The "other" side of file sharing | Hacker News Reader

The "other" side of file sharing

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39 pointszemanel48 comments

Ink is a really good movie - obviously subjective, but its a must see.

That point aside, there's something I just don't understand about some pirates. Why do they insist on justifying stealing? I understand that, in this case, its the owners of the art saying it worked out for them. Generally though, just steal and shut up. Someone else (possibly an evil conglomerate) owns the work and they have every right to discard your economic theories. Sure, you can stick it to them, but, again, why justify it?

Is it because people don't think art should be owned?

Saying piracy is theft is theoretically incorrect. Stealing something means that it you takes something from someone who doesn't have it anymore. Digital copy just doesn't work that way.

As for the question if it is good or bad, it's up to you. I'll just say that to me at least, having thought long about it, intellectual property is a very unnatural concept.

You answered my question better than you realize.

Whilst I agree that no intellectual property whatsoever promotes progress, I think that intellectual property protects the interests of people whose main asset is their intellect. Think about someone who have spent years to develop some innovative product: doesn't he/she deserve to make a profit from it? Or is it better for some other people who are just smarter about business to make gobs of money over the effort of somebody else?

I think that lots of times, someone who is capable of making something remarkable is someone worth having around. So often, things will work out that way.

Actually, it already does : people invent things at companies, and the companies then own the intellectual property.

Saying piracy is theft is theoretically incorrect. Stealing something means that it you takes something from someone who doesn't have it anymore. Digital copy just doesn't work that way.

This is a common misconception. The legal notion of theft does not depend upon taking something from someone who doesn't have it any more. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services

Turnstile jumping on a subway and gate-crashing a rock concert are two trivial counter-examples.

I'll just say that to me at least, having thought long about it, intellectual property is a very unnatural concept.

You think? I have a lot of friends and relatives who have written books, and it seems perfectly natural to me that they should have a moral (and legal) claim against someone who attempted to publish (and profit from) their work without prior agreement.

I was talking what people usually refer when they say "theft". Not a legal notion which is by definition arbitrary.

For me, you can't own something that is not material, ie that can be replicated at no cost. The question of those who actually make a living of IP is one of business model. They more than probably can keep a healthy profit without IP, as they are countless example of around the internet.

It is because people don't want to feel they are thieves. "Cognitive dissonance" at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

See also why the GPL is the involiate Word of God but enforcing other copyrights is like Dick Cheney clubbing baby seals with a Zune.

The power of the GPL comes from copyright. It's siily to embrace one and reject the other.

However, several artists encourage the sharing of their works.

The same argument could be made against libelers.

When this video* was published, I thought the idea it tells was too obvious and well known, but time proved me wrong it seems. Please watch it.

(*) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

I watched it, and was unimpressed. Copying is not theft, as in the physical removal of an item. It is, however, theft as in "theft of services" (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services)

No, it isn't. Watch it again. If you flee from a hotel, restaurant or taxi without paying for the service, you produce a tangible damage in the form of staff time and other physical resources.

That's in no way comparable to making a copy of a digital work by your own means.

How about if you gate-crash a rock concert, or jump the turnstile at a subway?

That's just the same. You're occupying space, a scarce tangible resource at concerts and the subway. Plus other derivated resources.

Scale it up if you don't see the damage: I could easily make 1000 copies of a digital work without the author even noticing, but you can't sneak 1000 guys into a subway station or concert area and not screw over the organization and the rest of the users.

If the concert is sparsely attended, or there are enough empty cars on the train, you can sneak 1000 people on without effecting the rest of the users.

However, in all cases, revenue is lost, and services have been received without due payment.

The scarcity of the resource is irrelevant, IMHO.

Ok, what about 10 million people?

There is no service in the act of copying a digital work. A service is an economic good, i.e. it needs to be a scarce resource. Scarcity of resources constitutes the core of Economics, so it is hardly irrelevant.

It seems to me that there are three different arguments going on here.

