Ask HN: Necessary piracy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Necessary piracy?

50 pointsmantas55 comments

This is quite a hard topic for me. As a programmer I feel bad about piracy. I wouldn't like to steal somebody's work. I know how hard it is to make smth nice and that cost of software/music/book/whatever is not just it's physical format.

I heard about Tony Hsieh's "Delivering happiness" quite a few times. Today I decided that I want to read it. I live in Lithuania (aKa ex-ussr), so naturally book shop next door doesn't have english books in stock. But I've got Kindle! Let's try amazon... Whoops, "books is not available in your region". F*ck! Next stop - book's website.. They don't sell directly at all. BN sells to US-adresses only as well. I checked amazon.co.uk as well - no digital version available, paperback can't be shipped to my address.

What shall eastern-european-to-the-bone do? Let's google "delivering happiness download". Long story short: I got it on my kindle in 15 minutes. For free.

For Americans and most of westerners piracy may be about morale and choice. But for many piracy is not a choice. And not because of price. That's the only way to access information.

What's your take? Is it OK to "steal" stuff that is very hard to obtain in legal ways?

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I deal with this issue sometimes, particularly getting digital content in America while living in Japan. My solution is that one of my VPSes runs a Virtual Private American: Apache running mod_proxy. Any web request proxied through the Virtual Private American appears to originate from a computer in St. Louis... because it does. I use a proxy switching addon in Chrome and Firefox to magically turn American whenever e.g. Amazon gives me guff about it. Then I can pay for the content of my choice using my American credit cards. (If you don't have one, you can fake it with a stored payments card.)

Morally, it isn't my finest hour (it is technical breach of contract with Amazon, it makes a minor imposition on the eventual rightsholder of the Japanese version, possibly retards the ability of the content to licitly reach Japan, and possibly transgresses a secular law which enjoys a presumption of moral legitimacy), but it is a much less grave offense than theft.

> it is technical breach of contract with Amazon

What contract did you sign with Amazon?

You know, those terms that most people usually don't read and just click "I accept".

I don't remember if Amazon have those before registering/buying though.

Doesn't that require shipping to a US address?

This isn't a problem for digital downloads.

How do you actually receive meatspace items you purchase? Via a mail forwarding service?

I only buy atoms that I need to eat, wear, or clean things with. Japan has plenty of good options for these. It's getting particular bits that I want that drives me bonkers.

Try these guys: http://www.myus.com/

i use http://www.bongous.com cause english no good and me no understand good. i use bongo like their website in espanish..

Well, here's how it looks from each of the stakeholder's perspective, as near as I can tell:

Artists: You invest a ton of hard work into making something you're proud of. Then you make $0.87 because everyone is pirating it (or at least, that's what your distributor tells you).

Distributors: Their primary value these days is in marketing. So far it's just the web cartoonists who seem to be making a living off their work, but the distributors being supplanted over time. They're hiring lobbyists and trying to keep their leverage by fighting stuff like Net Neutrality.

Users: I bought a game the other week. It wouldn't install and gave me some vague nonsense error message like "Install failed: try again." My best guess is that Starforce DRM was the reason. I'm out $20. I'm guessing it twigged on some remnant of a CD drive emulator I used to convert some ISO a long time ago and later uninstalled, but it won't tell me. I never got to play it. I could get a crack for it, but all the crap I took from trying to make it work made me hate the game. Long story short, I returned it. The non-techie store clerk elected to mark it as "defective." I didn't really feel like contradicting her.

Pirates: You can get anything you want for free. Unlike the users, your version won't have DRM. Worries about viruses and such are real, but overrated for people who are reasonably computer savvy. There's a reason more people transition from user to pirate.

Librarians: They're sitting on some wax cylinders from 1890 that won't go out of copyright until 2067 thanks to a 1972 law that simplified (and extended) audio copyrights. The Library of Congress report said that they generally have to ignore the law to preserve a lot of historic audio files.

Did I miss anyone?

Is it OK to "steal" stuff that is very hard to obtain in legal ways?

With all due respect, I'd suggest you're just being lazy and looking to justify something that you seem to know is ethically dubious.

