31 ms·

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

• eimrine 3y ago
  I hope one day it will be a country somewhere on Earth who will have a ban for non-free software in the Constitution. The reality has changed too much to trust some people in govt to protect us from megacorps. We really need Richard Stallman kind of guy as a president of at least a tiniest country in the whole mad world.
  • Flameancer 3y ago
    That seems like a sure fire way to hamstring your country. Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? Would you install trackers and block the internet in general so citizens can’t get software that’s open source. Would you demand visitors to surrender their devices while visiting so the authorities can check for non-free software installed?
    • cturner 3y ago
      These are fair criticisms of the proposal. A similar but more workable path would be a constitutional clause to 1. limit the concept of property to scarce goods and 2. outlaw the creation of legal mechanisms like copyright.
      • 9dev 3y ago
        We tried something similar once. It broke down quickly, led to the rich owning everything, required a surveillance nightmare to function, and left a permanent scar on the world. I don’t think we should in engage this idea again.
        • eimrine 3y ago
          We did not try mass refusal of defective by design technologies since Clair Patterson.
        • cturner 3y ago
          I do not understand your point. (or maybe you did not understand mine)
          • 9dev 3y ago
            > limit the concept of property to scarce goods This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results. You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.
            • cturner 3y ago
              There is no analogy between (strengthening scarce-property rights) and (communism). There is no analogy between (preventing copyright) and (communism).
              • 9dev 3y ago
                You did not say strengthen scarce-property rights; you mentioned abolishing property rights for things other than scarce goods.
                • cturner 3y ago
                  Higher up, I phrased it the other way around - but they are the same thing. The creation of property rights around non-scarce things undermines scarce property rights. There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights. Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc. Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.) By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards. Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now. A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.
    • bambax 3y ago
      Like the original article explains well, the question isn't technical, it's legal. You don't have to inspect users' devices if you make selling licences illegal, because then nobody can legally make money selling them.
    • eimrine 3y ago
      > Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? The law I proposed has to be working against governments and semi-government institution such as banks, not about random Joes. The firmware question is interesting, because there is no such thing as FLOSS hardware except of some low-end microcontrollers, thank you for noticing. The most decent way of achieving this state seems like to prohibit only import of new devices and don't even bother about user's ones or anything second-hand. I have an observation that if you have 2 identical laptops but one with Nvidia/Amd and one with Intel HD then the former laptop will die naturally, such as any laptop with Ati today, while the latter laptop keeps serving until the physical death. You can install Ati driver for Windows 7 but can not for Windows 8 and never; also proprietary Ati driver fails to work with modern Linux stack while free Ati driver uses to much energy to consider the device as a laptop. This is an example of natural death of proprietary hardware/software, just stop import new proprietary devices. Any authorities checking user devices for anything is a way of tyranny/authoritarism/totalitarism, nowadays the governmenns are working into totally another way, elusive to see for us the adults. In XXI governments use to propagate this or that ideas in schools. Teach them to have their fun and games in GNU/Linux distros and prohibit teachers to propagate Microsoft, Zoom, Viber, Google without restricting usage of these service for leisure. When the proprietary devices will start begging to buy a new hardware but it will not be available inside of the country then we will found ourselves in a new world. > Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? There is no such thing in XXI as an independed government without a large dev team.
  • wizardforhire 3y ago
    Yes and… We need a figure head with a strong moral and ethical compass who lives in private as if they are in public. Whom is capable of addressing all situations with grace, elegance, respect, compassion, and humility in that order only in reverse. One whom is frugal, well read, and courteous. One whom in being frugal is able to think of all and is able to stand fast in the face of corruption as they deep down truly experience the interconnectedness of life and by proxy society… and through experiences, travels and interactions has attained a working understanding of the all pervasive ripple effect. Oh yeah, and this person has to be willing to martyr themselves as the public life sucks!
    • TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      Yeah, we need a good dictator (...) or we need to create federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making as an alternative to current systems.
      • wizardforhire 3y ago
        Who said anything about a dictator? What I was describing is the hypothetical dream traits of what I perceive are a necessity to be an effective leader in this era. It’s a tall ask but someone embodying those traits would scoff at the notion of wanting, let alone keeping power! If you’d like to see what federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making looks like and how it feels to participate in I challenge you to join a local planning commission in your city if you haven’t already and if you live in america of course…
      • tacocataco 3y ago
        How about everyone self organizes into 2000ish person communes, all structured in the way they feel life is best lived?
  • dottedmag 3y ago
    Open source is a technical detail. One can see a less drastical change that will have the same effect. 1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are: - Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner. - Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner. - Spying on a user is an unlawful search. 2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job. 3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years. 4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.
    • ozim 3y ago
      I branch off company close branch down because it was unprofitable - I don’t have to support device. Other approach, only huge companies start making devices because medium size companies cannot take the risk of the refunds. Users are worse off, companies are worse off everything with the outlined rules is worse. Making law is hard.
      • fifteen1506 3y ago
        Agreed. Still, reverse engineering unsupported software or hardware should be made legal.
        • tacocataco 3y ago
          Why can't it enter the public domain by default? Like how copyright used to work for media.
      • dottedmag 3y ago
        Make managers personally responsible.
    • anonymousab 3y ago
      > bought digital content The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion". You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state. That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow. But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.
  • jorvi 3y ago
    I’ve always dreamt of at least the EU and China (yes I know of Kylin) mandating libre software for governmental use. Could you imagine the gigantic amount of flow of money that goes into Microsoft enterprise and Office support instead flowing into open source? And the amount of bug that amount of eyeballs would catch. Both the Linux desktop and things like LibreOffice would see meteoric improvements within the year. Right now there is already some chances budding (in Spain’s regional governments, Munich, France’s military), it just needs to be pulled together into a comprehensive plan and get a good push.
    • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      It's an idealism, for sure; but after reading about experiments like Hamburg's maybe we'll get there eventually. But what's far more important (and practical) than mandating libre software is mandating libre file formats, and this is what we've seen happen somewhat successfully around the world: governments requiring official documents to be primarily available in PDF/A and/or OpenDocument (c.f. OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice) instead of (say) MSFT's Office OOXML formats.
