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Say I buy the music for $.99, and then put it on my own service where I sell copies for $.09. And say people use my service because I've made it very simple or that I'm using a business model that people prefer to either freely downloading it or paying full price. Should this be allowed?

I do not consider piracy theft, but I do consider there to be economic issues that must be handled. If the creators aren't compensated, there are limits that wind up occurring. For music, because of factors such as the ability to be compensated through concerts and through fame (fame can't directly pay your rent, but I think it still counts as compensation because of the impact of having high fame), it is possible for people to still make money. But in other medias this may not be possible. Look at movies, if we allowed infinite copying how would we get the budget to create the expensive movies currently created? Imagine if a theater only had to make a copy and could continue to show the movie and make profits without giving any back to the creator.

If you look at indie video games, you see a truce of sorts. Most indie games have little protection, but many people still buy them even though they could copy them. Some do this because they want to support people who aren't developing game with always online DRM or similar techniques. But is this model sustainable? What happens if people begin feeling entitled to such an extent that the producers aren't able to sustain their livelihoods?

And I'm not sure my personal experiences are relevant or not, but I'm someone who use to pirate computer games back when I was a broken college student but who started buying all my games once I had a steady income.

In what world is piracy not theft? That is the literal definition of the word.

If piracy and theft were identical, there wouldn't need to be a separate word. Theft deprives the owner of their property. Piracy is creating an unsanctioned copy of their property.

"A thousand candles can be lighted from the flame of one candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened."

I think he was referring to "piracy" in the sense of pirates on pirate ships. Piracy is literally theft in its original sense.

The question now is if modern day software piracy and similar intellectual property copying is theft. If it isn't then perhaps "piracy" is a bad term for it?

I think people have the intellectual capacity to learn newer and subtle definitions for words. Give them some credit.

I think the reaction had more to do with the intended negative connotations of a word being perpetuated by people trying to justify their existence.

I'd prefer we call them huggers, not pirates, and that they are hugging content rather than pirating content.

You'll notice that if the word has positive connotations, then if you commission a study on the effects of hugging on the music industry, you'd probably be expecting to finding positive net benefits to the activity.

This confusion is exactly why "piracy" was used as a marketing term by the MPAA & friends.

It seems pretty obvious. Piracy is a synonym for particular sort of theft, but one that paints a very vivid picture of the person doing it as an outcast and a danger. If they had, for example, used the term 'digital shoplifting', which in the case of P2P is pretty close to reality, people would have brought their preconceived notions about the term which many associate more with teenage stupidity rather than hardened criminality.

Other synonyms for theft (larceny, burglary, robbery, etc) are too tied to the physical world to work for their purposes. The goal was to frame the conversation away from more accurate words like copying or infringement since those have more ambiguous moral connotations. Looking at the thesaurus entry for theft, I struggle to find a better alternative to piracy if the goal is to shape the way people think about the issue in your favor.

Comments like this violate the HN guidelines by taking threads on generic ideological tangents. It's easy to do that without meaning to, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take care not to in the future?

In a world where copying music is essentially free (not 0.99$ as you say), you are free to sell copies for whatever amount. Good luck with that. Perhaps by adding side value it'll work.

Video games are a good example of something that works: the marginal cost, and actual copy-proof value of many games are updates and content. See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.

At least you are paying for something that actually costs money (again: a download is essentially free to the seller).

>Good luck with that. Perhaps by adding side value it'll work.

The issue is why do I get to sell someone else's work? And even if we did allow it, this would quickly lead to content producers not being able to continue to produce.

Imagine for a second if Steam could just take any video games and sell them keeping 100% of the profit. How would that impact production of video games?

>See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.

So create a market where only always online games are ever made? That doesn't seem a step backwards?

While I understand your metaphor, I don't understand your position. Are you against copyrights entirely? If you want to reform it, how so?

For example: if my friend who works on self-driving software for Google is at my house, should I just be able to download the source code from his work laptop onto a USB drive? The software distribution cost, like music, is near zero, so is this ok? If not, how is this example different than music?

I, for one, don't believe it is "absurd" that creators like musicians or Google be able to exert some control over how their creations are copied for a limited period of time. Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric, but I think the basic idea is sound and makes a nice set of tradeoffs.

I also disagree that history somehow makes it obvious that incentives are not needed to make music. When the printing press came along and drastically reduced that cost of distributing music, copyright systems followed almost immediately thereafter. What historical precedent of an environment with low cost distribution but without copyright systems makes it obvious that the copyright part is unnecessary?

> Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric

That’s not even quite the case. The current system is strongly in favour of the middleman — publishers, music labels and the like. Whether this is a better or worse state of affairs than being biased towards the authors themselves is unclear, but it’s a sufficiently sourced different problem that the solution must also differ

When one produces goods (e.g. pizza) there are two costs:

- pay-once costs (the cost of the oven)

- pay-per costs (the cost of the dough)

Competition and economic law tells us that the price of a pizza will drop to the pay-per (marginal) cost once the pay-once (fixed) cost is repaid.

Copyright law was introduced to let companies recover fixed costs by giving them a monopoly and preventing competition. The problem is that this law failed on many levels:

* the length of the monopoly far exceeds its needs: recording an album does not need millions as 50 years ago. It needs thousands.

