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I consider HN to be an intelligent and well informed corner of the internet - so I would be curious as to what readers think of TPB, the Pirate Party and "illeg

I consider HN to be an intelligent and well informed corner of the internet - so I would be curious as to what readers think of TPB, the Pirate Party and "illegal" distribution of copyrighted material in general. I don't agree with some of the practices of the copyright holders; and agree that copyright law is somewhat outdated and needs revisiting. However, I equally have trouble with distribution of material such as that described in correspondence above (an unreleased version of Mac OS X), a product that employees have worked hard to create, and don't accept the "information must be free" argument/mantra. Others opinions?

w0utert 14y ago
My personal ethics regarding piracy are simple. I'll happily pay for anything available through legal channels, for a fair price, without inane restrictions, in a format that suits my purposes. Anything else, I will pirate, since I wouldn't ever pay money for it anyway. An unreleased version of Mac OS X clearly falls in the first category. OS X has always been distributed without crazy DRM schemes, for a fair price, and without any hidden gotcha's that cripple it's utility. I would never pirate it. For music, I've switched from downloading everything to paying for Spotify. I have no need for cabinets full of shiny silver discs, and I don't feel like paying for crappy songs I don't like just because they happen to be on the same album as the one or two songs I was looking for. Spotify fits the bill for me, so I don't have to pirate anymore. For movies, it's a whole different story. I don't have a Blu-Ray player (I have a PS3 but it sucks for watching video because of the noise), so buying discs to see high-def movies is out. Nine times out of ten, the movies I like are not your typical Hollywood blockbuster crap, so I can't even get them on Blu-Ray anyway. I built my own HTPC running XBMC because it's a million times better than any device I can buy in a store, which means I prefer to have my movies in a common, unprotected video format. No legal alternative exists that provides those, so I download each and every movie I want to see. The day a commercial service is available that has not just Hollywood blockbusters but also foreign/ arthouse/ classic or niche movies, and allows me to play them on my own device, for less than $10 a movie (or e.g. $30 a month for all you can eat), I'll sign up immediately. Some might say I have no entitlement to make any demands as to the way the content I want to consume is distributed or how much I have to pay for it. This is actually a fair point, but the producers have no entitlement to get my money either. Because I try to be fair to producers and artists by legally buying content when it is available under such terms I can justify paying for it, I don't feel bad about pirating everything else at all. It's not even illegal where I'm from anyway (at least not for music and video, software I stopped pirating long ago).

w0utert 14y ago

My personal ethics regarding piracy are simple. I'll happily pay for anything available through legal channels, for a fair price, without inane restrictions, in a format that suits my purposes. Anything else, I will pirate, since I wouldn't ever pay money for it anyway. An unreleased version of Mac OS X clearly falls in the first category. OS X has always been distributed without crazy DRM schemes, for a fair price, and without any hidden gotcha's that cripple it's utility. I would never pirate it. For music, I've switched from downloading everything to paying for Spotify. I have no need for cabinets full of shiny silver discs, and I don't feel like paying for crappy songs I don't like just because they happen to be on the same album as the one or two songs I was looking for. Spotify fits the bill for me, so I don't have to pirate anymore. For movies, it's a whole different story. I don't have a Blu-Ray player (I have a PS3 but it sucks for watching video because of the noise), so buying discs to see high-def movies is out. Nine times out of ten, the movies I like are not your typical Hollywood blockbuster crap, so I can't even get them on Blu-Ray anyway. I built my own HTPC running XBMC because it's a million times better than any device I can buy in a store, which means I prefer to have my movies in a common, unprotected video format. No legal alternative exists that provides those, so I download each and every movie I want to see. The day a commercial service is available that has not just Hollywood blockbusters but also foreign/ arthouse/ classic or niche movies, and allows me to play them on my own device, for less than $10 a movie (or e.g. $30 a month for all you can eat), I'll sign up immediately. Some might say I have no entitlement to make any demands as to the way the content I want to consume is distributed or how much I have to pay for it. This is actually a fair point, but the producers have no entitlement to get my money either. Because I try to be fair to producers and artists by legally buying content when it is available under such terms I can justify paying for it, I don't feel bad about pirating everything else at all. It's not even illegal where I'm from anyway (at least not for music and video, software I stopped pirating long ago).