First: from a legal perspective, the work itself is considered a service, and the illegal copying/consuming of that work is legally considered "theft of services." You may not like this definition, but it is the law of the land (for some values of "land" including the US of A.)

Second, there is the economic argument. Here, you are claiming that "scarcity of resources constitutes the core of Economics." This may (or may not) be the case, but the notion of intellectual property currently has a place firmly within the domain of economics, even if not at its core. Again, you may wish it weren't, but intellectual property is a mainstream economic notion.

Finally, there is the moral argument, which seems to be that "copying should be permitted, since it does not take anything corporeal away from anybody." In this case, I think the case of JRR Tolkien is instructive; you may recall that a US publisher, Ace paperbacks, printed and sold copies of "The Lord of the Rings" when another publisher (Ballantine) actually had the rights. The Ballantine edition contained a plea from Tolkien stating that "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."

Morally, I am with Tolkien on this one. I think that common courtesy (at least) requires that the people responsible for creating a work of art be remunerated for that work by those wishing to partake of it, if they so desire.

These are good arguments. I'm not aware of theft-of-service laws being used against copyright infringement, possibly because copyright laws are more obviously applicable and call for vastly higher damages. Indeed it's the draconian nature of current copyright laws, and the intrusive tactics needed to successfully enforce them, that make me cautious about using analogies to theft rather than the specific tradeoffs of having copyright laws when we decide where the line should be drawn.

Revenue isn't lost, merely not gained. If you convinced all those people to stay home, you wouldn't see more money in the till.

Theft-of-service isn't really theft. It's a newer problem that required a separate body of law because the laws against theft don't apply to it. It only has the name it does because someone wanted to manipulate you into thinking of it in a certain way. They wanted to connect to your stone-age "MINE!" survival instinct rather than having to win the economic debate about the relative merits of making this economic good excludable.

Because in many cases it's not stealing. What has historically been a very ubiquitous, mundane, and vital activity of sharing art becomes indistinguishable from piracy when translated into the limitations (or lack thereof) and capabilities of modern highly networked digital media.

This is a problem. Pretending that sharing is identical to stealing is not a solution it's merely the creation of an even bigger problem.

What has historically been a very ubiquitous, mundane, and vital activity of sharing

Could you explicate on that, a bit? If we cast ourselves back, say, a hundred years, what was the "ubiquitous, mundane and vital" method by which art was shared?

Loaning of books would probably be the best example of this phenomenon across history. It was so ubiquitous and considered so vital that people went to great efforts to build libraries to facilitate it.

> Why do they insist on justifying stealing?

They do not "justify stealing", they do not consider copying of publicly available information amongst each other (sharing with thy neighbour) as stealing. (FYI, not even current _laws_ consider people exchanging "protected" but public information as stealing, its only you and your ilk who keep repeating this, who directly profit from the prohibition.)

> have every right to discard your economic theories.

It is also considered that a for-profit censorship right is morally wrong, and thus can be ignored.

> Is it because people don't think art should be owned?

It is because very very many people do not think that for-profit censorship rights (also known as "copyright") should be applied to private and non-commercial information sharing because it makes western countries no better than china, north korea & co. As hard and fiercely as you can get hit there for copying and spreading a bit of political information, you can get hit here for copying and spreading a song, a picture, a poem. Both utilize censorship of _private_ information exchange in order to protect a unnatural prohibition against its own people for the benefit of a few "rights holders". They basically only differ in justification.

Those evil pirates do not want their homecountries to engage in massive censorship and daily remind them of North Korea, and thus collectively keep engaging in passive resistance by ignoring censorship laws. The icing on the cake, and a definitive validation of their views, is the little cute pieces of hate propaganda that is always accompanying censorship regimes. The endlessly repeated 1984esque mantra "copying is stealing, duplicating is deleting, sharing is theft" , you and your ilk never get tired to repeat, perfectly fits that role. So keep repeating if you like, but consider that it may have a completely opposing effect on your target audience.

