6 ms·

Whatever the legitimacy of the OP arguments he sounds like a real creep! I get that he's trying to make a hard nosed, here's how it is in the real world. But h

by b1daly 15y ago

Whatever the legitimacy of the OP arguments he sounds like a real creep! I get that he's trying to make a hard nosed, here's how it is in the real world. But he comes off a variation of an abuser who believes his victim leaves him no choice to abuse. I would hazard a guess that most file "pirates" are not like him. They either don't think much about the consequences to others of there actions or if they do they feel at least a little bad,just not enough to stop doing it. I think at core his argument is that he doesn't want to pay for the content he consumes. He justifies it on the grounds that the prices are too high. This a nonsensical assertion supported by the flimsy justification that the marginal cost of a digital good is so low. Well the total costs of production remain quite high,especially considering the cost of marketing. I remain amazed at the anti big content additudes found on HN given that the tech industry is just as dependent on legal enforcement of intellectual property protections as hollywood is. (Think trademark,patent and copyright) IP law is just as important to open source software. The problem is that digital goods without articily created scarcity and property like "properties"'will suffer a major free rider problem. Would any of the coders here be cool with others appropriating their work without compensation or choice in the matter? I've seen people get quite huffy in these parts for lifting a stupid graphic graphic from a website. For any VC types here: how would you feel if your companies had deal with heavy appropriation of the the product you put up money for? I'm really asking!

drostie 15y ago
I think at core his argument is that he doesn't want to pay for the content he consumes. He justifies it on the grounds that the prices are too high. Well, no. At least, that's not the central theme of his essay. I can sort of see why you might get that impression if you read only the middle and neither the beginning or the end, but the author is very clear about what he is saying and you would have to ignore all of that to label him as "a real creep." So, here is the overall picture of the essay, since you may have missed it. He is saying, "look, I am a pirate -- I'm not going to try to justify that or discuss it; we'll just take it here as a given: I am going to pirate stuff. Now, it just so happens, like many pirates, I actually buy a lot of entertainment, paying a lot of money for games and television and movies. So let's ask a different question: how can you get access to my money?" Here's one way, he says, to revoke your access to his money: sell him a crappy product. It's not unlike my behavior at cyclist shops in the Netherlands. An obscure piece of trivia: there are three bike valves in common usage, the American/Schrader/car valve, the French/Presta/unscrew valve, and the English/Woods-Dunlop valve. The Dutch prefer by 90% or so the Woods valve, but I have been sold twice air pumps from various cycling shops which simply do not work on Woods valves, and either time I was told that I could not be reimbursed because I had to take the pump out of the packing material to use it. (In fact, both times I found out that neither bike shop knew the name of the Woods-Dunlop valve despite the fact that it's absurdly popular.) Guess who is never getting my business again? The people who sold me stuff that does not work. In fact, as you might imagine has occurred with me, he is now so paranoid about being sold content which sucks that he will no longer put down money until he knows that it doesn't suck -- just like I won't buy a bike pump unless I can see that I can manually switch the airflow to the smaller nozzle. If I can't demand a refund then I'm going to demand that I know the quality that I'm buying. On the other hand, he says, one way to really get his money is by convenience. When he sees albums from bands he liked, he buys those. If he pirates a good game he usually buys the sequel, and will even opt to pay a little extra to bundle it with the original game. IP law is just as important to open source software. It actually tends to get in the way. There are all sorts of different licenses, many of which are not compatible -- GNU code can use but can't be used by BSD code, Eclipse can neither use nor be used by GNU -- and the biggest problem is that software freedom is not given automatically. Would any of the coders here be cool with others appropriating their work without compensation or choice in the matter? I assure you, all of the people here who work on websites would be happy if you visited their website, even though that requires your computer to copy all of their images and client-side code. We might get mad if you try to reappropriate our content, especially for profit. This is also conceded by the original poster, who says, "The main reason I don't feel bad is because, like I detailed above, I know I'm buying content. Another important reason I don't feel bad is because I'm not profiting. I'm not taking your content and trying to resell it as though I'm a legitimate vendor." The