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

Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#81

Post by steveklabnik »

kyro wrote: post #49
byoung2 wrote: post #15

I hate it when people equate piracy with theft...it's copyright infringement, not theft. If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, that's theft. I, the original owner, no longer possess the item. If instead the "thief" breaks into my car and copies all of the music from my iPod (let's say that all of the songs are recordings of my band to make things simple) and posts it on several torrent trackers, that's pi…

Do you hold the same opinion when it comes to software? And by software I mean code you've spent months laboring over that you perhaps hope to make some sort of living off of.

I do.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#82

Post by steveklabnik »

tptacek wrote: post #68
tsuraan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you call bullshit on the notion of people paying when they can pirate instead? Everybody's aware of file sharing at this point, and nearly everybody has internet access. Somehow, the content control industry keeps getting money, mostly from sales of their content. What is your explanation, if it isn't that people pay for stuff they like despite free options?

You are drastically overestimating the technical acumen of the average buyer of online music. Most of the people buying music from iTunes are the same people writing 'patio11 support emails complaining that his bingo card generator broke their internet.

Even among those of us _with_ the technical acumen, piracy is just too much of a pain. $36/year for Pandora is far worth the dozens of hours I'd save, and I have accounts on a few private trackers.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#83

Post by tvon »

bediger wrote: post #73
tvon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, that's theft. I, the original owner, no longer possess the item. Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.

> You can steal an idea, for example. How so? I can't even really write about it without getting mired in semantics, but here goes... Suppose, one icy winter, I see you scraping your car's windows with an inverted plastic coffee mug. I'm having a lot of trouble with my store-bought flat, shovel-shaped scraper. I copy your idea: I bring a plastic mug out to my car, and use that mug to scrape frost off my car's windows…

You steal an idea by passing it off as your own.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#84

Post by [deleted] »

kemiller wrote: post #77
tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the semantic flaws in the content industry's criticism of file sharing are indeed a great injustice.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. But in this case, it's not some sort of picayune hair-splitting going on. The word "theft" has visceral, ancient connotations for most people. Those with a horse in the much more abstract copyright infringement race would very much like it if everyone would please ignore any and all subtleties and call it "theft". Squatters also deprive landowners of the potential use of their…

[deleted]

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#85

Post by kemiller »

tptacek wrote: post #80
kemiller wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. But in this case, it's not some sort of picayune hair-splitting going on. The word "theft" has visceral, ancient connotations for most people. Those with a horse in the much more abstract copyright infringement race would very much like it if everyone would please ignore any and all subtleties and call it "theft". Squatters also deprive landowners of the potential use of their…

Yes, I do think it is a bit rich for people who are using luxury goods without paying for them because they disagree with the terms they're being sold under to complain about the specific words the sellers use to refer to them. Just be happy they haven't wised up and started calling pirates "content rapists"; rape is also pretty hard to quantify in dollar terms.

I'm not arguing that copyright infringement is right any more than I'm arguing trespassing or operating a sewage treatment plant in a residential neighborhood are right, only that they're not automatically "theft" just because they're bad.

We have distinctions between different crimes for good reason. Death penalty for speeding? I'm sure some who have lost their loved ones to reckless drivers might agree. But we as a society have pretty much decided that while there should be a punishment, it should not be that harsh.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#86

Post by tvon »

wildjim wrote: post #66
tvon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, that's theft. I, the original owner, no longer possess the item. Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.

That's just slang! You can't actually steal an idea! Once someone has made it possible for the idea to be shared -- even if they wrote it down and locked it in their safe -- then the information is already potentially accessible! Breaking-in to someone's home to steal the paper you wrote your idea on is explicitly the theft, and getting the idea written on it is a side-effect.

Looking at the OED definition: http://is.gd/eSaRt

first example:

> dishonestly pass off (another person‘s ideas) as one’s own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#87

Post by petercooper »

jeromec wrote: post #74
petercooper wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP explains that since nothing is actually removed it's not theft. I disagree. It depends whether you're referring to your own personal definition of "theft" or a legal or common definition (of which there are many). If the former, no-one can quarrel with you, of course ;-) If the latter, in some jurisdictions, permanent deprivation of property is required for "theft", so copying files would not count. Where perm…

I didn't mean to get into the semantics of "theft". If you notice, I said "To me I'd consider that theft". What is significant, I believe, is the moral weight of categorizing it as theft, rather than specific technical definitions and jurisdictions. I believe the same context is meant by the Obama administration's choice of words. We are at a time in history for which there is no precedent for all the things we are a…

OK, I appreciate your argument now :) It is cool for you to frame things within your own value system and I can't argue against your opinion, but it's a shame that the executive branch is being lax with the definitions of words that have special definitions in their realm.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#88

Post by petercooper »

tptacek wrote: post #57
jrockway wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're someone who makes copyable content for profit, it's best to think of purchase rate instead of piracy rate. You make as much money from someone who pirates your Cocoa app as from someone who uses Linux. But the Linux users aren't "stealing" your revenue. Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I c…

So basically your argument is that when people like something, even if it's trivial for them to pirate it, they'll pay. Yeah, I respectfully call bullshit on that.

A non-negligible percentage will, no? 70-75% of downloaders paid $1 before or after downloading Stephen King's "free" book The Plant. Radiohead had success with In Rainbows too.

There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#89

Post by NateLawson »

alextgordon wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know where I'm coming from: I actually think what you'd doing is a form of theft. I don't think the word is inappropriate. You are free to disagree. I think many objections to the word "theft" in this context are reasonable, even I don't agree with them. But I am genuinely amused that people expect political correctness from people whose livelihoods they are probably disrupting unlawfully. (I chose my wor…

It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.) There's nothing I can do about piracy. The options are to either (a) treat it as the enemy and fight it or (b) accept the benefits it brings and write off the losses. Judging by the prog…

There are a number of things you can do:

1. Legal: pursue copyright violators, possible DMCA claims against those who circumvent your protection scheme (if you have one)

2. Technical: build in DRM. If not, at least add forensic marking to allow you to track the source of your piracy to know if it's hurting actual sales or not

3. Social: stop propagating the meme that copying commercial data is ok because you are knowledgable enough to do so and it doesn't hurt anyone.

The RIAA has an uphill battle because of no option #2. (CDs have no DRM, despite efforts to retrofit it). They are trying #1 and #3.

Also, I have a counter-example to Felten's claims that DRM never prevented piracy. With BD+ (Blu-ray), we have had some discs survive 60 days before they were cracked. In that time period, there were no high-def rips available on Bittorrent of those movies.

While there are still no large studies showing how many potential pirates purchased a disc due to the delay in availability, I wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing I can do about piracy".

Re: Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

#90

Post by NateLawson »

Qz wrote: post #5

I keep telling myself, this has to be better than if we'd elected McCain -- right?

Big business is a huge influencer of both major US parties. With Dems, you get unions and Hollywood. With Reps, you get oil and industrial agriculture.
Post reply on HN