This seems like a personal attack wrapped in a reasonable response. I have no ilk, I'm not part of or affiliated with anyone or thing you seem to be implying. My personal belief is that information, though wanting to be free, can be owned just as sure as a loaf of bread or a kitchen sink. And people who own that information should be able to charge for and control the information how they want.

Some information can cost billions to create, take decades and involve thousands of individuals. I do think that companies that make such investment must be allowed to profit from it.

You make an interesting point about censorship, one I hadn't considered and will need to think more about. I see a difference between public information and private information. I think, after a certain period of time, private information should be forced public, but I'm talking decades. But again, this is a new perspective that I'll have to digest.

But still, ur response came off pretty aggressive to me.

If I really liked the Mona Lisa, I'd have three options:

1) Go see the original painting even if might cost me a pretty penny (not that it does, bare with me here)

2) Buy a decent copy from a reputable artist.

3) Get a high definition scan of the painting for free and print it in high quality paper.

Most people who pirate movies fall into three groups. The group that saw it in the cinema, but can't be bothered to buy a dvd/blueray to watch the movie one more time a few months/years later. The group that did not see the movie in the cinema, but wants to know if the movie is worth paying for in the form of a dvd/blueray. And finally, the group that will not buy the movie or go to the cinema anyways. The first group thinks that paying to see the Mona Lisa once is ok, but don't want to spend twice or thrice the cost of seeing the original to buy a decent copy they just want to look at once more. The second group would rather have a free taste of the artwork before committing any money into a copy that they might not like if they didn't see it before. The third group was not going to buy the copy or go see the original anyways.

I think that all this will be 'amortized' at some point when digital renting and downloading of movies and tv shows become the norm and are integrated into the living room viewing experience. In any case, the excuse is either that you don't want to pay more to see something you already payed less to see once AND want to see once again, specially since now you get to see it at home, or that you want to try something out before committing to a purchase. The third groups excuse is that they would have not payed money for it anyways. I can sympathize with all three, since the options that all three require are not in the grasp of everyone yet.

Regarding your final question. Yes art should be owned by the owner, said owner should not force me to pay an exorbitant price to get a copy of the artwork if I just want to watch it one more time. Also, I should not be forced to buy a copy of the art piece if I don't even know if it's worth buying. You wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it would you? Finally, some people are just not into art that much, and don't really want to own a copy of the piece.

I agree with you stealing is stealing (and bad). But can you really point fingers when a lot of the stealing is caused because it really is the most sensible way to test drive or revisit the movie? Can you really point fingers if you know that your movie was watched by one more person that would have not seen it if it hadn't been pirated?

Do you sneak into theaters to "test drive" a movie and then buy a ticket on your way out if you liked it?

No. Read the post again. The parent asked why people feel the need to defend piracy. I answered why, in my opinion, they defend it. I also mentioned that I sympathize with the first two cases, which has no relevance to what I personally do (or don't do) or opine regarding movies and/or cinemas.

You excluded from consideration all the people who would see/rent/buy the movie, but are satisfied with the pirated copy (shifted to group 3). Why do you think them rare?

Those generally don't try to justify the piracy. That camp think it's all fair game. I also find people in that group are generally teens who would rather not spend their money in a blueray in any case. These are rarely the one's justifying piracy, and are more generally the one's flaunting their 'pirate skills'.

I justify downloading movies from file-sharing networks with:

a) In cinema there are 30 minutes of advertisements before the movie starts

b) In cinema I cannot take my food and drinks with me

c) In cinema I sometimes cannot even take my backpack with me

d) DVD/Bluray treat me like a pirate. Unskippable insults and advertisements. Hard to get on my harddisk in a reasonable setup. It is easier, faster and more convenient to download a third-party copy.

e) Last but not least, I do not really care about the industry itself. No loss to the world if hollywood or the music industry would die. People make art if they feel the need, there is no money incentive for true art. I do like to "reward" art creators though, if I really appreciate what they did.

I bought 4 DVDs in my life. 2 I could not play them out of the box on my Linux OS. The other two were Jason Scott's documentaries.

