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From the article comments: "This is the bottom line. Whether or not the business model is out-dated or not has absolutely no effect on whether what Kim was doi

• hnhg 15y ago
  Not to the artist. There's the vendor and then the publisher first.
  • jonhendry 15y ago
    Self-published artists, with their own labels, don't exactly catch a break. Filesharers don't care about anything but their own entertainment.
    • angersock 15y ago
      Yes, because there couldn't possibly be people who handle their own distribution while still supporting the artists.
      • jonhendry 15y ago
        Um, what?
        • angersock 15y ago
          You asserted that "Filesharers don't care about anything but their own entertainment." I would wager that there are fans of artists who donate to artists via concert proceedings or actual online donations while still downloading (for free, from alternate sources) their music. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, you kind of have to do this if you actually want to bring about positive change--you support the artist, but you deny any money to the middlemen.
• Zirro 15y ago
  "I can't just steal something from an Amish person's business because "their business model is out-dated." It doesn't matter." It doesn't justify piracy, but it is a way for the media industry to solve the "piracy-issue" themselves. In short: Give the people what they want and they will pay you.
  • pyre 15y ago
    More like: "The correct business decision is not to moan/groan/complain to the government, but to adapt to your situation." Adapting to the situation is apparently too much for the suits at the major labels to stomach though.
  • huggyface 15y ago
    In short: Give the people what they want and they will pay you. If only it were so simple. Today you can buy virtually any media electronically. Services like Netflix, Rdio, Spotify, iTunes and others allow for enormous content enjoyment at a very reasonable price, with a couple of mouse clicks. Steam and Origin, App Stores and Android Markets exist with countless software options for incredibly low prices. Yet piracy is still absolutely rampant. We're being lectured to by thieves who made millions on the other side of the law. There are some people who are simply selfish and greedy. Who are willing to ignore the law -- if not even twisting reality -- to suit their own selfish desires. Such transparent arguments usually drown out any rational discussions on sites like Reddit, Slashdot, and sadly now HN. I've spoken against piracy many times (and it is stealing, and arguments to the contrary are baseless. I spend thousands per year on games, movies and music. I have well-paid peers who spend $0, enjoy all the same content, but will still give you the tired "it isn't stealing, no one was deprived" nonsense argument), but it's an argument that just isn't worth having on many online venues. There are simply too many people who contort rationale to defend what gives them the most for the least, everything else be damned. - at least in the short term. Then, of course, those movies, music and games stop being produced.
    • njs12345 15y ago
      Let's assume you keep spending the thousands you do spend per year on buying the same games, movies and music, but that you also pirate things where you feel the value does not justify the price. Who's lost out? You've got something for nothing. There is a significant body of academic work demonstrating that much piracy has this form: it does not displace a sale. Piracy may therefore be providing a net benefit to society.
• Schmidt 15y ago
  2000 / 400 = 5 Are you kidding me, no artists gets $5 per sold record. If you sell a lot and have a really good deal you get around $2 (britney spears kinda big). The records my fathers band have recorded give them about $.5 for all of them (six members). They barely cover their production costs with that...
  • patrickk 15y ago
    http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ This link always gets mentioned in relation to artists/labels and who gets what, so here it is.
    • lookelsewhere 15y ago
      Your link wasn't working for me, but here is what did: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/singleton/?mobile.html http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/singleton/?mobile.htm... Thank you for sharing that, btw. I enjoyed the read... edit: fixed link
• mayanksinghal 15y ago
  "File-Sharing, such as giving my friend a CD I burned, is not file sharing in the same sense as Torrenting something which is also being torrented by 400 other people." Actually, I think that the underlying moral principle would be the same for the two. If you are stealing something - it doesn't matter whether it is $5 or $2000; it is still a theft. The scale of it should only govern the punishment if that is the intent was different - which I believe is not. I do not think that one can justify sharing one copy vs sharing 50 copies _morally_; the justification will be economic.
