Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by learc83 » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 9:51 AM UTC

chaz wrote: post #235

roguecoder wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it have been a better outcome if the same number of people had paid for the game and only 10% as many people got to play? It wouldn't have been better for the game-makers and it would have been far worse for the population.

The fundamental argument for anti-piracy is that at least some of the pirates would have paid for the content if piracy was not available. It's not all the pirates, and it's not none of the pirates. Nobody would care about pirates if they were 100% unmonetizable. I'm making numbers up, but let's say 10% paid as usual, 1% converted to payment because piracy wasn't available, and 89% didn't want to pay and didn't play.…

Your example ignores the potential positive effect of piracy on sales. It's likely that at least some of the pirates purchased the game because they liked it. It's also likely that all the extra people playing it contributed to the publicity.

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

#312

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 10:16 AM UTC

Czarnian wrote: post #245

rbanffy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So if I break into a theater when it's closed and make a reel-to-reel copy of a movie with my own film stock, then I didn't just steal it? Good to know.

No. You are guilty of the copyright violation and the break in. As long as you don't steal anything, it's not theft.

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

#313

Post by v0cab » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 11:35 AM UTC

DanEdge wrote: post #267

v0cab wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I agree with JulianMorrison.) Why doesn't it scale?

Because people who don't pirate stuff are subsidising those who do and if nobody paid for anything, new stuff wouldn't get made (or at least it wouldn't be available from those people who relied on the income from sales to make a living).

> people who don't pirate stuff are subsidising those who do

Well, the pirates aren't asking the buyers to subsidise them.

> new stuff wouldn't get made

Fine by me.

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

#314

Post by jiggy2011 » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 11:39 AM UTC

bitmonk wrote: post #143

jiggy2011 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing "happy birthday to you" in public might be a legit act of civil disobedience . Pirating last weeks blockbuster isn't.

That's an opinion. Stating opinion as fact is a worthless contribution, in fact a detriment, to healthy discussion. I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way: Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.

What's your point? I should prefix every sentence with "I think", people here are smart enough to put things in context.

Legal means of acquiring music is pretty simple. Legal DRM Free MP3 downloads are built into my music player and I'm a linux user.

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

#315

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 12:33 PM UTC

grellas wrote: post #214

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…

The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. Well, the Internet certainly has led to a generation of young people who are accustomed to downloading freely from various sources without regard to copyright restrictions and, in this sense, I would concur that social norms are changing. Unfortunately, the law itself is far from changing and, while some o…

Some movies wouldn't be made without large budgets and associated risks but technologies improve and lower the costs. I'm perfectly happy to wait 10 or 20 yeras for a a given movie to be made with desktop class pc instead of hiring 1000 people and sinking a real ship or two.

Big budget movies are expensive only because they can be. They are huge waste of resources enabled by copyright.

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

#316

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 12:40 PM UTC

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 nobody pays for a copy of Linux? There is new constantly improving Linux in every software niche it can get into.

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

#317

Post by e40 » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #280

e40 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9. That would never happen unless MS charged an outrageous sum for it. If any company finds itself in the position where nearly all of the users are pirating, then there's something wrong. They're charging too much or the DRM is too onerous, or something. EDIT: if you charge a fair price and make something available, people will buy it rath…

"EDIT: if you charge a fair price and make something available, people will buy it rather than pirate it. Louis CK and lots of other people have shown this." There are two problems with this assertion. The first is that people's current working definition of a "fair price" seems to be $0.00. Are we really to believe that paying $1.29 on iTunes, or $0.99 on Amazon, for a DRM-free music track is "unfair"? Or that the u…

You are not putting forth an argument against my statement. I said "a fair price" and did not include $0.00. Louis CK charged $5. Radiohead and Reznor/Williams let buyers choose. These are very different experiments.

Lastly, I was a huge Radiohead fan until their "In Rainbows" release. I thought it was horrible. After previewing the songs, I didn't buy/download it. I wanted to very badly, because I wanted the experiment to work. I think they did the experiment on that collection of songs because they knew they sucked.

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

#318

Post by mikeash » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

pilom wrote: post #276

mikeash wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the kind of junk I'm talking about. I get that the author disagrees. The problem is that neither he nor you back it up with any reasoning. You're just declaring that you're right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong. What's the point of that? The simple fact is that copyright infringement is not a universally-agreed wrong the way e.g. murder is. If you want to convince people that it should be, that's…

Ok I see the difference. I'll answer more to your point. When a person creates a work, they have a right to decide how that work is given to others. They can leave it in their closet. They can sell a couple copies to friends. They can give it away to everyone and say "if you like this, please give me a dollar!" They can say, "here is one copy for you but I want it back if you ever decide you don't want it any more."…

No, you're just asserting it without backing it up again. "[Creators] have a right to decide how that work is given to others." You just state this, as if it's a universally held fact, and then base the rest of your post off of it. Clearly a whole lot of people do not believe that creators have a right to decide this.

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

#319

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 3:41 PM UTC

artsrc wrote: post #270

roguecoder wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this a separate anti-intellectual property view: I like content and am greedy for it. Copyright helps me get more content by providing incentive. This is the benefit. Whatever these are benefits of copyright, the practical collateral costs (to privacy, freedom, making everyone a criminal etc) of enforcing copyright law make it not a worthwhile.

I would group those people in with creators who think that copyright means they'll earn more money. That is, people who are swayed by arguments appealing to the "common sense" that "artists should make money off their work" without specific evidence in support of their views.

Since copyright can be used to prevent content creation (for example, cover performances, sequel novels written by other people or derivative works) it isn't at all obvious that copyright leads to more content. The internet has led to more music and better music being made, according to the recent study I saw comparing radio play of new music over time. Webcomics make most of their money selling books of comics available for free on the web. For most of human history we functioned under a deliver-first, pay-later or -indirectly method of exchange; the internet has allowed this model to scale almost without limit for goods with zero marginal cost.

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

#320

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Jan 20, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

matteodepalo wrote: post #244

roguecoder wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 totally agree. However I think we should include a third group in the pro-file sharing side: people who don't have the money to pay for content or just wont because they're cheap. The problem is that the anti-piracy side mostly sees this group instead of the other ones and that's why, imho, they claim that pirating is like stealing and that it causes the same damage.

There are people who want things for free. However before the internet those were the people trading bootlegs, buying $2 CDs from sketchy catalogs, borrowing cds from the library or friend, watching MTV, listening to the radio or simply not listening to music. I would argue that they are no more supportive of piracy than any other form of free entertainment.

Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life.

Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did.

I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.