problem is that digital goods without articily created scarcity and property like "properties"'will suffer a major free rider problem. No, they won't. The fact that people will download you for free will be perfectly balanced by the fact that downloads are absurdly cheap operations. It's like complaining that, "if we don't make it really hard to get a glass of water at our restaurant, then everybody will just order water and nobody will ever buy drinks." If you start to think that way, when getting someone a glass of water is of absolutely negligible cost, then you will alienate your customers for no good reason. That's what the MAFIAA has been doing: it's dirt-cheap for them to produce digital copies, but they think like you are describing, and insist on trying to create an artificial economy of scarcity. All it creates is resentment. A good restaurant starts you off with a glass of water and refills it whenever your waiter/waitress notices that your cup seems to be a bit empty -- then you go, "wow, this is great service, I'll come back here again." Same thing with digital content. Because I can get The Daily Show in the Netherlands via TheDailyShow.com, I am really interested in any work that Comedy Central does, and I even own a copy of their book, America (The Book). I have no idea how else they're going to get a revenue stream out of my viewership there, but I imagine they'll find something worthwhile.
- rbarooah 15y ago
  In a restaurant, the cost of providing you with a warm comfortable place to sit, and someone to bring you glasses of water (the cost of the water itself being deminimus), is covered by the expensive meal you pay for. Since all unprotected digital goods are approximately as cheap to copy as one another regardless of production cost, all digital goods count as 'glasses of water' in your analogy. This implies that the cost of producing unprotected digital goods in general can only be covered by selling some non-digital good or service in conjunction with it.
  - Retric 15y ago
    MMO's are digital goods without this problem as is Facebook. Also, many restaurants barely break even on their food and make most of their money selling dramatically overpriced drinks. If you order a ten 99c cheeseburger's from McDonald's they make less money than if you order one 1.50$ soda, yet when you focus on the average customer you sell enough soda for McDonald's to become a multi billion dollar company. http://adage.com/article/news/double-cheeseburgers-working-triple-time-fast-feeders/122898/ http://adage.com/article/news/double-cheeseburgers-working-t...
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      No they aren't - they both keep important parts of their software protected and sell an adjunct service. The MMO server software is heavily protected, and you pay for access to the data center where they run it. MMOs are therefore both protected and funded by the selling of an adjunt service. Facebook's client software is free but the server software is also heavily protected, and the operation is paid for by selling advertising, also an adjunct service.
      - Retric 15y ago
        The server side software on most MMO's is a tiny fraction of the overall code. People have reversed engendered World of Warcraft and some people play on private servers. However, in both WOW's and Facebook's case it's the hosting of all that data that's valuable not just the code. Which comes back to my main point, there are DRM free ways to make piracy irrelevant. If someone was trying to sell a nuclear submarine by walking door to door in a trailer-park people would have no problem suggesting they were an idiot. Yet, for some reason people get all up in arms when someone suggests selling prepackaged media is a poor decision.
spindritf 15y ago
> This a nonsensical assertion supported by the flimsy justification that the marginal cost of a digital good is so low. Well the total costs of production remain quite high,especially considering the cost of marketing. That could be true but doesn't seem to be. (Though it is possible that due to piracy some capital-intensive virtual/intellectual good are not being made at all.) Note the sort of post scriptum he added at the end: > Year after year I'm told online file-sharing is decimating sales, everyone is losing money, we have to do something to stop it. I'm not going to try and convince you you're wrong, but I do have a question: [...] If online file-sharing is killing these industries, why would they keep producing more content? > I've seen people get quite huffy in these parts for lifting a stupid graphic graphic from a website. I think that's also a consequence of copyright enforcement: "I can't copy anything but when I made something people just copy it?!" sort of thinking. And many people are fine with their work being appropriated without compensation (with credit which is also strictly enforced in the illicit copying world), look at all that GPLv2-, or MIT-, or BSD-licensed software.
danssig 15y ago
I, for one, don't want movies, music or any other content creation to die. I would like to see the obsolete middle men die off though. They have no reason to be there and seem to be really awful people (going by what they do to stars and real content makers).