• kazing 15y ago
  Stealing? The internet runs on computers, everything is stolen every other second by buffers, caches and in the end just the machinery. NSA is stealing gigabits of data every second from backbones, yet no one has reported their data lost yet. Do not start a pity tour for record companies looking to push laws that will actually put real people behind bars for pushing around bits and bytes.
• nextparadigms 15y ago
  But those 400 wouldn't buy a CD. Maybe 40 of them would. People consume a lot more content when it's free/unlimited. Proof of that is the average content consumption on Spotify vs iTunes, and why some artists complain that they make a lot less "per play" from Spotify than they would on iTunes, but they are looking at this in a very wrong way. When people have access to a lot more content for the same price or lower, they will consume a lot more content. That doesn't mean they would be willing to pay for each piece of content as much as they would with the old model.
  • VMG 15y ago
    > Maybe 40 of them would. The point still stands then.
• toyg 15y ago
  "In the Governments eyes, what Kim was doing illegal." Actually, there's "illegal" and there's illegal. New Zealand authorities sent a special anti-terrorism group, armed to the teeth, to arrest one fat Finnish programmer; that is disproportionate to the alleged crime. Was it just to impress their American friends with some random cowboy action, or were NZ authorities briefed that Dotcom was a dangerous terrorist? Extradition treaties have clauses; we'll see if Dotcom's actions do actually fall under those clauses or not. The fact that he's been bailed (and his bail was later upheld against the wishes of US authorities) make me think that it won't be a walk in the park. It might even turn out that some overzealous officer or politician, anxious to appease US counterparts for one reason or another, overstepped his authority and launched an unjustified operation. It would be funny to see them with egg in their face, should the judge throw out the case.
  • wisty 15y ago
    Dude, it's New Zealand. Their couter-terrorist police have to do except deal with a few Maori separatists, and the French Intelligence. Well, NZ has a fairly low crime rate. And Kim was armed, and had security. And he was a little ... odd. Better safe than sorry.
    • learc83 15y ago
      Better to escalate the situation and dramatically increase the odds of a violent resolution? In the US we routinely use SWAT teams to arrest nonviolent criminals because they "don't have anything better to do." The results are numerous preventable civilian casualties (not to mention scores of family pets killed).
  • VMG 15y ago
    (he's German not Finnish)
    • toyg 15y ago
      Wikipedia says he's got Finnish citizenship as well, and he has not one but two Finnish passport, so hey, majority rule ;)
• haberman 15y ago
  I'm of two minds on this. One part of me agrees with you 100%; artists shouldn't have to "compete" with illegal trafficking of their own content. That's not even fair competition, because it didn't cost the file-sharer anything to create the content. You're trying to "compete" with someone who had no up-front expenses. The other part of me thinks that there needs to be some force to counter the insane overreach that copyright holders increasingly take in the digital age. For example: 10 minutes of previews that can't be skipped on a DVD/Blu-Ray that you legally bought, DRM that makes it uncertain whether you will continue to have access to your legally-purchased content, or arbitrary restrictions on what devices/software you can use to view your own content. The natural market forces that should work in favor of consumers are greatly diminished by the fact that a single entity has control over every sales channel for a given work. And the DMCA gives legal teeth to whatever technological measures content producers use to implement these arbitrary restrictions and controls. There are other cases where the government intervenes to restrict this lopsided distribution of power. For example, "compulsory licensing" requires copyright or patent owners to grant licenses for certain uses of a work at predetermined rates that are set by the government. For example, this allows musicians to record "covers" of existing songs without having to get permission from the original song's author (though a royalty has to be paid).
• jkn 15y ago
  "I can't just steal something from an Amish person's business because "their business model is out-dated."" For a correct analogy, make the Amish a billionaire who makes money by exercising a monopoly. The monopoly is legal, it was even expanded by congress thanks to his lobbying efforts, and the government actually spends taxpayer money to enforce it. And I'm not stealing from the Amish, I just found a more efficient way to distribute copies of his products, copies made at my own cost. And users find my service not only cheaper, but much more convenient: it is not riddled by silly restrictions, and I have a much larger selection. Somehow I make tons of money with it, and all this money would go to the Amish, if he could adapt his business model, because he has a natural advantage to provide the best service: he gets the products first, and with the best quality. Considering that the monopoly is harmful to cultural exchange, freedom of speech and other essential rights, I see moral value in any contributions to bring it down or transform it into something more morally acceptable and less expensive for society.