Book Depository has the book for $18US with free shipping to Lithuania http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780446563048/Delivering-...

http://www.abebooks.com/ top two results both offer shipping to Lithuania, less than $25 total cost.

As the other user pointed out, ebay sellers have the book with shipping to Lithuania, total cost ~$25US again.

I can think of three worthwhile points here, though:

* Outside the US, getting legitimate digital content is still much much harder and/or more expensive than getting pirated content. I live in Australia, so somewhere between US & Lithuania in convenience stakes, and we get the same "not available in your region" BS. I spent some time in NYC last year, and the ease & availability of digitally delivered content blew me away. Bring it on!

* There _are_ countries where piracy is the only sensible option. You own a Kindle, so I'm assuming you can afford a $20US hardback book. I used to live in Indonesia, where my housemates earned ~$60USD a month. Although they didn't have their own computers (or Kindles), some of our neighbours had computers (P2-era in 2004) and every piece of software was pirated. I don't even know where they would go to buy legit copies if they wanted them.

I think you can make a case for piracy in these circumstances. In fact, even Microsoft did - they gave the Indonesian government licenses for all of the Microsoft software on their computers, in exchange for them agreeing to pay for more licenses (at reduced rates) in the future.

Thankfully, Linux is (or was) growing in popularity in Indonesia as an alternative free (and ethical) option.

* Finally, I would say that this shows there exists a market for a site like http://booko.com.au/, targeted to ex-USSR countries. Hint hint. :)

As I said in original post, price is not the problem. Although laziness and not so high ethics is :)

Thanks for the links.

Offtopic: we had the same situation in 90s. Getting better now, but most people still pirate software. Photoshop costs more than average monthly salary. Before taxes. Do I need to say more? :)

That's not quite what you wrote in the original post, you were trying to suggest that you had no legitimate option and piracy was "the only way to access information".

Whereas the truth is simply that the legitimate options took more effort to find & execute than piracy did. Which is universally true, even often for those who live in the US (the gap is just narrower there.)

That's an interesting moral dilemma.

I'd say that if you can't obtain it at all then downloading it may well be a legitimate option if there's another way that you could recompense the author or pay it back. For example, you could find a US library address, buy the book and have it sent there instead, then download a copy safe in the knowledge that you have actually paid for it, with the karmic bonus of having donated it to a library.

Thanks for the idea about library!

...which then results in a few people reading the library copy rather than buying their own, so that he effectively stole a book for personal use and discouraged multiple sales by other people who would have otherwise bought copies. His attempt to pay back the publisher for the book just cost that same publisher $50.

Our systems of morals assume a scarcity of goods which is increasingly not the case when the goods in question can be represented as bits of information. Sooner or later society will have to decide on a new set of moral rules to account for that, but for now things are fuzzy and a simple application of the traditional answers (goodwill and charity in this case) don't always give the best solution in a modern context.

(Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with this solution - I just like playing devil's advocate.)

That's the standard anti-piracy strawman - you don't know that the people who borrow the book from the library would necessarily have bought it.

I've checked out books from the library, and later bought my own copies because I wanted to re-read them again, at my own convenience.

(insert standard "sample size of one" disclaimer here.)

Not to mention, by that logic, you should never donate books to a library, since it is effectively costing the author sales.

>> by that logic, you should never donate books to a library, since it is effectively costing the author sales.

Precisely. Should authors and publishers be paid by everyone that wants to read their work, or should the books be available freely to all that want them? (And yes, they would get paid for the number of books the library owns, but the system is set up to minimize that amount and it should certainly be less than the number of people reading them.)

What is the moral difference between pirating a book and paying no money to the author, or borrowing a copy that had been donated to a library and paying no money to the author? The borrowed copy prevents another patron from borrowing at the same time, but this feels more like a physical limitation (and legal loophole) than a morally relevent distinction.

People try to place value on making sure that authors get paid, and on making books freely available to all (that live near a library?), while neglecting that these are mostly incompatible with each other.

Oh, and the "I later bought my own copies" argument is also commonly used in favor of piracy.

It's reasons like this that I don't claim any strong opinions on these issues myself. Things are complicated. There are too many factors at play - especially when you toss in greedy corporations and all that - to make clear distinctions between right and wrong that hold up from all angles.

