Comment by itistoday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itistoday | Hacker News Reader

Just another symptom of living in an idiocracy. This situation will work well for the for-profit prisons in the United States, who, like the for-profit health insurance companies, make a profit off of people's misery, and will ensure that America remains #1 in persons incarcerated:

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-high-...

Thankfully, the article does point out the discrepancies in Biden's claims:

  Interestingly, the statements seem to fly in the face of a  
  recent Government Accountability Office study released to 
  U.S. Congress earlier this year, which concluded that there 
  is virtually no evidence for the claimed million dollar 
  losses by the entertainment industry. That study suggested 
  that piracy could even benefit the economy.

Nevermind facts, we don't care if the evidence suggests that piracy helps the economy, or whether Biden's metaphor is a metaphor and not a substitute for reality, or whether that drug you're taking is not only safe, but healthy, we're still going to toss your ass in jail, or give you a fine you'll spend the rest of your life dealing with.

Ars Technica did a great job thoroughly debunking the claims of the RIAA and MPAA:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits...

And here's their take on the referenced government study:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-governmen...

But in this country, facts don't really have much weight when it comes to policy making.

The irony of all of this is that like the War on Drugs, instead of keeping people safe and happy, this coming War on Piracy will only serve as a drain on America's economy and morale, and yes, could even result in the creation of a dangerous black market. Tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the purpose of spreading misery and soothing the irrational fears of an aging and nervous minority of rich people.

If you actually read the summary of the linked GAO paper[1], you can see that the authors of this attack piece misrepresented it. Some choice quotes that they neglected to include:

"Negative effects on U.S. industry may include lost sales, lost brand value, and reduced incentives to innovate", "The U.S. economy as a whole may grow more slowly because of reduced innovation and loss of trade revenue", "research in specific industries suggest that the problem is sizeable"

Basically, the report says that piracy has some bad and some good effects, but these effects are extremely difficult to quantify due to the illicit nature of piracy. Nonetheless, piracy is probably a significant problem.

As it becomes easier for people to get stuff without paying for it, production of said stuff will drop. It's common sense, people.

[1] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423

> As it becomes easier for people to get stuff without paying for it, production of said stuff will drop.

And so what? The "said stuff" is mainly quality-inversely-proportional-to-budget music and movies. We needn't them anyway.

There are many people folks who enjoy the summer blockbuster more than an art-house flick. I would be pretty sad if the options in music, movies, software, and books became severely limited because the system could no longer compensate the creators.

If people aren't willing to voluntarily pay for it, I think the free market has spoken, that it doesn't value the summer blockbuster.

I'm not sure what you are arguing. I was invoking the free market in support of blockbusters. People pay to watch big-budget movies in droves. The free market suggests the creation of blockbusters (particularly sequels) and not art-house films (with occasional exceptions).

I'd bet the black market values blockbusters pretty highly too. However the easier it gets to pirate, the more people will do so and the incentive to create these movies will evaporate.

If that were true, then we'd expect the big budget stuff to be among the least pirated, not the most pirated.

That is unrelated IMO. People have to choose what to spend their money on; marketing (and perhaps social) pressure tends to incite people to see films that are much too often not worth their price; ergo they prefer to pirate them and spend their good money on more useful stuff.

Piracy doesn't just hurt the RIAA and MPAA. It hurts:

* indie game developers

* Unsigned bands

* authors and book publishers

* OSS companies that sell their compiled binaries training material while giving away their source.

People who create things deserve to be compensated if they wish to. Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing.

Nice sense of entitlement you got there.

I'd like to rephrase your statement to:

People who create things should be compensated if we can figure out a system to do so that's not too costly to the general public. "Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe.

Note: I am an independent content creator (though I don't live from my content at the moment).

It all boils down to the public goods problem, and which solution to it that you prefer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

> if we can figure out a system to do so that's not too costly to the general public.

No, that's not the basis of capitalism in the slightest!

The point is to work out the price someone will pay and maximise your returns by offering it to them at that price.

It is up to content distributors to set the price they want; and it is up to the public to refuse to purchase if they feel it is too high.

You also seem to be claiming that piracy is purely due to high prices; and that if prices come down piracy will end. This seems unlikely. I am certain we would see less piracy - but much less? Free is always better than any price after all :)

"Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe.

