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> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pir

by tzs 3y ago

> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP. In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"). The impression I've gotten is that piracy of nearly everything is widely felt to be OK here. Information wants to be free, yada yada. About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago
> About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity. Like what you said... > Information wants to be free
tomComb 3y ago
Yeah, I don’t judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to explain how mining is good for the environment.
- _jal 3y ago
  There's a "polite society" thing going on. Briefly, something like: 1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why. 2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide. 3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics. It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous." There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.
joshstrange 3y ago
> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"). I’ve read and participated in many such threads and I’ve literally never seen this take. Often what I see is complaints about having to learn different UI for different services/apps, no offline, ads injected into paid services, having to figure out which service a show is on, and generally terrible UI you can’t change/fix. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen someone use the argument “yes it’s great today but they might charge more later”. Not saying people haven’t said that but it’s far from the main thing people say in my experience.
kmeisthax 3y ago
The GPL was specifically written to lock code out of the proprietary realm, so if you hate copyright[0] you'll hate people using it as intended. [0] To be clear, I know of few who actually like copyright. Tolerate it? Use it as needed? Sure. The only people who actually defend the current broken-ass system are large media companies which are built to optimally exploit it.
theappsecguy 3y ago
This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view business model of UfC.
- ryan_j_naughton 3y ago
  For books, if it's a client reader software frustration, then you should still buy the digital version and then you can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is BS. For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing. The whole point of copyright is to give someone the monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing power to incentivize them to create the product in the first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the format things are delivered in all you want (like the client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with pricing. And that's ludicrous. In that case, just read a news article about the event. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able to be published without the consent of the copyright holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free without any justification for you're doing so. Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources of the fight information. But if you want the recording with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has value to you over written recaps or social media coverage. And you are just arguing over price, which they are the copyright holder have the right to set the price.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the terrible DRM’d music the labels wanted to foist on us. We need to inflict the same pain for books. Personally, I think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to the Books Trust or your local library.
monkeynotes 3y ago
People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.
- zwischenzug 3y ago
  That newspaper was likely paid for by someone, and could only be read by one person at a time.
  - monkeynotes 3y ago
    The news on a website is paid for by someone, else they would not be in business. And I only have one screen, I don't share it. The difference is physical vs. digital copies. A physical copy costs $.10 a digital copy costs $.0000001 (made up numbers), the business can take a loss of numerous digital copies before hitting the cost of one copy of the physical paper. The problem is really that their business model sucks. They are working with fewer and fewer advertisers and much more competition and expecting business like they had before. And so we have a business that is attempting to fix itself with paywalls which don't work 100% of the time, but good enough to get the found newspaper analogy.
  - Kerb_ 3y ago
    While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my brothers would share the comics together while my parents kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time. Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical properties of the object and not an inherent property of information to be consumed through one avenue at a time
  - anhner 3y ago
    And what if the person picking up the paper would stand up and shout the content of the article so all the people on the train would hear?
kiba 3y ago
Piracy is different from plagiarism. People are understandably angsty about someone stealing credit. A NYT article is going to be a NYT article, not laundered around and presented as someone else's work. Plus, there's the angle of enshitification and ads being injected into a paid service, and so on.
thfuran 3y ago
>"subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change" I'm not saying you've never seen anyone make an argument roughly like that, but I will certainly say that it is not at all representative of the argument that I see made. Complaints usually have to do with current behavior of the platform or the wider streaming ecosystem.
jancsika 3y ago
> "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change" Gonna gamble and call bullshit on this. My speculation: the most popular reason HN'ers give for pirating: they literally cannot get the content otherwise. 2nd most popular: it is such a pain to either to purchase the content or get it to run on bog standard software (like Firefox/Linux/etc.) that otherwise paying fans are driven to whatever the current equivalent is for bittorrent. In fact, I don't believe I've ever seen a justification for using bittorrent or whatever due to what someone's favorite streaming service might do in the future. I'm assuming you saw at least one based on what you wrote-- care to give a link?
raldi 3y ago
> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"). If this is true, it should be easy for you to link to an example. Could you do so?

by tzs 3y ago

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

> About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity. Like what you said... > Information wants to be free

tomComb 3y ago

Yeah, I don’t judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to explain how mining is good for the environment.