It's fine to play devil's advocate, but I would advise against making that depend on a secondary argument that society disagrees with, that being libraries as a negative thing.

This is an interesting take on applying your own personal ethics to a situation which is still technically illegal.

download a copy safe in the knowledge that you have actually paid for it, with the karmic bonus of having donated it to a library.

It would seem like you are double-dipping here. You can decide personally that the one act ethically offsets the other, but I don't know if you can claim good about both things at once. :)

It depends. If you read the book on the kindle once and then the library has the hard copy forever, then it's equivalent to a full donation on top of reading the book. If you use it as a reference and come back to it often, then you're double dipping.

Personally, I think he's being backed up against a wall enough that he should just download it.

But I appreciate your creative and thoughtful solution. If this were an interview question, your answer would tell me a lot about you.

What do you think the answer says about me? I'm interested now.

If you have a kindle change your zone in the kindle settings page and add an US adress (pick one on the yellow pages). I am in france and use that method to download us only kindle ebook. It's work perfectly :) (amazon dont verify the postal adress)

Whoah. I thought it requires credit card on "delivery" address. Thanks.

I don't know about Europe, but in the US you just have to re-enter your credit card information if you have it shipped to another address. Obviously, so someone can't just login to your Amazon account and order stuff on your card.

Same thing in Europe.

But they may just ask you re-enter CC info OR validate it against your address as well.

Fun story: been living in the UK for a while, but using Lithuanian credit card to shop online. Most websites required UK billing address. And allowed to use my cc with billing address in different country...

I know what you mean. On the one hand, stealing is wrong, generally speaking.

On the other, I'm in Australia. We speak English, have a Free Trade Agreement, and are generally as available a market to the US as the US is. And yet, we pay FAR more then our fair share, we don't get releases at the same time, and generally get shafted.

And, the only reason why is often one of profit. It's more profitable to charge us more, because we'll pay it. It's more profitable to delay launches here, because then they can have big-bang style launches.

Which, as you've no-doubt noticed, leads to piracy as the means of obtaining something. It's a dilemma I've not quite resolved, myself.

It's not necessary, but it's damn convenient. That's mostly the fault of the content distributors, IMO, that actively prevent honest consumers of legaly acquiring things due to outdated regional distribution models.

I don't live in the US either and saw this more times than I care to remember: "you can't buy this digital download because it's not available in your region. print and fill out this form, mail to your local distributor and you'll get it in a few weeks".

Want to watch Lost finale? Wait a couple months until it's been spoiled to death. The lastest album from your favorite band? A technical book, games, it's all the same. Sure, it's all purely convenience, unnecessary things, but it's digital bits that have people all around the world, with their credit card in their hand waiting to consume them.

I've seen people use proxies and whatnot to be able to give their money, say, to Apple to buy music in iTunes which is not available here. I think it's absurd to pay to get something that end up being infriging anyway.

Not to mention all the hoops customers have to jump through (quotas, DRM, exclusive content, DLC) that pirates don't have to worry.

I like the honest position Shane Carruth (who written, directed, produced the movie Primer pretty much by himself) about torrenting his movie:

http://primermovie.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1626#1626

(somewhere else he says he received several tips through paypal from people who downloaded but rejected them all due to legal issues)

All that said, I think there's a huge market for someone to provide a way for people around the world to purchase legal bits of pretty much anything, if they can work through the legal issues. Steam is already doing a good job at this in the gaming market, but there's still plenty of space there.

Legal, piracy is a beneficial public policy. 19th century and 18th America benefit enormously from the piracy of British literature at the expensive of native American writers, who does have copyright. Of course, some British authors actually made money from the exchange too. Some authors like Charles Dicken are deeply upset by the fact. Nonetheless, cheaper books help Americans afford more books and learn to read.

As for me, I don't feel bad about piracy. I am an anarcho-capitalist, so I don't have much respect for any law that transcend my property right. However, I also noted how piracy hurt my interests tremendously in the long run, no matter how attractive and unrisky it is to pirate.

Piracy support monopolists, not entrepreneurs who respect my property rights. As a result, I am gald when people target pirates instead of my business.

