting a torrent with that same content costs anyone with a regular internet connection less than a cup of coffee from Starbucks. PS: Many people use the internet without actually owning a computer. In this case language and cultural barriers are more important than internet access which says a lot about the world IMO.
  - res0nat0r 15y ago
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
grellas 15y ago
The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. Well, the Internet certainly has led to a generation of young people who are accustomed to downloading freely from various sources without regard to copyright restrictions and, in this sense, I would concur that social norms are changing. Unfortunately, the law itself is far from changing and, while some of this has to do with corporate lobbyists, the greatest reason is that copyright is a key part of many forms of commercial activity whose nature is not changed by the Internet and whose deep-seated roots require the continuation of copyright. Just as one example, Steve Jobs had funded Pixar when it was a fledgling company primarily trying to design a hardware solution while also supporting a team of animators who were doing primarily experimental things. In time, it became clear that the hardware piece was not going to be promising but that the animation team might just produce a breakthrough in animated films. The problem: it took someone with tons of money and a huge appetite for risk to carry this through. A whole team of creative people and their families suffered through that one and did not come out whole even as it was - but they stuck it out, as did Mr. Jobs, who invested countless millions in the venture at a time when that strained his personal resources. The outcome: Toy Story (and the whole Pixar legacy). The outcome without copyright: a big goose egg. Why? Because the participants in this venture underwent great hardship to get to the final result and the only hope of a financial payoff lay in being able to have a film that would be owned, controlled, and marketed by the Pixar venture and that might become a large commercial success. This is indeed what happened but only because of the protections afforded by copyright. Now take the whole universe of startups as a larger example, where founders are today offering massive incentives to highly skilled developers in order to develop key functionality based on proprietary code whose value lies precisely in the fact that it is protected by copyright. If all this were simply public domain, then funding for these ventures would vanish or the business models radically restructured. Unless and until someone comes up with a model by which public domain code can be used to gain competitive advantage in the standard startup of this type, copyright will continue to play a huge and important role. Such examples could be replicated many times over. My point, though, is that, insofar as the law is concerned, copyright law is hardly "outdated" and the reasons for its existence and its commercial value have not gone away. That body of existing law does indeed protect the interests of mega-corporations who are using lobbying efforts to gain special privileges at the expense of us all, and this is despicable. But it also protects countless other people who create things - writers, musicians, film makers, software developers, etc. - whose livelihood in the economy as currently structured depends on it. Unless and until the needs of such creative people to control their works change, copyright law will persist as before (I did a lengthy post on the reasons for this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959). I am not saying that it is justified to mount a moral crusade against acts of infringement. But to suggest that a radical change in the law of copyright is imminent - or that it is about to be abolished - is, in my view, to misread the legal landscape in a serious way.

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.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

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.

alextingle 15y ago
Some are activists. Most are simply conforming to new social norms.

VMG 15y ago

What happens if everybody eats mince pie on Christmas? Life goes on as usual. What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

learc83 15y ago
Most authors make far less than minimum wage after everything is said and done. Yet they keep producing books. There may not be a windows 9, but you can bet there will be 200 flavors of Linux.
DrHankPym 15y ago
You say that like it's a problem. Look at it this way: Does Ubuntu or OS X suffer from being pirated? Not really. Windows needs to figure this out for themselves.
- VMG 15y ago
  It likely is a problem for all those people who pirate Windows
- comicjk 15y ago
  We certainly don't want all OSs confined to closed hardware like OS X. Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't work for annoying grunt programming - note the poor driver support in many Linux distros. For some tasks, someone needs to be paid.
  - treeform 15y ago
    A big couse in pour drivers support is that companies dont publish specs to their devices. If there was only one dominant free OS like linux, companies that make hardwire would want their devices to work with it and so will write drivers or at least publish full spec.
  - 15y ago

kiba 15y ago

The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Sir, what make you think our situation is historically unique? If you read the history of copyright, you would realize that our is not so special. Rather, the current situation is a continuation of debates that started centuries ago.

onemoreact 15y ago
The ability for 1/2 the people on the planet to distribute content without meaningful cost barriers is vary new. It's caused people to create and publish far more interesting content in a single day than you can consume in a single day. We are transiting through a tipping point where locating and filtering content is becoming more valuable than creating it. Consider, on average do you enjoy reading HN posts? In what ways are people compensated for creating them how is copyright relevant for that compensation? PS: Imagine a clearing house where authors pay random people to read their works in the hope that they might simply up vote it and even paying those who down vote their content.
- Volpe 15y ago
  Have you been to a bookstore recently? I think you need to look up the printing press and it's relation to the copyright law debate. The internet (on that front) is not as new and amazing as you think. btw 1/2 the people on the planet are not on the internet it's actually more like 1/3, and of that a smaller subset 'create content'.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Printing enough books so that 10 million people can read what you created costs ~1/2 a million dollars. Hosting a torrent with that same content costs anyone with a regular internet connection less than a cup of coffee from Starbucks. PS: Many people use the internet without actually owning a computer. In this case language and cultural barriers are more important than internet access which says a lot about the world IMO.
- res0nat0r 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

grellas 15y ago

The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. Well, the Internet certainly has led to a generation of young people who are accustomed to downloading freely from various sources without regard to copyright restrictions and, in this sense, I would concur that social norms are changing. Unfortunately, the law itself is far from changing and, while some of this has to do with corporate lobbyists, the greatest reason is that copyright is a key part of many forms of commercial activity whose nature is not changed by the Internet and whose deep-seated roots require the continuation of copyright. Just as one example, Steve Jobs had funded Pixar when it was a fledgling company primarily trying to design a hardware solution while also supporting a team of animators who were doing primarily experimental things. In time, it became clear that the hardware piece was not going to be promising but that the animation team might just produce a breakthrough in animated films. The problem: it took someone with tons of money and a huge appetite for risk to carry this through. A whole team of creative people and their families suffered through that one and did not come out whole even as it was - but they stuck it out, as did Mr. Jobs, who invested countless millions in the venture at a time when that strained his personal resources. The outcome: Toy Story (and the whole Pixar legacy). The outcome without copyright: a big goose egg. Why? Because the participants in this venture underwent great hardship to get to the final result and the only hope of a financial payoff lay in being able to have a film that would be owned, controlled, and marketed by the Pixar venture and that might become a large commercial success. This is indeed what happened but only because of the protections afforded by copyright. Now take the whole universe of startups as a larger example, where founders are today offering massive incentives to highly skilled developers in order to develop key functionality based on proprietary code whose value lies precisely in the fact that it is protected by copyright. If all this were simply public domain, then funding for these ventures would vanish or the business models radically restructured. Unless and until someone comes up with a model by which public domain code can be used to gain competitive advantage in the standard startup of this type, copyright will continue to play a huge and important role. Such examples could be replicated many times over. My point, though, is that, insofar as the law is concerned, copyright law is hardly "outdated" and the reasons for its existence and its commercial value have not gone away. That body of existing law does indeed protect the interests of mega-corporations who are using lobbying efforts to gain special privileges at the expense of us all, and this is despicable. But it also protects countless other people who create things - writers, musicians, film makers, software developers, etc. - whose livelihood in the economy as currently structured depends on it. Unless and until the needs of such creative people to control their works change, copyright law will persist as before (I did a lengthy post on the reasons for this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959). I am not saying that it is justified to mount a moral crusade against acts of infringement. But to suggest that a radical change in the law of copyright is imminent - or that it is about to be abolished - is, in my view, to misread the legal landscape in a serious way.