3 ms·

>> "isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales" I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain coun

>> "isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales" I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain country to view the material. Maybe it hurts their feelings that it's being pirated. Maybe they have a release planned 6 months from now in a certain country and their sales will be down for that. There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm.

icebraining 12y ago
As a copyright holder of my HN posts, it hurts my feelings seeing you criticize pirates. Please refrain from doing so as a condition of downloading my posts.
logfromblammo 12y ago
> There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm. Harm must be proven to receive civil redress. Potential, unrealized harm is not actionable. If your neighbor digs a bottomless pit in his backyard, and posts trespass warnings, you cannot sue to have him fill it because your kids might fall in. They would, after all, need to trespass in order to do that. But you could tell your insurance adjuster, they could apply a risk premium to a policy, based on the presence of the hole, and you could sue your neighbor for that. The argument against piracy is essentially a neighbor saying that 40 of their kids accidentally fell into the hole, except they also somehow lost all the birth certificates and forgot the kids' names. There's just no way that anyone can prove that sort of harm. But if the content industry ever tried to take out an insurance policy for sales lost to piracy, that would be a reasoned, independent, and measurable assessment of their harm, and they couldn't make up those BS numbers about how many dozens of their non-existent children fell into the pit, lost forever, even to the public records and the memory of their parents.

3 ms·

>> "isn't piracy a "victimless" crime as in the producers of the content don't lose sales" I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain coun

by k-mcgrady 12y ago

icebraining 12y ago
As a copyright holder of my HN posts, it hurts my feelings seeing you criticize pirates. Please refrain from doing so as a condition of downloading my posts.
logfromblammo 12y ago
> There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm. Harm must be proven to receive civil redress. Potential, unrealized harm is not actionable. If your neighbor digs a bottomless pit in his backyard, and posts trespass warnings, you cannot sue to have him fill it because your kids might fall in. They would, after all, need to trespass in order to do that. But you could tell your insurance adjuster, they could apply a risk premium to a policy, based on the presence of the hole, and you could sue your neighbor for that. The argument against piracy is essentially a neighbor saying that 40 of their kids accidentally fell into the hole, except they also somehow lost all the birth certificates and forgot the kids' names. There's just no way that anyone can prove that sort of harm. But if the content industry ever tried to take out an insurance policy for sales lost to piracy, that would be a reasoned, independent, and measurable assessment of their harm, and they couldn't make up those BS numbers about how many dozens of their non-existent children fell into the pit, lost forever, even to the public records and the memory of their parents.