The issue with "hard to obtain" in most cases in that it is deliberate. It's easy to make available, in many cases you're even being taunted by publicly displaying its availability, and then telling you you can't have it. As far as I'm concerned, if that's your way of dealing with customers, all bets are off.

Second, copyright laws aren't a question of ethics. They are very artificial (nothing is being "stolen" or removed, copies are not the original property) laws that have originally been created to promote the distribution of original work. If it's being abused to do exactly the opposite, again, as far as I'm concerned any ethical considerations become null and void.

And don't get me started on deliberately crippling a legally acquired product with crap like DRM.

"Piracy" is how things work from now on (where "now" is about 1980's), and the change is quite similar to every other technological revolution. There will be opposition to it, but all the countermoves against it are just totally pointless struggle against how things shall naturally go: information will be free.

The outcome of all this is good: it takes away power from the unskilled artists (soulless list hit generators etc.) and moves it to the skilled ones. You know, the kind that make you wanna throw money at them even if you already have their stuff.

ebay may be an option where the seller ships worldwide. Found at least one http://cgi.ebay.com/Delivering-Happiness-Tony-Hsieh-BRAND-NE...

If the people putting the time/money into producing the content don't make it available to you, then that's their choice. They're still putting a value on it, so if you obtain the content without providing them that value, then it's stealing. The book you mention is a perfect example. I can't get it either. So I just don't pay for it and spend my money somewhere else instead. Your "steal" should just be steal (no quotes). It's black or white.

Now I don't think it's some huge deal, I'm just saying it's still stealing, either way you look at it.

No, it's not stealing. This word has a very specific meaning (and emotional baggage associated with it) which is often used to blur the argument (like you did).

It's called copyright infrigiment.

We can easily get lost on the definition of words without looking at what the OP was asking. You are correct based on the specific definition of stealing, but I'm pretty sure the OP meant "taking something of value without paying that value".

The OP was obviously using a broader definition, and I used his definitely to answer the question. He uses "piracy" and "stealing" in the same question, so I think his meaning is clear.

I realize English is not your first language, but on this particular topic, one must be VERY careful with the terms you use. In classic rhetoric, the ability to control and define the terms is the means to control and define the argument. If you honestly seek a fair resolution, step back from the politics and word-smithing by trying to address everything as fairly as possible including the terms used.

Given that I respect tptacek for being bright, level headed, and having a good mind for reverse engineering and analysis, I had hoped to get him into a friendly discussion addressing root causes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798540

Human nature is acquisitive, but this manifests itself in two distinct ways; for a group or for an individual. In the former, there is a part of human nature wanting collaboration (for group), so we want to return favors and want to reward efforts. In the latter, there is a contrasting part of human nature more avariciously (selfish, greedy) inclined to benefit the individual, so there is also a desire to not return favors and not reward efforts.

Copyright laws are an attempt to enforce the former, and of course, copyright infringements are an attempt to enforce the latter. The former creates "monopoly" and the latter creates "theft" but both of these terms are rhetorically loaded, and worse, both of them are a detriment to markets.

The important question is, can we design a better system to both fairly reward efforts of collaboration and at the same time also benefit individuals?

It's a very tough question, but until people are willing to step back from their biases and heated opinions, we will not be able to figure out a better solution.

I've been in the same predicament before for finding older software. When I needed a certain older version of Hypercam that couldn't be found anywhere, including eBay at the time, I ended up pirating it. I was willing to pay up to the full original price for it because of the need.. what else can you do if the software is a torrent search away?

You've got a misleading title there. You don't need to read this book, you just (in your own words) "want to read it."

So, of course you have a choice. Read something else.

The universe doesn't owe you a constant stream of your preferred reading material in the cheapest and most convenient way possible. There are 50 used and new copies for sale on Amazon.com. You're telling me not a single one of them could be bribed into shipping internationally for you? There's not a single Lithuanian book shop that will do a special order? Lithuania has blocked BonVu.com?

I think what you mean to say is that you didn't feel like paying extra for a book or waiting for it to arrive. So really, you pirated out of convenience rather than necessity.

I find your answer deeply dissatisfying.

