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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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 words carefully there).

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.)

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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 certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.

Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.

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.

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.

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.

What's interesting is that iTunes would never have existed if not for MP3 downloads, but also because of Napster-style ease-of-access to a large catalogue of music.

This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.

To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).

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 progress the RIAA and co are having with option (a), I think option (b) is a far more rational alternative.

Personally, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I think you can help yourself by not socially norming piracy into a badge of geek cred. But then, I don't believe in the supposed benefits of piracy.

(Actually, piracy directly benefits my line of work, and nets some interesting intellectual challenges for me and my field, since it's driving plenty of businesses into the arms of DRM-style schemes. It will not surprise you to learn that I also believe the pirates are going to lose the technical battle over DRM in the long term, too. So, in behalf of everyone who enjoys writing kernel debuggers and hypervisors: thanks for the extra billable hours!)

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".

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