5 ms·

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy. Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

jjtheblunt 2y ago
[flagged]
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
  If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing. Enough with the false equivalence.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    If. I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it. Enough with the false dichotomy.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.
- underlipton 2y ago
  Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery. IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
- shrubble 2y ago
  You wouldn't download a car ...
  - compootr 2y ago
    there's where you're wrong...
  - justinclift 2y ago
    If only we could: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5918367 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5918367 Well, maybe a future version of 3D printing. :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pizza 2y ago
  I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.
  - compootr 2y ago
    Mee too! Although I like the mentality of "make it easier to use without piracy than with" (i.e excessive drm)
- LocalH 2y ago
  Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally. You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.
  - hresvelgr 2y ago
    Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      Both are blatantly anti-competitive measures.
      - tastyfreeze 2y ago
        That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.
        PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        This seems to hurt society more than it helps. Plus now we are forced to hear yammering about chinese competition "stealing" (translation: competing).
        tastyfreeze 2y ago
        If patents are done away with then we go back to trade secrets. Nobody will share their advancements. Then there is potential for advancements being lost.
        jjtheblunt 2y ago
- al_borland 2y ago
  There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it. I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it. Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.
- ericd 2y ago
  They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.
- lubujackson 2y ago
  What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had). What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth. No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.
- mxkopy 2y ago
  The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down. It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing. Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved. This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell. If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).
  - firesteelrain 2y ago
    If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing. Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed. Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing. Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff. > Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing. No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.
      - firesteelrain 2y ago
- llm_trw 2y ago
  If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it. The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.
- RF_Savage 2y ago
  Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.
siamese_puff 2y ago
100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop. These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.
- instagraham 2y ago
  If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products). Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job. I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
  - ivell 2y ago
    Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.
petra 2y ago
A lot of great software today is SAAS. They seem to have solved the problem.
- freefaler 2y ago
  That's one of the reasons, to curb piracy. However the bigger is that they need a recurring revenue, because programmers need to be fed while they're working on a release and bringing a new one from the wild is expensive and takes time to get meaningful code from them.

jjtheblunt 2y ago

[flagged]

LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing. Enough with the false equivalence.
- fragmede 2y ago
  If. I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it. Enough with the false dichotomy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.
underlipton 2y ago
Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery. IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
shrubble 2y ago
You wouldn't download a car ...
- compootr 2y ago
  there's where you're wrong...
- justinclift 2y ago
  If only we could: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5918367 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5918367 Well, maybe a future version of 3D printing. :)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pizza 2y ago
I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.
- compootr 2y ago
  Mee too! Although I like the mentality of "make it easier to use without piracy than with" (i.e excessive drm)
LocalH 2y ago
Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally. You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.
- hresvelgr 2y ago
  Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    Both are blatantly anti-competitive measures.
    - tastyfreeze 2y ago
      That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        This seems to hurt society more than it helps. Plus now we are forced to hear yammering about chinese competition "stealing" (translation: competing).
        tastyfreeze 2y ago
        If patents are done away with then we go back to trade secrets. Nobody will share their advancements. Then there is potential for advancements being lost.
      - jjtheblunt 2y ago
al_borland 2y ago
There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it. I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it. Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.
ericd 2y ago
They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.
lubujackson 2y ago
What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had). What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth. No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.
mxkopy 2y ago
The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down. It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.
bee_rider 2y ago
It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing. Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved. This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell. If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing. Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed. Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing. Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff. > Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing. No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.
    - firesteelrain 2y ago
llm_trw 2y ago
If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it. The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.
RF_Savage 2y ago
Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.

siamese_puff 2y ago

100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop. These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.

instagraham 2y ago
If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products). Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job. I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
- ivell 2y ago
  Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.

petra 2y ago

A lot of great software today is SAAS. They seem to have solved the problem.

freefaler 2y ago
That's one of the reasons, to curb piracy. However the bigger is that they need a recurring revenue, because programmers need to be fed while they're working on a release and bringing a new one from the wild is expensive and takes time to get meaningful code from them.