Hacker News Reader

Comment by acon | Hacker News Reader

This really makes me question my vote for the pirate party. I really like them, as a voice for freedom on the internet and beyond, and would really like them to lay of the pirate propaganda and start preaching the gospel of freedom instead. Perhaps I bet on the wrong horse all along. Unfortunately I don't know what the right horse is.

View on HN

They do "preach the gospel of freedom". If you e.g. have a look at their press releases, you'll see that very few of them are about copyright. But these don't make it very far across the Internet and with obscurity as their greatest threat in the upcoming elections, this kind of "propaganda" is necessary. Also the current issues regarding the pirate bay isn't about copyright as such, but instead about where liability stops.

From a branding perspective I think you're right. Corporations have been far too effective at using loaded words like piracy and intellectual "property" as a way to frame the argument.

"This really makes me question my vote for the pirate party. I really like them, as a voice for freedom on the internet and beyond, and would really like them to lay of the pirate propaganda and start preaching the gospel of freedom instead. Perhaps I bet on the wrong horse all along. Unfortunately I don't know what the right horse is."

I would vote for them as long as "freedom" doesn't mean the ability of anyone to download/share commercial software, music, and movies with no legal consequences.

So your disagreement with the status quo is the current brand of legal consequences being used? What do you propose instead that will have the effect of limiting downloading and sharing of the above, since that's what you seem to be after?

"What do you propose instead that will have the effect of limiting downloading and sharing of the above, since that's what you seem to be after?"

That people respect the wishes of the content providers by not going around them and downloading their content for free. Since it's obvious this isn't going to happen, it's going to have to happen by force.

I hear so many arguments on this site about respecting your fellow man when it comes to health care and paying your fair share of taxes. Yet, when it comes to someone selling software online, they don't deserve the money. It just seems very hypocritical to me.

I don't think piracy is such a bad thing. Imaging there's a gigantic library that has every music title, movie, TV show, book and software made by man in their shelfs and everybody has free access. Sounds like a desirable thing.

Now the problem of course arises when content creators don't get paid anymore and therefore content creation becomes unprofitable or the quality of the products diminishes. But neither of these things seem to be happening. Not even in the slightest. Entertainment is booming, movies and games reach new heights of invest and profit each year and despite having now a generation of children that probably never bought a music album in there life, Apple will tell you the music industry is far from dead.

So it actually seems you can have both - a highly profitable digital content industry, while having said content available for free to everybody.

That's kind of missing the point. The content isn't 'free to everybody' because there is always the spectre of getting caught and sued hanging over people's heads.

If the authors/content owners themselves said, "Here's this place where you can get all my content for free, legally, but still buy my albums from the store if you want to support me," then we could have a debate about the results of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com