    • em-bee 3y ago
      china is actually trying, but it is not easy to get every governmental employee to listen and enforce such a change. in europe on the other hand the issue is entirely political. a city switches to linux. when the leading party changes it switches back because microsoft promises some benefits like jobs or worse kickbacks, or the new leader is simply ignorant and actually believes that windows is better.
    • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Germany offered the UK a "test and trace" app during the corona virus pandemic. The UK government of course refused, because producing an app was an opportunity to divert £37 Billion (!) from taxes to their associates. The delay in not taking the completed app also would have cost thousands of lives. In short, the first thing you need is people who care about their countrymen. People often propose ideas that start from an assumption that politicians want to make the World better, but the ones in power in the UK at least are more motivated by other things: greed for example.
  • timwaagh 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • eimrine 3y ago
      Where are the lunches going from? I can bet a few dollars that you as a hired dev are mistreating your users making their computers to do a lot of things they are not aware of for the sake of cancer like growing of your favorite industry. RMS is Clair Patterson of our world and programmers like you are equivalent of those guys who unfairly claim that leaded fuel is OK and a lot of lead in the air was since the creation of the world.
      • timwaagh 3y ago
        You lost your bet. I don't abuse our users. How much did I earn? I'm not sure what you have against hired developers. We just want to earn money for coding, is this a crime?
  • buzzert 3y ago
    I don't understand, why is it not enough to just... use free software? Why must the government be involved at all?
• the-dude 3y ago
  Piracy was never stealing to begin with.
  • r0ckarong 3y ago
    Digital piracy. Piracy was indeed piracy at one time.
    • codedokode 3y ago
      Piracy still exists.
      • LoganDark 3y ago
        Yep, shipping containers are stolen straight off ships to this very day, or ships are just straight-up hijacked. Real, actual piracy.
        • xg15 3y ago
          Is there still a lot of piracy with the goal to actually steal the goods though? My impression is that current-day pirates try to capture the ships themselves and hold them for ransom. (Genuinely curious though)
          • LoganDark 3y ago
            I think so. I haven't read any recent news on it or anything, but there are surely still pirates that steal individual containers or sets of containers rather than trying to hijack the entire ship.
            • defrost 3y ago
              Individual containers are far far easier to steal dockside - seals can be broken and contents taken leaving the container and an undiscovered theft, containers can be rerouted onto trucks, etc. Stealing a container on the high seas is damn near impossible, doable but a challenge. The middle ground would be taking under tow floating containers that fall off of ships in bad weather - but I daresay that comes under salvage.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Piracy isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement. The copyright lobby overplayed their hand with those infamous cringey "you wouldn't steal a car" ads, and trying to claim that every copy made of their product was a "lost sale".
  • jonathanstrange 3y ago
    The worst thing about this campaign was that nearly every person on Earth would download a car if that was possible, e.g. with an affordable advanced 3D printing robot.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • hazbo 3y ago
      I recently learned that it had been reported that the music for those ads was stolen and used without permission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
      • sonicanatidae 3y ago
        Because of course it was. smh.
        • lern_too_spel 3y ago
          The Wikipedia article says that the reporting was incorrect and cites https://torrentfreak.com/sorry-the-you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-anti-piracy-ad-wasnt-pirated-170625/ https://torrentfreak.com/sorry-the-you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-a...
          • sonicanatidae 3y ago
            That's fair. It doesn't address the numerous cases where they did similar, but in this one case, sure, despite it matching their business model perfectly.
• buserror 3y ago
  See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872 -- 4 hours ago.
• alin23 3y ago
  I believe in most cases, DRM would not exist if people wouldn't have started pirating digital content. We're also to blame for the state of things. Just like I would not bother to buy and use a bike lock if people would not steal bikes in the first place. It's a bad analogy though, like all analogies are, since if I sell my bike I can't make it stop working for the buyer at a later time. But that's the big difference between digital and physical. I have been working on and off on anti-piracy measures for my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/) and as much as I want this to not affect normal users, the app can still stop working after a decade or two if the Paddle licensing server doesn't respond as I expect it for example, and I'm no longer around to fix it. This could be regarded as DRM by some. But I would have never wasted time with this if people would not crack my app in the first place AND demand customer support and flood my dashboard with errors unrelated to the normal functioning of the app. If piracy isn't stealing, then protecting against it isn't limiting ownership.
  • izacus 3y ago
    I find your posts fascinating - after working in the content industry for awhile, it's very easy to see (and confirmed with repeated studies) that DRM doesn't significantly affect or prevent piracy. Not to mention that there's a constant stream of more and more anti-customer requests coming from content provider lawyers. Requests that would make your head spin at just how fundamentaly evil they are (most of them... for now... can be pushed back). Remember, those dudes had the idea to attempt to make physical media that rot away after few days of use. You are hugely, hugely wrong in the basic premise that actual reality of piracy is something that even comes close to reasoning for people who put these anti consumer practices in. Use your brain - DRM allows them to increase profits even without piracy (by taking away consumer rights like second sale doctrine and ability to share content with your friends and family). You're seriously implying it's a bit of piracy that's making them say "yes, let's make sure everyone buys their own copy of the movie"? Do you think copyright protection laws were extended to 70 years+death of the authors because there were too many pirates copying Mickey movies?
    • raincole 3y ago
      > a bit of piracy Don't know about other content industry, but at least in video games, "a bit of" and "piracy" are oxymoron. Any semi-popular game has a significant number of pirated copy players. Example: World of Goo claims 90% of players play pirated copies.[1] This is a game distributed without DRM and the price isn't high ($15 and region-based). 90% piracy rate is how customers respond to no DRM. [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy
• colinsane 3y ago
  Cory links as the source of this quote to a bluesky page. does anyone know how to view these things without a login? doesn't seem to be supported by bypass-paywalls or by archive.org yet. https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kf...
  • mandmandam 3y ago
    https://skyview.social/ https://skyview.social/ Quick link to quote: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Ftylerjameshill.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3kflw2lvam42n&viewtype=tree https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...
• UberFly 3y ago
  This quote from the author is my favorite. This is so spot-on: These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further."
  • carom 3y ago
    The CEO of the last startup I was at was like that. Very much an archetype in my mind now. I will never work with someone like that again.
