241–250 of 334 posts
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World of Goo launched on Steam and still saw 90% piracy. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/my-software-is-bein...
> 90% piracy Notably, that's not an actual calculated number. Even so, the unanswerable question is whether it'd have been 91 or 99% without easy distribution.
Civil disobedience, the most puissant form of protest, is breaking a law you believe to be unjust, and suffering the consequences if necessary. If you break a law you believe to be unjust and expect to suffer no consequences, that's silly, but not immoral. If you break a law you believe is just, then you're kinda evil.
One of these things is not civil disobedience. In fact, trying to cast piracy as a form of civil disobedience is insulting to the people who actually got arrested, beaten by police, attacked by dogs, had the firehose turned on them, were tear-gassed, run over, and suffered any number of real consequences as they publicly defied laws and a society that were unquestionably wrong.
To cast content piracy as civil disobedience, one must accept that the act of murder is an act of civil disobedience because the murderer believes the law against it is unjust.
Now, his publishers have finally realized the connection, so he doesn't need the anonymous pirate blog anymore. Instead, he links to the torrents from his own offical blog. He is also an avid SOPA protester: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/
I don't really understand these posts that simply declare that the correct choice is not to use their stuff, that piracy is wrong, and it's not your choice. I happen to agree with the overall conclusion that one should seek alternatives in these cases, but this is just an argument by shouting. It's foolish to simply declare, "it's not your choice". Clearly, people think it is their choice. If you want to convince the…
People don't understand how Ethics works. On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced. The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate. On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups…
I don't understand pirates that think downloading the content is a form of protest. If you want to make a change and win then you have to think like your opponent. This is how the greedy suits think: "Our product has sold X copies, but Y people downloaded it. That means there are X+Y people interested in my product! We must make it so X+Y people buy it and 0 download it!" NO! Stop! Bad pirates! By downloading the pro…
> You are not making a stance by stealing it. Stop using theft as synonym for copyright violation. When someone copies a movie, they create a new copy. They don't take someone else's copy away.
Good to know.
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Now you are making a different argument, but I can argue just as effectively against this one. :) In my role as copyright superhero have I not only worked as an employee at companies producing copyrighted works, I have also, personally, produced and sold copyrighted works that have, to some extent, been pirated. I have yet to feel any self-righteous anger. The only anger I might feel is a certain frustration where so…
Well then, I stand corrected, you do have some basis for your statement. :) Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts…
I see you brought it back to a question of ethics, which is something that I think is ultimately not very interesting. Ask any horse-cart driver during the infancy of the car industry, and they would probably curse cars for being noisy and dangerous, and car drivers for being unethical and immoral for supporting this metal abomination. These days no one cares. In the same way, hopefully, we'll one day look back at the era of government anti-freedom bills and shake our heads in disbelief.
Because short of actually going into the heads of all the people who, unlike you, don't see piracy as a parasitic activity, what can you actually do about it?
It's so easy to copy works digitally that many people are no doubt doing it without realizing it. If you have a blog, and someone links to a youtube music video, and you like it and want to share the experience of seeing it with a friend.. you put a link to the video on your blog. But! Unbeknownst to you, that video was put there without the permission of the original creator, and you just committed a crime (by proxy, in this case, but a moral crime nontheless).
A short history of Minecraft, as told by me (guaranteed to be inaccurate in many ways):
Minecraft rose to fame by being heavily shared while in the alpha/beta stage at various indie game forums, 4chan, something awful and other places like these, from where the word of mouth spread wider and wider. From the start, it was for sale (I think for $10), it has never been a free game as far as I know. It was pirated like crazy from the beginning. By the time notch formed mojang, he was already a millionare from the sales of minecraft.
Of course he didn't become a millionare from the piracy directly. The piracy didn't stop him from becoming one, though. In fact, I don't think it's possible to say definitively what impact piracy really had, other than that it helped spread the word. Given the graphics of Minecraft, would millions of people buy it without trying it? Maybe. You say that piracy doesn't provide resources, but in this case it did provide that one elusive thing that every independent developer desperately needs: exposure.
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I'm pretty sure no one is trying to make a living by creating new HN posts with interesting content. If he is, I need to send him a couple of boxes of ramen so he can eat next week ;)
Following this logic, if someone really, really rich creates intellectual property, it's okay for the rest of us to pirate it? It's not like they're creating it to make a living.
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Since it seems to be impossible, from a technical standpoint, to prevent piracy, then maybe we have to accept the free rider problem and produce intellectual property on a public basis. One option would be a grant system, as is used in scientific research (solving the free rider "problem" that anyone can read your paper and use your research).
There are numerous other ways to approach it. For one, you can compete with free, and many do precisely that ( Cory Doctorow gives away digital copies of most of his work, but still makes his living mostly by and from his writing.) Another is to sell the associated scarcities rather than necessarily the copyright system itself (as Red Hat does). And trying to produce it on a public basis produces problems in deciding…
Author Paolo Coelho operated a blog called Pirate Coelho where he published torrents to all his books. He still does this because it makes him rich. For example, in Russia nobody bought his books, sales were up to 15 000 books in two years. So he leaked the russian translations via BitTorrent. Soon, he saw that people started talking about them. Some time later, he saw the sales increasing. A lot. In one year sales o…
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They don't have to make that stuff. They can try to find something else to do instead.
If there was legitimately no demand for these products, then sure, they should move on and make something else instead. But there is a demand for them — it’s just that many of the people consuming it are stealing it. This is what laws are there for. Again, I know this analogy isn’t perfect, but what you’ve said is not all that different from telling a shop owner who was robbed that maybe he should do something else i…