Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

devtopics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#31

Post by lunchbox »

noodle wrote: post #22
lunchbox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".

thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income. what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income

I want to remind readers that this 10% (or what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

If you backed up that assertion with hard evidence, and demonstrated that this effect outweighs the loss companies sustain from piracy, I'd take you more seriously.

Are you claiming that these companies overall make more money because of piracy? Software and media companies are diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of their budgets into anti-piracy measures. If piracy didn't drain their profits by at least the aforementioned hundreds of millions of dollars, why on earth would they throw away so much money into something that reduces their bottom line (and annoys me and other consumers, therefore making us less likely to buy their products)? These companies might be capitalistic, greedy and [insert adjective here], but they're not dumb. Follow the money.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#32

Post by lunchbox »

cdr wrote: post #24
lunchbox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".

The 10% is not spread across every item of the whole. 90% of the time, there is no lost income because there was never any potential to begin with. Piracy steals income infrequently at best.

90% of the time, there is no lost income because there was never any potential to begin with.

You seem to be making an argument about how rates of piracy are distributed across different products. How does this make the effects of piracy any less harmful?

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#33

Post by noodle »

lunchbox wrote: post #31
noodle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income. what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income I want to remind readers that this 10% (or what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated? If you backed up that assertion with hard evidence, and demonstrated that this effect outweighs the loss companies sustain from piracy, I'd take you more seriously. Are you claiming that t…

i think the claim i'm making is that piracy is a wash. some people who otherwise would purchase something now won't, and some people who otherwise wouldn't have now will.

canadian governmental study on music piracy:

http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/pubs/music_industry/tdm_e.cfm

When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases. The study estimates that one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.

When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population), there is no direct relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchases in Canada. According to the study authors, the analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#34

Post by carlio »

lunchbox wrote: post #12
carlio wrote: post #5

People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and y…

"The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing?" Inaccurate analogy. The baker played no part in making it rain bread. Software developers and other producers of content…

I disagree that it's an inaccurate analogy, but I agree that piracy will reduce innovation in its current state. I'm saying that, as it stands, the fundamental idea of selling something which is free to duplicate is broken.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#35

Post by carlio »

edw519 wrote: post #8
carlio wrote: post #5

People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and y…

But it's not a question of ethics EXACTLY what someone with an ethical dilemma says. Situational logic if there ever was any.

It can only be described as an ethical dilemma if the underlying assumptions are sound. I don't believe that the way we talk about information actually represents what information is and that is the root of the problem. Pirating music or not is not the question to ask until we work out what it is which is getting pirated.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#36

Post by dfranke »

bct wrote: post #26
blogimus wrote: post #19

"Piracy" is just as inappropriate and ridiculous as "theft" as a term to describe illegal copying or copyright infringement. Call it what it is, "illegal copying." It fits its own class, not theft of hard goods on land or piracy on the high seas. "Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?" How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil ?

I'm OK with calling it "piracy", because nobody is in danger of confusing the details and effects of copyright infringement with those of real piracy. This is not the case with the word "theft".

It also allows for a lot of silly pirate humor that would not otherwise be possible.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#37

Post by philh »

>A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket.

Some cinemas are set up to facilitate sneaking in: having passed the usher to get into one film, you can then stay and watch any number you like.

This is semi-deliberate: it turns out that they gain more money from people who wouldn't otherwise bother, than they lose from people who would otherwise buy two.

Maybe these people are committing "theft", but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship. This doesn't obviously apply to most internet piracy, as in that case nothing is bought at all, but it's worth considering.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#38

Post by sabat »

lunchbox wrote: post #10
noodle wrote: post #3

no, silly, piracy is not theft. piracy is piracy, its not a theft or not theft issue, its a different animal. the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop. so, pir…

OK, accepting your made-up figure of 90%, what about the other 10% who would pay for the item they're pirating?

Get a new business model. Trying to 'sell' software is like trying to hug water.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#39

Post by pg »

The mistake in this analogy is that the stars in boxes represent things one already has, while the dollar signs represent things one might get in the future.

Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft. If it were, giving someone bad financial advice would also be theft.

Because taking something someone already has is so much more serious than causing them not to get something they hoped to get in the future, we have a specially bad word just for this situation: theft. And the RIAA and MPAA deliberately misuse this word in order to make file sharing seem worse than it actually is.

Re: No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

#40

Post by ryanwaggoner »

mrtron wrote: post #15

Piracy is a strange beast, but it is definitely NOT theft. If I download a song - it does not directly negatively impact the artist. They aren't out anything. The indirect impact on the artist is another matter. They are potentially out of a sale that could have otherwise happened without the piracy. However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but d…

"However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy."

The analogy breaks down because music and other forms of media are just pure information, so there is no reason to buy it if you already downloaded it, especially as the friction of obtaining an illegal copy is reduced to zero.

Post reply on HN