    • odyssey7 3y ago
      This video from Y Combinator, “How To NOT Get Screwed As A Software Engineer,” is full of great tips. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fcfVjd_oV1I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fcfVjd_oV1I
      • ryloric 3y ago
        Great video, thanks for sharing
      • pierat 3y ago
        Wow, that's hella tone-deaf. EVERYBODY under Capitalism, aside the owner class, is getting exploited. It's not 'if you're getting screwed'. It's 'how much'.
        • satvikpendem 3y ago
          Not everyone subscribes to the labor theory of value, where Marx's definition of exploitation is a very specific, technical one (capturing of profit surplus) whereas the conventional definition is not (ie, exploiting children for child labor). Most people do not think that getting paid for a job even as the company makes more money is "exploitation," even if it is so under the communist definition.
          • 3y ago
• onion2k 3y ago
  It is though because you 'rent' from a digital store but you 'steal' from the content owner. Someone owns the content. Just not you. An analogy would be if I rent a car and someone takes it they haven't stolen from me but they have stolen from the rental company. (Where 'steal' is strictly shorthand for copyright infringement, but that's a pretty meaningless semantic difference outside of a courtroom.)
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    Is it a 'meaningless semantic difference'? If I told you I would give you X if you did Y for me, but after you did Y I refused to give you X, did I steal from you? What if I told a prospective client of yours a lie about your abilities and they didn't hire you; did I steal from you?
  • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >(Where 'steal' is strictly shorthand for copyright infringement, but that's a pretty meaningless semantic difference outside of a courtroom.) // It's not at all meaningless. If I take a photo of your house, I copy it, then I do not deny you full enjoyment of that house. If on the other hand I steal your house, I think you would feel a little more than a semantic difference. Now, I might copy your house and build another from the same materials, which again is unlikely to feel to you like theft. There are lots of other possible scenarios of course. Suppose you're the architect of the first house, you got paid, but not you're pissed off because you think you should get paid again despite having done no more work... but then it turns out people see both houses and they want a house in that style, so they come to and give you another few months of work. Do you complain about it being "theft" now?
    • onion2k 3y ago
      It's not at all meaningless. It is meaningless, because pointing out the difference doesn't move the conversation forwards in any useful way. Everyone who's discussed piracy in the last 40 years knows what 'stealing' means in a copyright context, and everyone discussing the morality of copyright theft, such as this thread, rather than the legality of copyright theft, means stealing in the sense of 'taking something without paying for it' and not 'depriving the owner of something'. While the armchair lawyers can't move on from the semantic moral (not legal, that's important) difference we won't get anywhere. If you're a supreme court judge it matters. If you're an internet poster it doesn't.
• todotask 3y ago
  Buying is an investment, piracy is a loss of investment and the license come with it.
• timwaagh 3y ago
  I didn't know things had gone quite this far yet. I have to agree. There should be legislation preventing this, or the pirates will be morally in the clear. Which does not help copyright owners. Yes, the pirate stole your content, but since you were going to revoke access anyhow he was stealing from a scammer which is justice.
  • caslon 3y ago
    A pirate didn't steal content, though. Nobody lost any content! There was no transaction involved. Piracy isn't zero-sum.
    • omeid2 3y ago
      Piracy isn't exactly a zero-sum game, there is a cost associated with it. Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on; now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question, with interesting arguments for how or why modern copyright might not provide the intended outcomes.
      • tpoacher 3y ago
        It's not even as straightforward as that. Most serious studies on the topic have demonstrated that piracy not only does not lead to lost sales, but in fact it leads to increased sales instead.
        • bad_user 3y ago
          ... for Big Tech. It's how companies like Microsoft or Adobe could grow and gain uncontested monopolies. Because, due to piracy, price was no longer a good enough differentiator. And it's why "Linux on the desktop" never happened. There aren't many studies on this topic and the available ones are bullshit, as they don't take into account second order effects of piracy, one of which being the rise of streaming with DRM, which also concentrates power in the hands of a few Big Tech companies. Piracy is one of the biggest reasons for why we have monopolies. The phenomenon is now repeated with ad blockers. And the irony of the situation is that people point at monopolies to justify piracy or the use of ad blockers.
• SSLy 3y ago
  dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872
• TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  TIf I copy the money in someone's bank account - it's just numbers, after all - I haven't actually stolen anything. So that must be ok? TBH I would be ok with that. But - inexplicably - the pro-piracy people never are. How about the videos of your personal sexy times on your phone? Ah but wait! Money has value! No, money does not have value. Money is a special kind of resource-constrained IP with a unique protection mechanism and tightly controlled access rights. If it were possible to hack that system - and some people have done this - it's still just numbers with no more "value" than any other numbers. Either you accept that ownership and access control are valid ways to manage access to resources, or you go full post-scarcity neo-communist and destroy the concept of ownership altogether. Anything else is hypocrisy. The fact that most IP is owned by terrible people and doesn't benefit the artists is a different argument. That's an argument against wealth capture, political inequality, and rentier capitalism - a much bigger issue with relevance across multiple domains. The real tell is that this is only ever about creative and never expands into wider questions of ownership and resource control. My suspicion is that non-creative people resent the apparent agency and freedom that creatives have, and this is always more about that resentment than some supposed question around IP. Basically some guy who makes music is an easier target than CEO bro, and it's always easier to punch down than up.
  • rmellow 3y ago
    Interesting analogy with money but I don't think it holds up. Money requires scarcity, otherwise its utility goes down. En masse, money copying would bring about hyper inflation very quickly. Society loses. On the other hand, what work of art requires scarcity to be enjoyed? Personal sexy videos don't count here, as that's a privacy matter not a scarcity issue. I can see that argument working for the fashion industry for example: buying clothes from an exclusive designer has the value of making you look unique. If suddenly that outfit gets copied and everyone is wearing knockoffs, you no longer look unique. However if someone pays to rent a movie, and someone else pirates it, none of the consumers lost. The copyright owner only loses if a sale would've otherwise happened. So I think that outcomes matter according to specific scenarios, and showing damage should be essential in court cases. Too many innocents have their lives ruined by inflated piracy claims that truly caused little damage.
  • 3y ago
• apienx 3y ago
  The definition of private property is defined by political systems, which are shaped by cultural norms and values. It's unlikely that humanity will still treat intellectual output as private property centuries from now. The digital (and network) revolution are paradigm shifts, and the latter can take a very long to play out. That said, financially supporting worthwhile projects is a moral duty. So please do your part.