This is pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. In a wider sense it is certainly correct but, realistically, the idea of intellectual property is used (call it a hack) to simply identify those who contributed to creating something and therefore can (in the eyes of society) ask for renumeration in return for it.

Intellectual property is fucked up (for example; it shouldn't be an easily transferable right, grandchildren - maybe even children - shouldn't get it etc., it is too easy to protect generalities rather than the specific thing you created) but I think the general point has merit.

I worked in the games industry for a short while (for an indie developer) and it is pretty disheartening to see your hard work handed out for free without your consent. It feels like someone is sticking their middle finger up at you. :) And that is what is at issue; we are potentially building a culture where people expect stuff for free and businesses are expected to earn revenue in other ways - to the point that people will take it anyway and to hell with what you think. That's an extremely complex model in my mind and possibly counter productive to innovation.

> I worked in the games industry for a short while (for an indie developer) and it is pretty disheartening to see your hard work handed out for free without your consent. It feels like someone is sticking their middle finger up at you. :)

I'm familiar with this feeling too (as is one other poster). It's not great.

I get the feeling that if someone posted 'someone ripped off my app!' on HN everyone would instantly upmod it. Post that somebody's doing something about TPB and suddenly piracy is assumed to only affect large, evil corporations.

""Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe."

I never understood that point. That's like saying preventing murder is contradictory to the nature of humanity.

The point of societies is to make laws and enforce them, in a way that leads to everyone being better off. As far as I'm concerned, the argument against copyright should only be about whether it makes society better or not; it has nothing to do with morality, and definitely nothing to do with the nature of the universe.

There is an intrinsic cost to murdering someone that's not dependent on human laws. There is no intrinsic cost to reusing an idea, other than that made up by human laws.

I agree that the argument about copyright should be practical, not moral - which is why I'm opposed to starting the discussion from the point of view that authors have a moral right to preventing people from copying their creations. They don't.

> Nice sense of entitlement you got there.

Sorry, what's wrong with being entitled to the benefit of my own work? What right does anyone else have over something I made, with my work, taking hundreds of hours of my time?

I can't believe such a shitty personal attack on someone for daring to say they're entitled to what they create is sitting on HN with +3.

How would you feel if someone uploaded all the source for Woobius to TPB?

I don't think anyone has any particular right to profit from their work. You're arguing for some sort of positive freedom to profit from labor, which unsurprisingly no libertarian-leaning person would really endorse. Not only that, you're arguing that state power should be used to create artificial scarcity that would allow you to profit in that manner!

> I don't think anyone has any particular right to profit from their work

Then how will you make money from Woobius? How will any of us on HN make money from our work? Not everything can be ad-supported.

> You're arguing for some sort of positive freedom to profit from labor, which unsurprisingly no libertarian-leaning person would really endorse.

What? Freedom to profit from their own labor is very much something Libertarians hold dear.

> Not only that, you're arguing that state power should be used to create artificial scarcity

Libertarians want the government to stop interfering in markets. Piracy isn't a market, it's a crime - piracy hurts markets.

Don't feed the troll (_delerium).

Freedom to profit from their own labor is very much something Libertarians hold dear.

Libertarians want the government to stop interfering in markets.

Yes, but profiting from your labour is typically handled by an exchange of goods, and once the exchange is done, each party has no say over the goods they traded.

Not so with copyright, it limits what people can do with goods after they have been exchanged, and it does so through a state-enforced artificial monopoly. It is definitely government interference in the market. If it was completely free, you would lose control over your creations the second you sell them.

Piracy isn't a market, it's a crime - piracy hurts markets.

It is a market, and it works exactly like any other market. Piracy appears when a large amount of consumers disagree on the pricing of artificially scarce goods, and instead acquire the goods illicitly, by circumventing the artificial scarcity.

The easiest way to combat piracy is through the market, simply provide a better product than the pirated product, and provide it at a price most consumers are willing to pay. Most people pirate not because they want everything for free, but because there is a huge discrepancy between the price of something and what they percieve it to be worth.

