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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

If a Mercedes costs too much, it’s ok to steal it? That’s what this attitude means. That it isn’t a physical good doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost to produce and distribute it and the price of producing that product is set specifically to make the economics work for the producers. That the bar is making revenue specifically because of the content someone else is producing makes this theft even more unjustifiable.

If someone misused GPL, there’d be outrage, if a bar steals soccer, there is sympathy? If open source people expect (and enforce) licensing for software, how is it consistent that a bar owner is reselling soccer content (i.e. using it to attract customers,) is justified? The idea that people wouldn’t watch it otherwise is ridiculous — they’d seek out a bar that has it. So in this case, this is a direct loss of revenue to the producer of the content.

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With piracy, they don't have to pay for distribution, because the peer to peer networks take care of it.

What's unjustifiable is overcharging for essential music, books, and video, some of which is old, because of the ridiculous extensions on the copyright terms. Sometimes the artists have said they understand why people who can't afford it download their stuff, and can't blame them. Also unjustifiable is how the media conglomerates exploit the artists.

Mercedes doesn't bear any costs either when a car is stolen.

The car isnt stolen. The owner still has the original. The car was copied and now there are two.

That's why we use the term copyright infringement.

Theft is the wrong word, you are looking at copyright infringement. Not a moral judgment but simply the wrong term. There are no additional costs created at the producers site. The bars are having private licenses instead of those for public viewing. A missus of the GPL is also not theft but copyright infringement.

He pays for a copy and then streams it so everyone at the bar can see it.

Similiar to how he pays for cable and everyone at the bar can see it on all of their tvs.

I understand the soccer people want more money. But cost to create and produce is paid for by the subscription already or they couldn't afford to offer the service in the first place. The hardship doesn't exist on the producer's side. We could debate whether the producer should be able to extract as much money as possible on bar owners holding them up to Oracle type liceases. It reminds me of the music industry clamping down on people singing Happy Birthday.

> But cost to create and produce is paid for by the subscription already or they couldn't afford to offer the service in the first place.

That logic only holds if the majority of the consumers are paying though.

It goes both ways. I get the soccer game through cable but would never watch it. It is part of a bundled package.

If I walk into a bar I may get a partial view of a screen / sometimes sound. That isn't worth the cost of a monthly subcription. Pro rated if the account is worth 10 dollars a month I would expect the actual usage to be around 10 cents per person. Not to discount the added ad revenue/tsheet sales/increased individual subscriptions/increased ticket buying.

It's hard to make the case that this revenue is critical to the survival of the game. I would say the opposite is true, the more bars offering the game the bigger and more valuable the game becomes. It's free advertising and if you could get my local little league into all of these bars on single subscriptions I would be the next unicorn.

But in this case there is only 1 provider, so imagine there is only Mercedes. Also they're selling it for a price that's 2x more than you can afford, while your job is XX miles/km away and there are no other options to get there.

I would completely agree with you if I believed in the premise that it's OK to own an idea.

Mercedes don’t have a monopoly on car distribution. If people doesn’t like the price of Merc’s then there are dozens of other alternatives. If people don’t like the price of media content then there is no other (legal) alternatives.

This is also why broadcasters have gotten away without much innovation in the industry when compared to what’s happening in other equivalent sectors.

Edit: Or at least not much innovation outside of rights management. Ironically they’ve spent more time and energy innovating ways to stop people accessing content than ways of improving their respective services.

I think that's a fair point. How long would it have taken for the media industry to come up with Netflix or the equivalent had it not been for people proving the viability of streaming media over the internet through piracy (and porn).

This obviously doesn't justify piracy but it does show how how resistant to change the media industry have become.

If Mercedes was the only supplier of cars run like a state like monopolistic actor.. So capitalistic socialism reigns in a market, people tend to do the usual black market stuff to get on withlife ? Surprise..

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