• einpoklum 3y ago
  1. Piracy is when guys in ships board another ship and take its cargo. Copying files is not piracy. 2. Sharing is caring and information wants to be free. 3. La propriété, c'est le vol! https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_propriété,_c'est_le_vol_ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_propriété,_c'est_le_vol_! https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Joseph-Proudhon https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Joseph-Proudhon
• muzani 3y ago
  Where I come from, both parties have to consent. The buyer says "I purchase this for $10". The seller says "I purchase for $10." You have a valid sale. Modern forms involve giving the money, then getting a receipt. Here's the problem - the seller can be a thief. The common forms of seller theft is selling something of less value than marketed, or with conditions that were not brought up earlier (like no repair). Being illegal isn't be the only measure of theft, not in some societies. You can pirate something without theft -- as long as the seller consents to it. It won't be legal if there's no written agreement of consent. Some companies have this model where you can illegally use their software forever, but have to pay for a license. They want some of the richer people to pay, but the law doesn't recognize this selective consent, so it's enforced selectively. But in OP's case, there's no valid transaction possible in some situations. They're not pirating nice guy WinRAR. The seller doesn't want to consent and the buyer won't consent. Because there's no possible option, the pirate assumes it belongs to nobody and takes it. Thieves will often justify a theft, either by saying nobody owns it or that it belonged to them. There's a whole hill of philosophy here about what private property means. Taking back your homeland is not theft, because it's yours. That's why we have laws so a third party can judge these things. But you know, maybe just come to terms that stealing isn't always unethical. Instead of saying piracy isn't stealing, it's more like piracy isn't unethical. It's pedantic, but solves a lot of the nitpicks people have on the topic.
• lemper 3y ago
  you know, my default stance is pirating is the way. i don't give a shit who "owns" the media. if it's in my harddisk, it should not go away unless I delete it or the system (fs / hw / what have you) is kill. good thing I don't enjoy entertainment like movies or music. but in the small chance I like it, I'd go to the store, get the disk, rip it or just torrent it. but bro! that's immoral and you will suffer in hell! nah bro, we're already in hell. bro! them popos will catch your ass and put you in jail! nah bro, if they don't know, it's not illegal.
• dindobre 3y ago
  The social contract is so broken that I'm not surprised that piracy is rampant. I justify it (and I make games). It has all become a matter of leverage, I truly believe that if some companies (or people) could point a gun to our heads they would, and it shows in the way they operate. And no, it's not always "it's just profit", sometimes it's a shortsighted chase of the next stock value high with complete disregard for the future since lack of accountability is pretty much built-in into the higher classes of managers
  • throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    Profit or stock value is what is measured, sociopathy is what's driving it and lack of accountability enables it.
  • csydas 3y ago
    It's endemic for sure -- I download pirated stuff yes, but as I got older, I really did try to make an effort to use streaming services, movie/media stores, app stores, etc. Everything about it was so awful and ridiculous that it just wasn't worth my time to deal with the frustrations and more importantly the ever increasing costs and advertisement non-sense. Having an entire TV series I was watching suddenly vanish from the provider library in between episodes, shows/music I had used the applications own "download to local device" feature vanished just because I was traveling and suddenly I was not approved to watch/listen to the stuff I had paid for, constant advertisements and pushes for more subscriptions, it was absolutely asinine. I do continue to download some pirated items but largely I just checked out of modern media mostly because the cost of participation is too much. At least online there are some services that video essayists release on which aren't too bad (Nebula isn't horrible, but still is a bit annoying). I'm fearful of the day that searching "[some specific functions I want] + FOSS" and looking for repositories that have what I'm hoping for will stop working, since it's been fairly successful for me to find software that doesn't come with all the modern tech world non-sense. Some of the most simple applications like DaisyDisk for macOS or the Redirector plugins for browsers are absolute gems that have made my life objectively better and more convenient, and the teams behind these programs have shown repeatedly they aren't interested in anything else besides just having their programs work. It was very easy decision to donate to these teams/buy the apps because it was the most simple transaction ever, and the programs work as well or better than they did when I first installed them. Same with games from GOG -- I love that I have bought HoMM3 one time, and I think more than a decade later, I can still use the same installer, get the installer again, and enjoy my game wherever I want, and it's a completed game that can be further improved by mods. Real and workable models for selling tech exist and it works without DRM -- I know for corporations it's not enough money coming in and they "need" to monetize every last drop of blood out of everything, but it's not like these business models are impossible or even bad; just different and a bit calmer than the corporate non-sense we have today. And the alternative models without DRM and data pilfering are definitely something I am willing to buy into, since there looks to be a pretty damn good chance I'll be able to actually use the stuff I'm buying how I want to.
• rizky05 3y ago
  [dead]
• mrtksn 3y ago
  Why is this even confusing? Piracy is piracy, it is the act of consuming products outside of the framework that enabled the funding for creation of these products. And the owning was always about owning the rights to consume some product within some framework, no one ever claimed that you own an album in the sense that you can do whatever you like to do with it if you paid 19.99$. If you want to actually own an album, you do it like Martin Shkreli purchasing the album from Wu-Tang Clan. Pay 4 million dollars and it's all yours. Useless discussions, honestly. It's like claiming that Walter White did not actually die on Breaking bad.
  • xigoi 3y ago
    If I buy a book, I can read it as many times as I want, lend it to other people or even burn it in a fireplace if I want to. Why shouldn’t these rights extend to digital media?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • mrtksn 3y ago
      I think it should. Go ahead and implement it, then get content producers distribute their work in your framework. Good luck.
      • epups 3y ago
        It sounds to me like you are trying to say that because technology exists to enforce oppressive stances against basic consumer rights we all had just a few years ago, we should also not make use of technology that exists to circumvent this attack. Is your argument solely based on "it is, therefore it should be", or is there more to it?
        • mrtksn 3y ago
          I think you are misrepresenting the situation and misreading what I said. What I say is, if you don't like how Oppenheimer was funded, produced and then how they tried to collect money from you when you wanted to see it then you should fund and produce your own movie and distribute it the way you see fit. Upload it to YouTube, share a magnet link - whatever. Nothing stops you from not participating in the DRM stuff.
