The hacker news community discovers that stealing ain't so cool when it happens to you. Various posters then tie themselves into knots trying explain this doub

The hacker news community discovers that stealing ain't so cool when it happens to you. Various posters then tie themselves into knots trying explain this double-standard. Proferred reasons why it's ok to steal from musicians, but not from technical authors: - it's not that stealing is per-se wrong, it's the plagiarism that some posters find distasteful. That musicians' primary source of income is removed when piracy is widespread doesn't seem to concern these posters. Their currency is the kudos obtained from producing engaging and informative technical articles. E.g. (greendestiny): "I find the misappropriation of authorship to be much more offensive than acquisition without license." rcoder has this to say: "Because of that, they can still drive real revenue for those artists -- people may initially acquire an album or episodes of a TV show illegally, then go on in the future to pay for new content from the same people." That rcoder finds this theory compelling in the face of the direct and incontrovertible evidence of a 50% decline in record company revenues in 10 years is somewhat surprising. - the RIAA engages in lobbying, and that's evil. Since two wrongs makes a right, it's ok to steal from them and those they represent. I note also that one of the typical arguments given for why recorded music should be free is that "it costs nothing to reproduce". Which is true, although one wonders why this argument doesn't equally apply to any other creative content reproduced on the web. Books, articles, movies, computer code, anything, essentially! I'm a musician/hacker and the "fuck you" attitude so prevalent here towards musicians and artists is really saddening. It's almost that people here expect us to live like paupers because that somehow fits some romantic expectation of how an artist is supposed to live, complete with alcohol problems and living in the gutter. That, or we're expected to make barbie dolls of ourselves or find new, cleverer ways to whore ourselves to ad companies (those that support this method as the only method of sustaining the industry will never be able to explain which ad company would have supported Lou Reed's "Heroin") There is no sympathy or empathy or any trace of human compassion towards this constituency. And this is supposed to be the enlightened, rational hacker community? Frankly watching some of the self-serving argumentation here is sickening. It's watching intelligent people who really should know better engaging in sophistry in order to justify their blatant pilfering of music.