* there is no real incentive to cut down fixed costs. The reason the prices of production dropped is simply the advent of digital recording. Pro audio analog tools are still incredibly expensive.

* it set up a specific, adapted business model which is not necessarily a good one, the one of rock stars, which privileges few "winners" giving them huge resources and exploits the majority of other artists by giving them essentially nothing.

If you want to know what would happen to software if getting a copy is free, well, essentially we are very close to it. Google is not really protected by copyright law when thinking about its search engine business. They are protected by the control of deep know how and the cost of building such a system. Google's search engine is its team, not its source code.

Software today is different, in that the value is not in the source code but in results of its execution. With Internet, this made it possible for companies to keep the sources and execution to themselves while giving you only outputs - also known as Software as a Service model.

The question of if they should be compensated each time it's played seems easy to me. Let the people who create the content decide how they want to monetize it. Unless I already had a contact with someone, if they told me I wasn't allowed to decide how my code got monetized I would be dumbfounded

Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?

There's two points --

Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable.

Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks).

There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)

I know it's somewhat beside your point, but production has also become a great deal cheaper. An entry-level external audio interface and DAW package will set you back a couple hundred dollars or euros at most, and will basically give you all the tools to do professional quality recording, mixing and mastering.

It's a pretty big change too, considering that just a couple decades ago the only feasible way to make recordings of any kind at home was cassette tapes.

So have the hardware and software required to write software. It still takes time though. I couldn't write software for a living if people didn't pay for it, even if I used free tools and free computers. The most expensive thing is my time. The same would be true if I wrote music.

The cost of making music is nowadays the cost of the time of the artists.

Recording can be done essentially for free (less than 10,000$). In fact many artists chose to have a studio at home and do away with that cost entirely.

As a lot of artists effectively work for free: the cost is zero.

In fact, the expectation nowadays, in many cases I've personally heard from them, is that new artists proposing themselves to a label are expected to come with a full master of their debut, self paid.

I guess this quickly becomes a very broad topic with many many sides and nuances, but I'd like to add another question that bothers me:

Why are creators of popular public statues or significant landmarks treated differently than, for instance, music composers or book authors?

They get a one time fee for their creation and, with some exceptions (e.g. no unauthorized pictures of Brussels' Atomium), that's it?

Another interesting question, what is the role of libraries in all of this? If I check out a book I want to read and read it, my likelihood of buying the book drops significantly. Some libraries even allow this for movies and games.

Libraries buy the books and pay a royalty to whoever owns the rights.

In some cases this is based on a voluntary contract and in some it is based on a public lending right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

You could apply this exact argument to software. Would you?

I don't know about that commenter, but there's an entire free software movement that applies this argument to software.

Are you talking about software parents or software in general? Because the internet is full of free code

Yes I would.

> People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software?

Are you actually questioning the whole concept of paying for digital goods?

Do you really think you only paid for a jewel case and logistics when you bought your CDs or packaged software back in the 90s? No, you obviously paid for the work that went into the product. And that should still apply, even if you buy the content from Bandcamp's digital shelves. Or the App Store.

> There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars.

The piracy discussion always seems to be limited to big major labels. I agree that we don't need more of those, but they are really just the surface of the industry. There are countless small and niche labels that do honest and important work, acting as curator, supporting their artists and gathering a significant and loyal following among avid listeners.

"the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today."

Do you mean the music that was created by musicians paid by the aristocracy for their work or the music created for fun by the already wealthy using their expensive pianos and strings instruments?

But what about them movies?

There are no record companies there.

The problem is that when you talk only about "distribution is effectively zero" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased. It's getting worse when you imply all data is just numbers and regulating numbers is silly and stupid. Those numbers have context, that's why they are not just numbers.

Labels are not only distributers, not all artists are interested in marketing, distribution, mixing, etc. And at some point you need to get those investments back.

If you remove payments or restrict it to special ways like patreon people will still produce music, that's obvious. But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.

Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion.

> But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.

So what? We're just trending back towards the long-tail. The whole "super star" phenomenon only exists because producing/distributing music was expensive and so corporations were able to exert control over music consumption and (more importantly) music discovery. Most of my favorite bands fund their albums via Kickstarter/Patreon/etc, I listen to it on Spotify, and I drop $20-$40 on tickets when they come to town. My money is still there, I just spend it on the services that provide the most value to me.

"Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion."

I believe that current situation favors indie artists as anybody can form a band, record an album in their basement, upload it to Basecamp, Youtube etc. and if they are really good, expect a success. That's how an open system should work imho. In an old system, you would have to pass that middleman (and agree to pay huge part of money made from your music) before somebody even hears you. The difference is that it is hard/impossible to strike super-rich now as a musician, "success" often means taking donations for song/albums downloads and getting paid for live concerts to make a living. That makes musicians much like any other profession, and that's how it should be; we had super-rich musicians only because there were bubble in music industry in the past century (other comments have written more detailed on this topic). If all pop-stars would disappears overnight, I wouldn't mind either as there's probably enough indie music to discover than I have enough time in my whole life.