• eadmund 3y ago
  I agree with the substantive point that these DRM-enabled shenanigans are a bad thing but I think putting things this way is unproductive: > I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer: > > WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS. Leaving it as ‘WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE. YOU WILL RENT, NOT OWN, ANYTHING YOU PURCHASE FOR IT.’ would be honest. Ditto ‘enshittification,’ ditto particularly ‘most guillotineable executive,’ ditto ‘deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup.’ These are not the words of a mature adult making a mature point: they are the words of a performance artist. One’s opponents are human beings too.
  • fifteen1506 3y ago
    Childish? Yes. Understandable? Also yes. Don't forget defeating DRM for ethical purposes is a grey area. Maybe even illegal. Example: those trains in Poland [referred in the article]. I think what the company did by contracting the hardware hackers to investigate (by RE) what was going on was illegal, and what they did was illegal too. What if they hadn't? The company would have lost the support contract. The law is out of sync with morals and what's better for society. So, while not recommended, the tone is acceptable or, at least, understandable.
  • ozim 3y ago
    I was thinking the same. But people are convinced that these CEO types or high ranking MBA employees don’t look down on customers or employees as people but as numbers in excel. So it is super hard to treat them as humans too.
  • mindslight 3y ago
    If we're debating how to optimize that 'disclaimer', start with capitalizing it properly. All caps is HOSTILE YELLING and big blocks of it are generally meant to be skipped over. Second, don't think of it as a separate disclaimer - emphasize the relevant details right in the review itself! "The device has great battery life, tactile controls, and a responsive UI. But the main way of getting music on the device is a proprietary 'media store' that lets you rent access to albums for some unknown time. Loading your music collection as standard mp3 or flac files is currently possible, but due to security vulnerabilities in the client software this option may disappear at any time the manufacturer wants to force you into the more profitable option. The MSRP is $200 but the expected TCO of this device will be upwards of $1200 or more assuming you want to listen to a modest 50 albums."
• motbus3 3y ago
  I honestly think that "perpetual until something" licenses should be forbidden or at least should guarantee the full price paid back.
• igiveup 3y ago
  Human laws do not follow laws of nature, or laws of logic. Trying to rationalize why something is or isn't owning or stealing is a misunderstanding. "It is not missing anywhere, so it isn't stealing" does not apply. What applies is more like "This paper says it is stealing, so it is." The paper says it because a human wrote it there, as a result of whatever complexity going on in their natural neural network. Please notice I didn't say "right", "wrong", "good", or "bad" anywhere.
  • berkes 3y ago
    We write these laws on paper, and not on two stone tablets because they aren't fixed. You make it sound like "once it's written down, that's how it is. forever". Which is also not how law works (not even how religious "laws" work).
    • igiveup 3y ago
      To me, it sounds more like you're saying the same thing as me: It is not a law of nature, it is text on paper, a human fiction. Yet, somehow you manage to disagree with me. How did that happen?
• tgv 3y ago
  Taking a book from the library without a library subscription and returning it is still stealing. That corps can brick the device you paid for or block access to your media is an different matter.
  • berkes 3y ago
    The comparison is off. The comparison should be "the library has plenty of copies of a book but does not allow anyone to borrow it, regardless of if they have a subscription. Someone takes it out, returns it". Is that stealing? It might be, IDK, but is certainly more complex than your example.
    • tgv 3y ago
      No, that's the second part: restricting access. If a library would not allow a paying subscriber to lend books, they would break the contract. Same for bricked phones or DRM. But "piracy", is it's meant here, is the first part: lending/taking without paying. It's not meant as a blanket condemnation of piracy, and certainly not as support for subscription access, but as a counter-example against the headline: even if you don't own, piracy still can be stealing.
• dathinab 3y ago
  piracy was never stealing, stealing requires the removal of where it comes from, which copies do fundamentally not do piracy is causing hypothetical financial damage by braking some laws with the irony that sometimes there is no financial damage, or that the damage is such a small fraction of the claimed damage to a point where persuading it should make no sense through sometimes it also can be big enough to destroy companies
• delusional 3y ago
  It's interesting that America, steeped in their self described "liberalism" and "market economy" has become a nation of renters. You don't own anything, but rent it. If you need to transport yourself, you rent an uber using your phone which is rented from google, on the internet connection rented from AT&T. It's important to note that I'm not saying you need to own a car to live up to the American ideal, but you'd expect the freedom conscious American to demand rights, making them the true owners of their possessions. You'd expect the American to demand guaranteed access to transportation.
• dustedcodes 3y ago
  I agree with the sentiments of most points in this article but this one irks me: > Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury! Different perspective: Imagine you've been so lucky that you were able to work on a program and GET PAID for it irrespective if it will turn out to be a flop or even deemed so bad that it's more worthwhile to write off than release. Imagine being so lucky that during the COVID-19 pandemic where most people were left without job and/or income you still had the privilege to show up on set at 5AM and do a 16-hour work shift and provide food on the table for your kids so they can eat a healthy breakfast. Talk about privilege and luck that you've ended up in a position in life that enables you this job security in life which 99.99% of humans can only dream of.
  • Solvency 3y ago
    This reeks of corporate bootlicking because we should be so "lucky" we're not part of the poor and starving class in 2023.
    • dustedcodes 3y ago
      If you work for someone else you're entitled to get a fair payment for your time and skill. If you want more than that go and create your own business.
      • leonroy 3y ago
        That’s disingenuous - part of your compensation at many companies involves the expectation that the work is rewarding or its outcome has some non-monetary compensation. This is especially true in entertainment and media industries where workers will even be asked to work at a discount for the prestige. Otherwise why do finance have to pay engineers more (at least here in London) or why are the interesting jobs nearly always paying below market? If the show or film was cancelled after the worker signed a contract to work, the expectation of the worker when they signed up was that said work will see the light of day. Part of the compensation would be having the work on your CV etc and the prestige of your name on the credits. The studio has reneged on an expectation the worker had when they accepted the contract and did not compensate them fairly for this new risk.
• znpy 3y ago
  "If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing" is my new favourite slogan. Yahrrr!
• edwinjm 3y ago
  > Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so... At least in Europe, a company can't just remove features from a device. If a product doesn't do what you can reasonably expect, this is considered fraud and you can go back to the store and demand compensation.
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
    The field of interpretation for "can reasonably expect" is very wide though, how many devices you own are still receiving security updates?