  • jonhendry 15y ago
    "For a correct analogy, make the Amish a billionaire who makes money by exercising a monopoly." Nonsense. People sharing files don't take the status of the content provider into account. It's a pleasant story to tell yourself, that you're just sticking it to the man, but it doesn't reflect the reality of file sharing.
    • jkn 15y ago
      Sure, most people don't think about the immorality of copyright laws when sharing files, but that doesn't make the laws moral. As for sticking it to the man, I was precisely trying to move the analogy from man-centered (the Amish) to the bigger picture: immoral laws preserving a bad business model that impacts the whole society. Quite the opposite of the Amish actually.
      • jonhendry 15y ago
        "but that doesn't make the laws moral." Doesn't make them immoral, either. Next you'll be saying "property is theft".
• sophacles 15y ago
  1. It is not stealing. This is well established. Stop using hyperbolic language to hysterically whine and force your moralistic crap down our throats. 2. Your Amish analogy is a strawman. 3. Whether Kim is breaking a law or not is not the point of this dicussion (another strawman here): the discussion is does the (il)leagailty of it make sense? Laws are not permanent nor are they absolute. We theoretically live in a society that is based on the will of the people, so lets talk about what make sense to our society. 4. Amazing improbable thinking does not grant one rights to someone else's pocketbook. Much like people should pay for stuff, by the same token, saying they should then suing them for actions they didn't and may never have taken is absurd. I should get paid $1 per read of this comment, there HN readers owe me a few $K. 5. Wow, I really fed this troll didn't I?
  • DrJokepu 15y ago
    From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Hacker News Guidelines): When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
  • jonhendry 15y ago
    "Stop using hyperbolic language" The main perpetrators of hyperbolic language on this topic are the people who act as if there is some necessity and moral right behind downloading some crap CD or movie or TV show, as if that was the same as stealing bread to feed a family. Guess what, you won't perish if you don't watch that TV show everyone is talking about, or if you have to wait six months for that new movie to show up on Netflix. The "harm" of doing without entertainment is no harm at all.
    • ssebro 15y ago
      Death and physical injury aren't the only ways someone can be harmed. Trust me - if you're the only kid in highscool without cable who isn't able to talk about that show from last night, you miss opportunities to bond. Those missed bonds are worth quite a lot, since they directly impact your future.
• vibrunazo 15y ago
  Please separate illegal from immoral. And try to consider both sides of the argument, instead of assuming it's either good or bad because there is some good our some bad in it. There's both pros and cons to piracy, so w have to measure both instead of blindly ignoring one side. While it's really sad that many lost their jobs breeding horses when automobiles were invented, it was a total net positive to humanity. You can't ignore one of the sides. While it's sad that some artists may lose their jobs when their cd is pirated. While is true that some potential artists may not have enough incentive to create. You cannot ignore that art will never cease to exist simply because of piracy. You can't ignore that sharing, remixing and freedom to fork and improve the work of others, do have a positive impact in the quality of arts. you cannot deny that better, drm free distribution models are many times a better experience for consumers. So is it a net benefit at the end of the day? Ill save my opinion, but please do consider both sides of the coin, instead of blindly citing a few of the arguments for one side while ignoring the other.
  • jonhendry 15y ago
    "Please separate illegal from immoral." It does someone no harm to do without watching Transformers 3 for a year. There's no moral high ground in lacking discipline. Therefore, it's immoral and illegal. Get a new hobby, and some perspective.
    • ssebro 15y ago
      Not true. Please see http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3653006 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3653006
      • jonhendry 15y ago
        You're kidding, right? Privileged person is privileged.
    • vibrunazo 15y ago
      How does purposely providing your user with a worse experience does no harm? That goes against any UX lesson or advice I've ever seen.