There is a reason that, for example, the Apple Music Store is so incredibly successful even though anyone can pirate music easily. They provide a better product (legal DRM-free files conveniently and quickly delivered is better than illegal DRM-free files that are inconvenient to get) at a better price (1$ per song instead of ~15$ for a bundle you didn't want just to get the song you actually wanted).

It is perfectly possible to compete with the pirate market, and doing so can be more profitable than trying the heavy-handed approach and strengthening the monopoly.

> Not so with copyright, it limits what people can do with goods after they have been exchanged

Fair use is awesome. Copyrights shouldn't last forever. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been conned by places like TPB - which punish everyone, including those who make OSS, and people who give away some of their works for free but charge for others - into thinking copyright reform requires advocating piracy.

There are many people who believe authors deserve to be paid, but fair use has a place. In fact, I think most human being fit into that category. Advocating for fair use while advocating stealing alienates everyone from the cause.

I'm not advocating piracy, and neither is anyone else here. However, I think you should be more realistic towards it and realize that it's not such a big deal. Casual non-commercial private copying of stuff probably doesn't hurt anyone. You shouldn't do it, but if someone does, it doesn't equal a lost sale for the creator.

And, to return to the original article, I'm convinced that dealing with it in this heavy-handed way, by adding more legislation, more law enforcement, isn't the right way. And I don't think it helps you or me as creators.

(I also wish people would stop downvoting you just because they disagree, that's really not the HN way. :-/ )

> I think you should be more realistic towards it and realize that it's not such a big deal.

It really is if you've had your work stolen. There are 3 people, last time I checked, in this thread who have. They're all pretty strongly against piracy.

> (I also wish people would stop downvoting you just because they disagree, that's really not the HN way. :-/ )

Hehe, thanks. It's been quite odd to watch - +2, -1, +1 etc as different groups for and against moderate reddit style.

I don't think anyone has any particular right to profit from their work.

Similarly no one particularly has the right to obtain someone else's work for free. Which is why this argument is a bit silly/flawed because human society doesn't work with such moral absolutes :)

How would you feel if someone uploaded all the source for Woobius to TPB?

I would feel pretty stupid for having allowed someone untrustworthy access to the non-public source code of Woobius. Then I would move on and continue adding features for our registered users, who like to deal with a company like us rather than "someone on the internet who stole the source of one of the up-and-coming construction web 2.0 companies on the web". It would make very little difference to our business model.

However, if someone copied the app, interface, functionality, etc, and made more money than us by doing so, well, I would have to take my hat off, because building a good app is hard, but selling it effectively is harder. If such a person existed, I think we'd be talking to them and trying to hire them or join forces somehow.

The value of an SaaS business is not in its source code (though keeping it private is generally a good idea), but in its existing customer, users, reputation, business connections, etc. Which is why it is an inherently stronger business model than selling bits and bytes (like the record companies do). If recording artists switched to a similar business model (which is perfectly plausible) they wouldn't care about piracy either.

Unsigned bands and authors have always been hurt, not by piracy but by those who didn't sign them.

It used to be that the only way to fame was through the distribution channels that was owned by a few large corps.

That's not how it is today and that's a good thing not a bad thing.

What? You're confusing two completely different things:

* Digital distribution is good for artists, as they can reach their fans without needing a record company to physically shift media. Digital distribution is not piracy. Nobody is disputing digital distribution being anything but good.

* Piracy is bad, as people taking things without paying the people that made them.

Look at Trent Reznor. He's not signed anymore, and gives away Ghosts I as a way of connecting directly with his fans, and making money off Ghosts II - IV, which he charges for.

TPB distribute torrents for Ghosts I which is great, but they also help people steal Ghosts II - IV.

No different that HN's friend, the Bingo Card Creator guy, when he made the desktop version of BGC and had his app ripped off left right and center.

Reznor is pro-piracy also, though. He's openly admitted to being a member of various torrent sites, and says he doesn't care if people pirate NIN works, even the ones he isn't himself distributing on torrents. He's certainly not going to sue anyone for doing so, and if one of his previous labels did, he's said he wouldn't support their suit.

I've heard Reznor tell his audience to pirate NIN CDs produced by his old record label as the price is outrageous and only a small amount goes to him.

I'm not sure he feels the same about the works he's selling directly himself.

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