• nurettin 3y ago
  Calling rentals "buying" should be illegal, because apparently people aren't equipped to understand the nature of their transaction by description.
• rezonant 3y ago
  This is excellent. Doctorow doesn't disappoint.
• senectus1 3y ago
  Pithy, but it wont pass muster in court.
• bohadi 3y ago
  as a longtime, proud, and noble pirate; attempts at moral justification or condemnation are simply gratuitous and i'm certain many like me feel the same
• tomohawk 3y ago
  > the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California This guy has a lot of good points, but this is way over the line.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• germandiago 3y ago
  wow, so true.
• rich_sasha 3y ago
  It's a false dichotomy. Snapping features from paid-for devices, or taking away content people paid for, is shitty and should be legally banned. DRM is a tool, like an electric drill, and you can use it to build a house or kill someone. I'm happy to pay less to rent a film online subject to constraints such as time or single device, and for DRM to enforce that. I reject the idea that my printer stops working because I used third-party ink. DRM is an implementation detail. Finally, there's nothing noble about piracy, even if you pirate things from asshole corporations. I'll agree that it is less bad in the context, but still. Victimless crime or not, someone owns IP to whatever you are after, and using it without their permission is not some kind of civil disobedience.
• jdright 3y ago
  "But I think this borders on the alarmist: "It's worse with video, where switching away from Media Center PC might cost you the footage of your son's first steps, your sister's wedding, your holiday films." Even the darkest tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists don't suggest that Microsoft is going to hold my WMV-encoded home videos hostage. But you seem to be taking it even further, somehow tying it to the Media Center itself. Please explain. Posted by: Chris Anderson" to demonstrate how blind-sided or too naive or optimistic, a supposed technology-aware person can be.
• balderdash 3y ago
  It feel like some basic consumer disclosure/protections would be a good start - you can’t use the word “buy” unless the purchaser truly has perpetual irrevocable use of the asset - other wise you have to use the word “rent” and simple disclaimer box with the length of the rental period if and how it can be canceled, and what remedies (if any) are provided if the rental is terminated early. Rent movie XYZ for $x Rental period: perpetual Cancelable: at will with x days notice Remedies if cancelled early: none
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    you can, but the reality is that 1. most consumers don't care. For them if it's longer than some months it's basicaly perpetual. Buying for them is a raw deal because they treat media like a rental and forget about the purchase in the long run. 2. streaming services pretty much "solved" this problem already. There's no notion of owning anything on Netflix and people are fine with that. The age of digital purchases is fading (except maybe for games. But even then, there are more f2p models out there).
• kgwxd 3y ago
  Copying isn’t stealing, full stop. But this new catch phrase is just stupid. It sounds like one of those “checkmate atheist” gottcha’s. A conditional license, no matter how shitty the terms, is what you’re buying, you only assumed you were buying something more. It does not then follow that “pirating isn’t stealing”, that’s just a fact that stands on its own.
• dgudkov 3y ago
  Warning: unpopular opinion that you won't like. If the audience of HN were writers, singers, and artists, people who know what it's like when the fruits of your work are stolen and you barely make any money (I have friends like that), the sentiment would've been quite different. But software developers can't relate to this and that's why they are so pro-piracy. They get a paycheck every month or bi-weekly and never face a situation when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free. I'm not saying the current situation with content consumption is ideal. Big corps have no shame in many ways. But sometimes both sides can be wrong. And this is exactly what I'm seeing here.
  • flohofwoe 3y ago
    The question is always: how much money would those individuals make if their work wouldn't be pirated. It's much more likely that they would just barely survive like they do now instead of raking in the big moneyz. Sometimes it's not piracy that's the problem, but simply that the art/content is unpopular, or a bad business model was chosen. > when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free Your friends should get a lawyer. This is a different case than people "pirating" content because the content is locked exclusively behind yet another service subscription.
  • missedthecue 3y ago
    I agree. It's always very curious to see the way these internet forums (HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc) justify piracy. Every thread about Spotify for instance is full of people upset that they don't pay artists "enough", as if everyone wasn't pirating music en masse in the days before streaming. Give me a break. And I'm not even throwing stones. I remember filling my MP3 player with pirated music 20 years ago. If you're pirating content, you're stealing it. I'd 100% prefer that people just own up to it than try to contrive these elaborate arguments about how the social contract has been completely rearranged and why ackshually they are not only justified but practically obligated to do it. Beyond ridiculous. Get over yourselves.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  [dupe] Mods, merge in earlier discussion (Cory's stupid permalink scheme), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578872
• devmor 3y ago
  If companies truly want to solve the piracy problem, they will treat consumers better. That is the only way to hit minimum piracy. Anecdotally I would observe that few people pirate games, movies, books, etc released by publishers with a record for respecting their consumer based - compared to piracy of media released by publishers that do things like revoking access to media you’ve paid for.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • tzs 3y ago
    > Anecdotally I would observe that few people pirate games, movies, books, etc released by publishers with a record for respecting their consumer based - compared to piracy of media released by publishers that do things like revoking access to media you’ve paid for Anecdotally I've seen a lot of comments over the years from book authors whose books are sold completely DRM-free, as physical books and/or DRM-free PDFs, say that they are widely pirated. There are a lot of people who will always find an excuse to pirate. Even if the ebook is inexpensive, DRM-free, in a completely open format everything can read, and the license allows everything that you can do with a physical book bought from a bookstore including lending it to others as long as only one person at a time has access, people will find some excuse for why they must pirate it, like "I wanted to buy 3 books that week, from 3 publishers, and it is too much hassle to have to enter my credit card number on 3 different web sites".
• gmuslera 3y ago
  It starts at the first word. It's not buying anymore, for most things. It is getting a permission for a restricted use of it, not even renting. And still, they charge you as you were buying. The original company is still the owner, and can do and undo whatever it wants. Imagine "buying" a house, but the real owner can kick you out, put someone living with you in some of your rooms, install their security cameras, forbid you to put some furniture or have a saying on who can invite you there. Also, piracy is as stealing as taking a photo of your car is stealing it. You still have your car, someone that wouldn't buy it anyway won't pay for that neither. And probably the person pirating it will have more rights over the thing they didn't pay than a lawful buyer would have over the item he fully paid and "bought".