I bought a lot of used CDs from ebay. Stopped even doing that when the media industry lobbyism shut down my favourite torrent site (the owner was cleared of all charges years later). Now I download free music. And sometimes, very rarely I download a commercial album. I would not buy it, no harm done.

I don't need to justify "stealing" because copying is legal in my country (Austria):

When buying harddisks or other types of storage (USB sticks) I have to pay a "private copying levy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy). This money goes to organisations that distribute it to the music industry and film industry. On the other hand, you get the right to make a "Privatkopie" (translated: private copy - see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatkopie), which means you can legally copy a film or music from a friend (and neither of you violates the law).

As the law changed recently, but (as far as I know) there practically haven't been any filesharing lawsuits in recent years, it's not 100% sure how this law applies to downloading over the Internet. Most lawyers seem to interpret the law as allowing downloading over P2P networks, but forbidding uploading over P2P networks. The film/movie industrie argues that also downloading is illegal, but there has not been a single person ever convicted for downloading (e.g., when using a patched filesharing client such as Bitthief that disables uploading).

Personally I would prefer not having to pay a "private copying levy" and paying for the content I consume. But it's not my decision and I'm not going to pay for the same content twice (private copying levy + purchasing the content).

Downloading from P2P networks does not fall under that law. That law "only" allows you to copy from closest friends.

According to 10.2 at http://www.internet4jurists.at/urh-marken/faq_urh1a.htm#taus... downloading via P2P seems to be allowed:

"Es geht dabei um das Problem, ob der Download eine zulässige Privatkopie darstellt. Nach dem Gesetzeswortlaut fällt er unter die zulässige Privatkopie." (Google Translate: "It is about the problem of whether the download is a legitimate private copying. After the text of the law it falls under the permitted private copying.")

There is also some further discussion under point 10.2 on this site.

"internet4jurists.at" is operated by an Austrian judge, so I assume the statements there are quite accurate.

I see a future for P2P based on Facebook social networks.

I haven't seen it yet but I'll watch it. Thanks for the recommendation.

As for pirating[1], it's a surprise to see so much support for it on HN. I expect it on digg or even Reddit, which have a different (i.e., younger, less industrially focused, more accustomed to p2p and open source) demographic. However, I thought most of us here earned our living through the creation of intellectual property, which we monetize or hope to monetize in a number of ways.

Films are very much like software startups. One or two people come up with the idea for a movie, get seed funding, refine until they have a "prototype" or "demo" (script/storyboards/etc.), build a project plan[2], maybe go for another round of funding and then cast, shoot, and edit the film into an MVP. Then they flog it at film festivals or wherever they can with the hope that someone with access to a major distribution channel sees it. That 'evil conglomerate', much like a VC in taking on a lot of risk, can promote it and get it out to enough theaters or DVDs to make back everyone's investment. In some cases, the success metric is getting enough credibility to ease the funding and casting parts of their next film.

These are geeks just like most of us–they have a dream that requires a lot of work, expense, and networking to get sales, and it's even higher-risk than software, with a smaller overall pool of cash turnover.

Yes, there's the issue with the middleman, but that's something that will have to be disrupted. It's not going to happen by ripping off the auteurs.

[1] Which I will define as the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of someone's digital work.

[2] The film project planning software out there shames anything I've seen for software development.

Stealing is wrong in any form, but I have no sympathy for the losses major studios and record labels have suffered due to online piracy. Illegal downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit, Avatar/Inception/The Dark Knight box office sales have disproven that. What has ended, is the business model of putting garbage inside a shiny mystery box that people have to pay for the opportunity to peek inside. Gone are the days of cd's that have one good song and fifteen filler tracks, movies that show their only worthwhile parts during the trailer leaving the story begging for a plot. Forget you Hollywood, I hope your industry suffers needlessly for years. The 'mystery box' business model only works when people can't preview the garbage inside

Illegal downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit, Avatar/Inception/The Dark Knight box office sales have disproven that.

So, you have the box office numbers from the parallel universe in which there was no pirating to prove this claim?