If there are systems set up that cut off knowledge from certain parts of the world, or even make it much harder to get it, I think that is injustice. I regard it as a basic human right to have access to the same information everyone else does. That's why we have public libraries.

In the U.S., we regard free speech as sacred, and I would argue that the reverse of free speech - the right to hear others - is equally as vital.

This idea that someone owns unique configuration of words and sounds is old and dying. You can own distribution platforms, own objects, and hire people who can make streams of words. But you can't own an idea.

--This idea that someone owns unique configuration of words and sounds is old and dying.--

That software you're working on is just a unique configuration of words and symbols. I think there's value in protecting that, and I don't see any difference in regards to written publications.

That's the thing... I'm pretty sure we can open source all of our code, and it will be business as usual.

We already open source a lot of stuff, because that stuff alone isn't nearly enough to beat us.

"I'm pretty sure we can open source all of our code, and it will be business as usual."

For everyone working on something trivial, which is most people, you're right. I don't think it would really work for important complex algorithms, etc., i.e., Google is not going to open source their search algorithm.

It sounds like you're saying that Google, after coming up with their version of search, should've just opened it up to the world, because everyone has the "right" to know what they're up to. Do you think they'd be in the same position today if they'd done that?

Google's main search algorithms are well-known and essentially open. It's all the little bits they keep adding on that are unknown.

Here - I rewrote your post to be a little more constructive:

   Perhaps you could try to find a book shop that will do a
   special order? I found 50 copies on Amazon.com. You could
   look into getting it shipped via bonvu.com if nobody will
   ship internationally.
   
   If all that fails and piracy really concerns you, remember
   you don't *have* to read the book.

Some piracy is welfare-maximizing for society. If there was zero chance that you would buy a costless-to-reproduce good at the effective price -- and the effective price includes all the hoops you have to jump through to get it, including search costs -- then obtaining a copy results in no real loss to the rightsholder, but a real gain for you.

Societies become rich by encouraging people to take as many such gains-without-loss actions as possible! (And quite a few actions where the gain of some outweighs the loss of others, too.)

Of course, having this utilitarian rationalization handy may mean you pretend you wouldn't have paid the higher cost, when in fact, you would have. And, someday the rightsholder may find a way to offer their product at a price you'd take -- perhaps through some form of price discrimination -- in which case, piracy causes a small loss to the rightsholder.

But piracy may still be net-welfare-enhancing, because their eventual-loss-at-some-future-price-point may be much smaller than your gain-in-the-meantime.

I wouldn't agonize over your situation, as long as you're trying to get legitimate copies. Perhaps you could pick up a legitimate copy when it does become available, or figure out a generalized way to pretend to be a US consumer of digital goods -- VPN, PO Box, CC card? -- whose cost can be amortized over many purchases. (Is that circumvention ethical? Well, that's another interesting question...)

> Some piracy is welfare-maximizing for society

This is a point that I've often pondered with respect to piracy. From society's point of view, the net gain from everyone having access to a digital good (given virtually zero duplication cost) could outweigh the benefit to society from the income being redistributed to the company that charges for duplication of said good?

Dude, I live in Lithuania too, I buy books at www.bookdepository.co.uk. Free shipping, takes 3-5 working days.

But I know what you mean. We have way less choice when it comes to buying stuff in this part of Europe, that's why so many people tend to skip the buying part, cause they want it right now.

Another option you could have tried would be to make contact with someone trustworthy outside of your country, transfer them money to make a legal purchase and ship it to you. Much more time consuming, certainly, but if you wanted to exhaust all legal avenues that's an option.

That would work if I asked how to make myself feel good.

But my point is that publishers could move their asses and start selling worldwide instead of bragging about piracy.

Copying is not theft.

I have a rather radical proposal, which might even not be feasible (about as feasible as trying to treat virtual non-scarce things as real and scarce):

Authors should get paid for writing, not for having written something.

Have you tried Craigslist?

Perhaps there are expat Americans or Brits who work in Lithuania, who could obtain a copy for you.

I remember a while back there was an attempt to compensate the producers of content that was more conveniently acquired via piracy, whatever happened to that? I think the context was music, but it stands to reason that it could be employed in any market.

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