• oleg_antonyan 3y ago
  Actually, this is a good explanation why I don't use streaming services and download music intead, which is 90% torrents and 10% bandcamp that costs overall higher than streaming subscription would be
  • class3shock 3y ago
    Can I ask how you discover new music? Or if you have any non-subscription sources for radio-like services not swamped with adds? I have largely moved away from subscriptions but still use spotify for those two reasons.
    • oleg_antonyan 3y ago
      Radio, thematic groups on social media, new releases on torrent tracker
• petee 3y ago
  > Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff To be fair, he wasn't the one who figured it out, *many* production companies were/are doing this. You only hear about some because the actors spoke up, but most won't risk violating their NDA
• lapcat 3y ago
  This why big companies want to move everything to "subscriptions", i.e., rental, in order to eliminate the concept of ownership.
  • Sakos 3y ago
    One of the reasons why I'm glad Stadia died. That's a future I didn't want to see realized.
• veidr 3y ago
  He was right; it has now played out and this is a legitimate accounting of it. It goes beyond the headline, though. We should rejoice that we have a writer that can make such boring-ass societal degradation interesting. I never "bought" any TV shows on my Playstation (or any Pantone colors on my Adobe) because I knew this would happen, but... the key sentence fragment of the article: this is the foreseeable, inevitable result
• atomjames 3y ago
  Let's elect more people like Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez to work on this stuff.
• smashah 3y ago
  "remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades" Revoking or paywalling API access falls under this definition of enshittification. The enlightenment* brought about human rights. We are well within the digital age without any meaningful Digital Rights. Adversarial interop should be one such digital right.
• shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Piracy isn't copying things for free. If it was, it wouldn't have been a crime on the high seas, nobody would've died, and we'd be in a utopia. (The kind we have in cyberspace and we're trying to enforce the tyrannical limits of meatspace onto for $, which can be used to buy stuff in meatspace, which you still can't copy for free.)
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  So easy to pile on this post. I remember decades ago watching closely the new crop of televisions released each year — getting nerdy about the specs, features (back when TV's were dumb, expensive, and the new annual crop always exciting, shiny). I began to notice that a company like Sony would produce a suite of TV's that were the same in more ways than not — but there seemed to be features that were simply neutered on the lower price-tier devices. I could imagine some marketing hack coming to the engineers and telling them which features to gimp on the base model, which ones to exclude on the next tier.... I must be both naive and old-fashioned to think that companies would compete by trying to both keep their prices lower than their competitor and their features superior. Sony (and of course others) decided to compete with themselves instead. Then when I started amassing a huge DVD collection a couple decades ago, it became increasingly annoying that I would have to sit through ads on the DVDs before I could watch the film I had paid for. Trailers, coming-attractions, also-available-from-time-warner are ads. I finally started to rip my own DVDs and have done so ever since.
  • dleslie 3y ago
    The forced ads on DVDs remains an important inflection point in the rise of digital media, I think. Early on one of the most common points in favour mentioned by those advocating for digital-only media was that you simply weren't required to sit through advertisements. I personally installed VLC for a number of folks simply because it allowed them to watch DVDs without advertisements. It was a meaningful draw. Then Netflix came and offered a low-barrier service with a decent catalog and, importantly, no advertisements. I'm of the impression that the broadcasters and studios have hated that aspect of it the most, and are hell bent to return to forced advertisement views.
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      I think I read someone else say that, if libraries weren't a thing already, the publishers would have never allowed them.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      ads are money, and very few businesses can avoid the allure of them. It also comes down to the side of the consumer. Almost every-time people would pick free+ads over paid+no_ads. now, lower_pay+ads over higher_pay_to_remove_ads is a much more dubious premise, but the moder pricing tiers suggest that some do go for it.
• parentheses 3y ago
  I couldn't read this rant all the way through. It was simply too much spewing hatred. DRM serves many purposes. It's just as much tamper detection as it is intentional control. While I want protections for promises implicitly made by products, they are implicit promises. In the end, it's a give and take. We as users get a lot for our money. I'm rarely disappointed by most consumer products - and they tend to be surprisingly feature rich. I look around my house and do not see DRM tragedies but products I like and have enjoyed owning so far. This article is a clickbait rant and I'm honestly sick of it.
• dorfsmay 3y ago
  Google lets you "buy" movies online. The movie is attached to the email account. You cannot transfer it to a different email account. The very same google that offers Gmail but is also known to block accounts for perceived violation of contract and which will now close Gmail accounts that aren't used for a number of months.
• HenryBemis 3y ago
  > companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for.. I figured out a Workaround for this. I install the crapware Driver-o-Software they want me to. Then I run "Double Driver 4.10 Portable" (not affiliated), I take a backup of the driver(s). Then I uninstall (or roll-back). Then the driver is still missing but I user my Double Driver folder backup (I keep in external disk), and booya! the device works without the crapware. It adds a couple more hoops in the experience, but it has worked like a charm. (I remember Steve Gibson mentioned DoubleDriver some years back on the SecurityNow podcast - I tried it, and I never looked back)
• tgma 3y ago
  Piracy isn't stealing -- full stop. No ifs and buts.
• dragonwriter 3y ago
  Piracy, in the sense used about IP, was never stealing, it has always been trespassing. Stealing is when you deprive someone of property without consent, trespass is when you use property without consent without depriving the owner of it. This remains true irrespective of what kind and term if rights you get when you purchase an IP license.
• austin-cheney 3y ago
  This is all about convenience. Consider streaming. You have everything available instantly without any effort… until your network connection goes down. Then you have nothing. Most young people cannot imagine living in a world disconnected. It’s great until it isn’t, and at that point it’s hopeless without any recourse. It might as well be a death apocalypse. I do know what it’s like to live in a world disconnected. Because of that I keep my media on a portable storage device and back it up on redundant devices so that it does not get lost. I pay no subscriptions to access my media. It’s always instantly available when I travel anywhere. There are no advertisements, outages, bills, pauses, or other disruptions. Because of stuff like Bluetooth, Samba, and Plex it’s available to all my household media devices automatically. My son loves his streaming service, but that just looks like paying a premium for laziness with a high potential for failure.