Just because they didn't tank doesn't mean they didn't loose profit.

So, you have the box office numbers from the parallel universe in which there was no pirating to prove this claim?

Just because they didn't make more profit doesn't mean they lost profit due to downloading.

The fact that there are downloaders proves that there is demand for the items in question. I find it difficult to imagine a price elasticity scenario whereby not a single person among those downloaders would have paid a single cent to the studios in order to fulfill the demand had the option to freely, illegally download not been present.

Do you honestly think that DVD sales are not even slightly affected by pirating?

I think DVD sales are affected by the fact that people watch films on computes and not TVs, to attribute that to piracy is just wrong. The fact that people download something proves only that there is a demand at cost 0, how this translates into a demand for a physical item at a cost >0 is hard to tell and sure not linear.

I agree that it is not linear. But can you agree that it does translate to some demand at cost > 0?

If so, that demonstrates that piracy represents some loss of potential income for the studios.

I share some of your feelings, although i also believe that downloading copyright material is not right. Anyway, take a look at how the game industry is managing the situation, specifically at what has SteamPowered has done or is doing. Whatever security mechanism is implemented into game protection, it's always possible to hack it and most games are available for download on torrent sites, at least. But even that comes with it's own problems:

* cracks sometimes cause instability problems to the games

* although cracks are included in most downloads, when a game patch comes out, if the gamer wants to take advantage of that patch, he needs to lookup a crack for that version, if it's available

* you can't trust the downloads not to have viruses or any other form of malware

* if you wipeout your data (either intentionally or not) and don't have backups, you need to re-download the game(s) and repeat the above process. If the game is "old", it will be more difficult to download it as it may suffer from the lack of seeders

Now take a look at (Valve's) SteamPowered platform:

* it has a (centralized) store with a large number of games, both recent and older ones, mainstream or indie, meaning you have very easy access to content

* in games as in movies, ultimately the user is not interested in the physical copy, as file sharing success has proven. When you buy a game, your "possession" of it is associated with your account. To access it (from a fresh OS installation or not) you only need to install a thin client and select which games you want to download and that's it

* you can buy games as a gift for others

* it even stores your save games on the [steam] cloud

* games patches are downloaded and applied automatically

* the store usually has a lot of price cuts on "old" games or promotions

and this, i believe, is creating serious competition even for "free downloads". Why would i download a game on the torrentz and risk my computer security and etc when i can just buy it for a couple of bucks, with all the advantages of having it through the SteamPowered platform?

Downloading movies from the interweb, although for "free" also has it's downsides, like:

* quality

* getting proper subtitles if it's in a foreign language

* if you lose the downloads, you need to re-download and hope to have seeders

* not everyone is a proficient at using torrent websites. My mother uses a laptop but doesn't have the skills to properly use them

what i'm trying to say is that i fail to understand why the film industry doesn't start treating the "file sharing" as competition and create a better service than "free as in beer", because obviously they won't "win" any other way, their business model is obviously being made obsolete with the advance of technology.

Why not create a similar platform as Steam, where you can buy films at a lower price which are associated with your account and that you can download entirely and copy to a pendrive to stick on your TV and/or stream onto your computer? with similar features as Steam?

This is in line with my pet theory on why Disney even bothered with a sequel to the original Tron.

They claim Tron became a 'cult classic' and hence a sequel was a good idea. It's a 1982 movie, how did it suddenly explode into popularity in the later 90s/early 2000s? The widespread file-sharing of the movie, of course.

I don't have a citation to back me up here (hence my 'pet theory'), but here's your data point of one - I downloaded Tron from a 'shady' source a few years back, and became part of the 'cult following' it has.

I'm surprised that this site, which is more sophisticated than most out there, still has a relatively high proportion of people who think copyright violation is "stealing".

I think "The Man from Earth" was also partially distributed through torrents. At least that's what the wikipedia claims - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth

Odds that the filmmakers made their production costs back before being ready to claim they are happy it has been pirated...?

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