_jal 3y ago
There's a "polite society" thing going on. Briefly, something like: 1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why. 2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide. 3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics. It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous." There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.

joshstrange 3y ago

> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"). I’ve read and participated in many such threads and I’ve literally never seen this take. Often what I see is complaints about having to learn different UI for different services/apps, no offline, ads injected into paid services, having to figure out which service a show is on, and generally terrible UI you can’t change/fix. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen someone use the argument “yes it’s great today but they might charge more later”. Not saying people haven’t said that but it’s far from the main thing people say in my experience.

kmeisthax 3y ago

The GPL was specifically written to lock code out of the proprietary realm, so if you hate copyright[0] you'll hate people using it as intended. [0] To be clear, I know of few who actually like copyright. Tolerate it? Use it as needed? Sure. The only people who actually defend the current broken-ass system are large media companies which are built to optimally exploit it.

theappsecguy 3y ago

This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view business model of UfC.

ryan_j_naughton 3y ago
For books, if it's a client reader software frustration, then you should still buy the digital version and then you can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is BS. For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing. The whole point of copyright is to give someone the monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing power to incentivize them to create the product in the first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the format things are delivered in all you want (like the client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with pricing. And that's ludicrous. In that case, just read a news article about the event. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able to be published without the consent of the copyright holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free without any justification for you're doing so. Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources of the fight information. But if you want the recording with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has value to you over written recaps or social media coverage. And you are just arguing over price, which they are the copyright holder have the right to set the price.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the terrible DRM’d music the labels wanted to foist on us. We need to inflict the same pain for books. Personally, I think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to the Books Trust or your local library.

monkeynotes 3y ago

People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.

zwischenzug 3y ago
That newspaper was likely paid for by someone, and could only be read by one person at a time.
- monkeynotes 3y ago
  The news on a website is paid for by someone, else they would not be in business. And I only have one screen, I don't share it. The difference is physical vs. digital copies. A physical copy costs $.10 a digital copy costs $.0000001 (made up numbers), the business can take a loss of numerous digital copies before hitting the cost of one copy of the physical paper. The problem is really that their business model sucks. They are working with fewer and fewer advertisers and much more competition and expecting business like they had before. And so we have a business that is attempting to fix itself with paywalls which don't work 100% of the time, but good enough to get the found newspaper analogy.
- Kerb_ 3y ago
  While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my brothers would share the comics together while my parents kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time. Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical properties of the object and not an inherent property of information to be consumed through one avenue at a time
- anhner 3y ago
  And what if the person picking up the paper would stand up and shout the content of the article so all the people on the train would hear?

kiba 3y ago

Piracy is different from plagiarism. People are understandably angsty about someone stealing credit. A NYT article is going to be a NYT article, not laundered around and presented as someone else's work. Plus, there's the angle of enshitification and ads being injected into a paid service, and so on.

thfuran 3y ago

>"subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change" I'm not saying you've never seen anyone make an argument roughly like that, but I will certainly say that it is not at all representative of the argument that I see made. Complaints usually have to do with current behavior of the platform or the wider streaming ecosystem.

jancsika 3y ago

> "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change" Gonna gamble and call bullshit on this. My speculation: the most popular reason HN'ers give for pirating: they literally cannot get the content otherwise. 2nd most popular: it is such a pain to either to purchase the content or get it to run on bog standard software (like Firefox/Linux/etc.) that otherwise paying fans are driven to whatever the current equivalent is for bittorrent. In fact, I don't believe I've ever seen a justification for using bittorrent or whatever due to what someone's favorite streaming service might do in the future. I'm assuming you saw at least one based on what you wrote-- care to give a link?

raldi 3y ago