• vcg3rd 3y ago
  Paying does not equal buying. If I lease a car, you can still steal it. If I rent a car, you can steal it. If I subscribe to a daily newspaper, you can steal it off my driveway in which case you steal from me and not the publisher because I never owned the content. If you sell my newspaper then you've stolen from the publisher even though I paid the publisher for that printed copy. It's really not that hard. Original pirates could steal from dozens of merchants, share holders, and sailors in various ways and degrees, monies paid to monies earned, to monies owed, to monies potentially gained, by seizing the cargo of one vessel.
  • CSSer 3y ago
    Let’s use your example. How would you feel if, due to a disagreement with the publisher over the quality of ink, the publisher was “forced” to break into your house while you eat breakfast and rip the newspaper out of your hands? This is what happens today. They’ve colluded to redefine the verb “buy” due to “licensing”, and it’s sick.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      it would suck and it would make headlines. But that's not what happens today, so it's a nil argument. the GP's argument comparing it to rentals/leases makes sense since you aren't truly owning a purchase (and if you are that deadset on stealing a car they probably will literally break into your house). you're buying a license and licenses can be revoked. Now, if that should be allowed without an explicit mention on the purchase page is certainly something to argue in court.
      • CSSer 3y ago
        It’s not just that. Physical copies are increasingly no longer available. Now I can only buy a license for the same price I used to pay for a physical copy. Moreover, this is for a good that has no substitute.
  • Matumio 3y ago
    Yes. And copying does not equal stealing. While we're rambling about broken metaphors, pirates have to physically get you and threaten violence. Imagine if they just copied your car or newspaper instead, without breaking anything.
• hereme888 3y ago
  One of the most astounding things I've learned is how movies/shows/cartoons get quietly changed, and you no longer have the original art. Wokeness, marketing, etc...decisions are made to change content, and the "owner" gets their product changed without consent or remedy.
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  even though (I think) I 100% agree with that article, I'm not sure it is sound. one can buy the right/rights to something "for X amount of time" or on "Y amount of devices" (what is known as a "lease", sometimes), but the "legal" gobbledygook specifies that what one is "buying" is limited to/by certain conditions. Like leasing a car. I think (but am not positive) that is how Apple ideologically reframed the way they "license" music/media consumption through iTunes? And also how, following in Apple's footsteps, how Google started "loaning" content (movies on YouTube) that are available for 48 hours after the "purchase"
• lern_too_spel 3y ago
  > 20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. This was an interesting discussion 20 years ago, but none of this matters in five years. Creative content delivery became too cheap to meter with the Internet. We're entering the age of creative content generation becoming too cheap to meter.
• tacocataco 3y ago
  For profit entities have proven multiple times they are not to be trusted with preserving culture. Piracy is the only way some games and TV shows are still available.
• parentheses 3y ago
  I don't get why this salty rant got so much love on HN. It's vulgar and extreme to a level that I just don't care about this. If tomorrow, some video I had watched disappeared, I would move on with 0 fucks given. Also worth noting rather ironically: at least for video entertainment, you can usually pirate discontinued content easily. I'm sorry to minimize your reason for such a salty rant, OP, but I just don't get it. If there's more context as to why this is personal, that may help me empathise.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]
• StopHammoTime 3y ago
  This exact same thing happened to me last week. I purchased a fantastic audiobook about Julius Caesar written by Adrian Goldsmith about 8 years ago on audible. I loved the content and the narrator was great, I listened to it four times. I go to re-listen to it last week and lo-and-behold, it’s not in my library. Even worse, I can’t even PURCHASE it again. It looks like they’ve just black-holed through production in Australia. If I lived in the US I could at least “buy” it again. I just want to enjoy art and the worst part is it’s not even the artist doing these things. It’s money grubbing distributors. Middle men are actually the worst kind of people in existence.
• Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Tried to follow the bluesky link with the source of the title quote... you can't view a bluesky post without making an account? Strange way to attract adoption... I can't see that linked source, which is annoying, and that stink is slathered all over Bluesky in my head, ensuring that now I not only passively haven't been motivated to make an account yet, I am now actively repelled and probably never will. (This isn't a defense of xitter, I never had a twitter account either.)
  • chownie 3y ago
    Bluesky is in closed invite-only beta but public posts/profiles are on the horizon now I believe — the last public announcement was about this in fact. That aside – I hope this response is perhaps a little bit hyperbolic? You came across a 403 and now that site has a "stink slathered" over it? If this is sincere you'd probably evaporate from rage trying to read US news orgs from a European country.
    • Brian_K_White 3y ago
      I'd been hearing about bluesky enough that I thought it was operating normally. I don't understand why you find that language hyperbolic. Yes, I find requiring an account to see a post to figuratively stink, as in, it makes me want to avoid. A choice to decline something is not rage, and I find it strange to try to paint it as such.
• southernplaces7 3y ago
  Perfectly stated headline. The tech megacorps get a free pass on completely redefining the definition of ownership in a way that's flatly parasitical and bordering on fraudulent (aside from the immense amounts of now completely normalized personal life tracking they do against you for so much as sneezing in their direction) but god help your moral standing if you decide to try roundabouts against their efforts at making your "ownership" of things you bought into a strictly conditional, locked-in limbo. Fuck these corporate/legal notions and their defenders, who view consumers as little more than milkable cattle as far as I can see.
• zhengiszen 3y ago
  Who said 'Software is not a manufactured product. It’s a service. Once you’ve written it, you can replicate it as many times as you like. It doesn’t cost anything to make another copy'
• fnl 3y ago
  Here’s another example: Apple Arcade decided to discontinue my kids’ favorite local multiplayer game (Marble Knights). Apple erased the game from my devices and there is no way to get this game at all now, at least as far as I know. With the pending increase in Arcade’s monthly costs, that was the last straw for me to say goodbye to this Apple “offering”.
• fennecbutt 3y ago
  Idk man, I hate big corpos and suit and tie handshaking but isn't this the same as renting a car vs stealing one? The t&cs of these companies probably specify that we don't own the content we buy. The problem isn't with the logic it's with the law; consumer rights should make it illegal to do what they do. But guess what? Ain't ever gonna change cause like so many other problems it requires that we work together and our species only does that when it's self serving.
• rglover 3y ago
  Typically, I take the Ayn Rand "objectivist" point of view on a lot of corporate shenanigans (read: the freedom to trade how they wish, accepting any consequences), but this is 100% fraud by Warner and Sony: > Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
• methods21 3y ago
  Latest example - VMWare (aka Broadcom now) perpetual licenses - REVOKED!