Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

A little miffed here at what seems to be the HN consensus. Stealing is not okay. It's not sound ethical reasoning to point to the fact that someone is wealthy, technophobic, or might not otherwise have fame to justify not paying for their content.

Piracy is not the only way to sample content, nor is it the only way to acquire DRM-free music online.

EDIT: Interesting that some folks are acting like they are not advocating privacy, only revolt over how stringent the fines are.

1) That's clearly not what the consensus is. Most of the top comments to this forum are ad hominem attacks on KISS over the quality of their music, or their somehow "not getting" how piracy HELPS them (which is hilarious).

2) The expected value of your fine is reasonable. It's the probability of you getting caught times the fine. That in essence is your calculus when you decide to download an album for free instead of paying for it, that your expected loss is still less than the cost per CD. Seen in this light the fine is set appropriately.

Scale of OK-ness:

1) Downloading a KISS album from BitTorrent:

A little bit not-OK

2) Prosecuting some kid who downloads a KISS album from BitTorrent, costing him or his family tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars:

Extremely not-OK

That's silly. If you agree that something is both illegal and immoral, then how is prosecution not an appropriate response?

It's the proportionality of the prosecution. If it was a hundred dollar fine and 10 hours of community service, that would be a different story.

Let's put it this way: why should "stealing" a 99c song be any different than shoplifting a 99c candy bar?

You can't own a song, but you can own a candy bar.

As much as the ads say "own the cd now" or "own the blu ray now" you own nothing. You are just paying for a license and some otherwise useless physical media.

Having said that, I still don't get why paying 99 cents for a song is so egregious if you've got a job.

Yeah, the analogy to physical goods obviously doesn't hold; I just think it's funny that the same people who compare copyright violation to theft also tend to advocate suing for incredibly large amounts, when stealing the same physical item has a drastically smaller punishment.

Interestingly enough, I suspect that if Big Media hadn't sought such absurdly punitive damages in the early days, (destroying what little credibility and moral high ground they had), most average people would have sided with them and aided in social enforcement. Something like, say, the cost of the infringing material plus a $100 fine would go a lot further to aid their cause than $100k lawsuits.

I think he's arguing that the scale of the punishment is not just. People get charged up to several hundred thousand dollar fines for downloading a tiny amount of music.

I'd agree that's unjust. Got links to any cases where people have had to pay several hundred thousand dollar fines for downloading (rather than uploading) songs?

I'm not sure what the current state of law is. Morally speaking, I don't believe that people should be paying those kinds of fines for either downloading or uploading in "casual" use ("casual" meaning that they're not original distributors of the material.)

The judgments that I immediately recall are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_v._Tenenbaum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMG_Music_v._Gonzalez

If KISS carefully identified infringers and sued them in small-claims court for the cost of the lost track sale + maybe even 10x for the trouble, I think they'd actually be applauded. The problem is that the US copyright system is downright evil. The copyright infringers come out as the good guys just because the other side is so horrible. I know a lot of people in IP fields who still tend to side with the pirates, not because they really think illegal downloading is a good thing, but just because they can't morally side with the status quo.

Has anyone been sued for serious money just for downloading?

Or have all the cases been people who were also uploading (and hence potentially costing far more than one sale)?

It's true that nobody has been explicitly sued for downloading, but in practice they have never shown any likelihood that the person uploaded to other people, so the real liability is essentially just having the track in your P2P client's media folder. It's a very hand-wavy way to sue people for downloading. Simmons advocates for suing "downloaders," but the actual suits would undoubtedly look much like the ones we've seen so far.

Murder is also not okay.

No one's talking about murder or stealing, though, they're talking about copyright infringement.

Thank you for making this point, because it's the crux of the argument. If I steal something from you, I deprive you that object. So, when I steal your physical car, you no longer have a car (that you could resell or use).

When you download a song/album, you have a copy of it. It doesn't deprive the original owner/artist from continuing to sell it.

I just looked through the comments again, and... I can't find anybody who says that stealing is OK. The issue at hand is that the response is often grossly out of proportion and just destructive to both parties.

What about the guy who said "The music industry should realize that piracy is a good thing."

Just because it's good for the music industry doesn't mean it's okay.

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