3 ms·

In the spirit of HN, where would you go if you wanted to pirate the screencasts (the most recent ones of course, the old ones are all over demonoid)

etherealHN 14y ago
Funny how the attitude of HN users change their mind about content piracy when it's closer to something like what they work on.
- mitsche 14y ago
  I don’t think the majority of people here condone piracy. It’s the practice of criminalizing people who don’t acquire stuff legally because they either can’t (e.g. the content not being available in their country) or won’t (because the distribution model puts the consumer in a unfavorable position) that rubs people the wrong way.
  - mhartl 14y ago
    Indeed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4077125 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4077125
keva161 14y ago
It might be in the spirit of HN but not in the spirit of being decent considering the hardwork that must of gone into this great resource.
mhartl 14y ago
To understand how hackers see piracy, I suggest reading Eric Raymond's open letter to Chris Dodd: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 Money quote: We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to devise an honest way to make money. I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse. Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this: if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple our computers. We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess are with the artists being ripped off by both sides. Note that the Rails Tutorial is neither part of Hollywood nor part of the music industry. It is distributed as DRM-free files that don't restrict your freedom in any way. When you make a purchase at railstutorial.org, the proceeds go directly to the "artist" (which in this case happens to be me). As the author of the tutorial, I would of course rather you obtain the files legally. But if you do find an illegal copy, end up learning Rails, and get a high-paying job as a Rails developer, please tell your employer how you learned it. :-)

etherealHN 14y ago

Funny how the attitude of HN users change their mind about content piracy when it's closer to something like what they work on.

mitsche 14y ago
I don’t think the majority of people here condone piracy. It’s the practice of criminalizing people who don’t acquire stuff legally because they either can’t (e.g. the content not being available in their country) or won’t (because the distribution model puts the consumer in a unfavorable position) that rubs people the wrong way.
- mhartl 14y ago
  Indeed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4077125 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4077125

keva161 14y ago

It might be in the spirit of HN but not in the spirit of being decent considering the hardwork that must of gone into this great resource.

mhartl 14y ago

To understand how hackers see piracy, I suggest reading Eric Raymond's open letter to Chris Dodd: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 Money quote: We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to devise an honest way to make money. I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse. Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this: if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple our computers. We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess are with the artists being ripped off by both sides. Note that the Rails Tutorial is neither part of Hollywood nor part of the music industry. It is distributed as DRM-free files that don't restrict your freedom in any way. When you make a purchase at railstutorial.org, the proceeds go directly to the "artist" (which in this case happens to be me). As the author of the tutorial, I would of course rather you obtain the files legally. But if you do find an illegal copy, end up learning Rails, and get a high-paying job as a Rails developer, please tell your employer how you learned it. :-)