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

Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

broadmuse.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 334 posts

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#251

Post by jarek »

joshmanders wrote: post #75
leoedin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an 85 word comment. Unless the author is unusually slow at typing (which is quite unlikely given the largely programmer-based audience here), it probably took them about a minute to write the comment. Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.

More more poking fun at the fact that he took more time to reply about why he wont read the article (which is ridiculous) than it would have taken to just read it and respond with valuable input instead of being snobby about it.

Reading this article, let alone reading and responding with valuable input, takes more time than writing a two-line comment, and not just because it's hard to scan sentences written without capital letters.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#252

Post by guscost »

I don't watch Boardwalk Empire because HBO won't sell it to me online. I'm sure as hell not buying cable, and I'm also not going to bother spending the time finding and watching some crappy rip online when there are other things to do.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#253

Post by martinkallstrom »

res0nat0r wrote: post #249
martinkallstrom wrote: post #243

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…

That is his right to do so. It is also the right of other authors to be against free bittorrenting of their books because they believe it hurts their pocketbook. The key is the creator of the material makes this decision, not the consumer.

Actually, he did this illegally. His publisher had the copyright to all translations, not himself. So he routinely asked "to see them" and then routinely leaked them on The Pirate Bay. Again, this is according to himself.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#254

Post by InclinedPlane »

VMG wrote: post #159
alextingle wrote: post #125

The author has a fundamental misunderstanding of what laws mean, and how they change. In England, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas day? Why? Because centuries ago England was governed by a despotic, fundamentalist Christian regime that did not approve of Christmas celebrations. Should I then refrain from eating the mince pie? No. I and millions of my fellow countrymen eat mince pies, and most are complete…

What happens if everybody eats mince pie on Christmas? Life goes on as usual. What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

What happens if everyone in the entire world only reads books from libraries?

This is not a new problem, nor is it without solutions.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#255

Post by baddox »

krig wrote: post #144
chaz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World of Goo launched on Steam and still saw 90% piracy. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/my-software-is-bein...

This is the kind of thing that boggles my mind. World of Goo was a huge success! How the piracy rate fits into the relative success or failure of World of Goo is not at all clear. I don't see how anyone can believe that there's a possible reality where World of Goo would be just as successful as it was with a 0% piracy rate, and where information exchange is free. You can't have both! If World of Goo had made a pitta…

I couldn't agree more. Complaining about the piracy rate of a successful game is like complaining about the "people who didn't buy it" rate. Just think of all the people who didn't buy World of Goo! There must be billions of them!

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#256

Post by kaffiene »

res0nat0r wrote: post #249
martinkallstrom wrote: post #243

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…

That is his right to do so. It is also the right of other authors to be against free bittorrenting of their books because they believe it hurts their pocketbook. The key is the creator of the material makes this decision, not the consumer.

There are no "rights" at play here. There is only what the law allows or does not allow and since that is the very point being disputed, to say that breaching the law is not allowed because that's what the law says is completely circular.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#257

Post by jsiarto »

jxcole wrote: post #51

Ok. I hope I'm not going against the rules of HN discourse here but I'd like to go out on a limb and say any article in which the author doesn't bother capitalizing the first word in his sentences is not an article I'm going to bother to read. One of the few things I miss about the world before the internet is a proper adherence to grammar. If he were ESL, I would be more forgiving, but this post just smacks of lazy…

Agreed--not a good design decision whether intentional or not. This works for logotype sometimes, but your eye needs the capitalization to make the reading easier and to help you identify where you're at in the text (especially longer text).

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#258

Post by joezydeco »

rbanffy wrote: post #177
what wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure stealing means to take without permission or right. Just because you don't take another person's copy away doesn't mean you had a right or permission to take a copy at all.

You didn't "take" a copy. You made one. Without permission, that's copyright violation, not theft. Stop spreading confusion.

If you consume the product, you've achieved the same goal as if you had legally paid for it.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#259

Post by kiba »

onemoreact wrote: post #171
kiba wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Sir, what make you think our situation is historically unique? If you read the history of copyright, you would realize that our is not so special. Rather, the current situation is a continuation of debates that started centuries ago.

The ability for 1/2 the people on the planet to distribute content without meaningful cost barriers is vary new. It's caused people to create and publish far more interesting content in a single day than you can consume in a single day. We are transiting through a tipping point where locating and filtering content is becoming more valuable than creating it. Consider, on average do you enjoy reading HN posts? In what…

It's caused people to create and publish far more interesting content in a single day than you can consume in a single day. We are transiting through a tipping point where locating and filtering content is becoming more valuable than creating it.

I doubt that this is very recent. This has been going on for the last 150 years, if not 200 years. By the time the internet become widespread, we are already trapped in a deluge of information.

Re: Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

#260

Post by diiq »

Czarnian wrote: post #242
diiq wrote: post #150

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.

Refusing to move to the back of the bus. Sitting down in the middle of the street to block the movement of troops from point a to point b. Walking from Montgomery to Selma. Downloading the Inbetweeners. 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…

I do.
Post reply on HN