by b1daly 15y ago

drostie 15y ago

I think at core his argument is that he doesn't want to pay for the content he consumes. He justifies it on the grounds that the prices are too high. Well, no. At least, that's not the central theme of his essay. I can sort of see why you might get that impression if you read only the middle and neither the beginning or the end, but the author is very clear about what he is saying and you would have to ignore all of that to label him as "a real creep." So, here is the overall picture of the essay, since you may have missed it. He is saying, "look, I am a pirate -- I'm not going to try to justify that or discuss it; we'll just take it here as a given: I am going to pirate stuff. Now, it just so happens, like many pirates, I actually buy a lot of entertainment, paying a lot of money for games and television and movies. So let's ask a different question: how can you get access to my money?" Here's one way, he says, to revoke your access to his money: sell him a crappy product. It's not unlike my behavior at cyclist shops in the Netherlands. An obscure piece of trivia: there are three bike valves in common usage, the American/Schrader/car valve, the French/Presta/unscrew valve, and the English/Woods-Dunlop valve. The Dutch prefer by 90% or so the Woods valve, but I have been sold twice air pumps from various cycling shops which simply do not work on Woods valves, and either time I was told that I could not be reimbursed because I had to take the pump out of the packing material to use it. (In fact, both times I found out that neither bike shop knew the name of the Woods-Dunlop valve despite the fact that it's absurdly popular.) Guess who is never getting my business again? The people who sold me stuff that does not work. In fact, as you might imagine has occurred with me, he is now so paranoid about being sold content which sucks that he will no longer put down money until he knows that it doesn't suck -- just like I won't buy a bike pump unless I can see that I can manually switch the airflow to the smaller nozzle. If I can't demand a refund then I'm going to demand that I know the quality that I'm buying. On the other hand, he says, one way to really get his money is by convenience. When he sees albums from bands he liked, he buys those. If he pirates a good game he usually buys the sequel, and will even opt to pay a little extra to bundle it with the original game. IP law is just as important to open source software. It actually tends to get in the way. There are all sorts of different licenses, many of which are not compatible -- GNU code can use but can't be used by BSD code, Eclipse can neither use nor be used by GNU -- and the biggest problem is that software freedom is not given automatically. Would any of the coders here be cool with others appropriating their work without compensation or choice in the matter? I assure you, all of the people here who work on websites would be happy if you visited their website, even though that requires your computer to copy all of their images and client-side code. We might get mad if you try to reappropriate our content, especially for profit. This is also conceded by the original poster, who says, "The main reason I don't feel bad is because, like I detailed above, I know I'm buying content. Another important reason I don't feel bad is because I'm not profiting. I'm not taking your content and trying to resell it as though I'm a legitimate vendor." The problem is that digital goods without articily created scarcity and property like "properties"'will suffer a major free rider problem. No, they won't. The fact that people will download you for free will be perfectly balanced by the fact that downloads are absurdly cheap operations. It's like complaining that, "if we don't make it really hard to get a glass of water at our restaurant, then everybody will just order water and nobody will ever buy drinks." If you start to think that way, when getting someone a glass of water is of absolutely negligible cost, then you will alienate your customers for no good reason. That's what the MAFIAA has been doing: it's dirt-cheap for them to produce digital copies, but they think like you are describing, and insist on trying to create an artificial economy of scarcity. All it creates is resentment. A good restaurant starts you off with a glass of water and refills it whenever your waiter/waitress notices that your cup seems to be a bit empty -- then you go, "wow, this is great service, I'll come back here again." Same thing with digital content. Because I can get The Daily Show in the Netherlands via TheDailyShow.com, I am really interested in any work that Comedy Central does, and I even own a copy of their book, America (The Book). I have no idea how else they're going to get a revenue stream out of my viewership there, but I imagine they'll find something worthwhile.

rbarooah 15y ago
In a restaurant, the cost of providing you with a warm comfortable place to sit, and someone to bring you glasses of water (the cost of the water itself being deminimus), is covered by the expensive meal you pay for. Since all unprotected digital goods are approximately as cheap to copy as one another regardless of production cost, all digital goods count as 'glasses of water' in your analogy. This implies that the cost of producing unprotected digital goods in general can only be covered by selling some non-digital good or service in conjunction with it.
- Retric 15y ago
  MMO's are digital goods without this problem as is Facebook. Also, many restaurants barely break even on their food and make most of their money selling dramatically overpriced drinks. If you order a ten 99c cheeseburger's from McDonald's they make less money than if you order one 1.50$ soda, yet when you focus on the average customer you sell enough soda for McDonald's to become a multi billion dollar company. http://adage.com/article/news/double-cheeseburgers-working-triple-time-fast-feeders/122898/ http://adage.com/article/news/double-cheeseburgers-working-t...
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    No they aren't - they both keep important parts of their software protected and sell an adjunct service. The MMO server software is heavily protected, and you pay for access to the data center where they run it. MMOs are therefore both protected and funded by the selling of an adjunt service. Facebook's client software is free but the server software is also heavily protected, and the operation is paid for by selling advertising, also an adjunct service.
    - Retric 15y ago
      The server side software on most MMO's is a tiny fraction of the overall code. People have reversed engendered World of Warcraft and some people play on private servers. However, in both WOW's and Facebook's case it's the hosting of all that data that's valuable not just the code. Which comes back to my main point, there are DRM free ways to make piracy irrelevant. If someone was trying to sell a nuclear submarine by walking door to door in a trailer-park people would have no problem suggesting they were an idiot. Yet, for some reason people get all up in arms when someone suggests selling prepackaged media is a poor decision.

spindritf 15y ago

> This a nonsensical assertion supported by the flimsy justification that the marginal cost of a digital good is so low. Well the total costs of production remain quite high,especially considering the cost of marketing. That could be true but doesn't seem to be. (Though it is possible that due to piracy some capital-intensive virtual/intellectual good are not being made at all.) Note the sort of post scriptum he added at the end: > Year after year I'm told online file-sharing is decimating sales, everyone is losing money, we have to do something to stop it. I'm not going to try and convince you you're wrong, but I do have a question: [...] If online file-sharing is killing these industries, why would they keep producing more content? > I've seen people get quite huffy in these parts for lifting a stupid graphic graphic from a website. I think that's also a consequence of copyright enforcement: "I can't copy anything but when I made something people just copy it?!" sort of thinking. And many people are fine with their work being appropriated without compensation (with credit which is also strictly enforced in the illicit copying world), look at all that GPLv2-, or MIT-, or BSD-licensed software.

danssig 15y ago

I, for one, don't want movies, music or any other content creation to die. I would like to see the obsolete middle men die off though. They have no reason to be there and seem to be really awful people (going by what they do to stars and real content makers).