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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

This is patently untrue. I looked up the wife of my colleague who is the epitome of small itme author and sure enough it's there. You go on mobilism, it's there. Do not try to paint pirates in a positive light. I know them inside out: I have been a software pirate since 1985, I have been the co-sysop of the one of the largest warez FTP sites in Central Europe in what now seems a different life (this was decades ago, it was mostly over by 2003 and fully over in 2004). Noone, absolutely noone cares what they steal. And these days I still pirate my ebooks but then I order the physical book and donate it to the local library and then delete the pirated copy. Only way to deal with DRM and lack of physical space.

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It's one thing for the book to be available on this library.

It's another for one to directly lose out on potential sales due to that availability.

This has been the argument for software piracy for the longest time and it's a convincing one: a student can't afford Adobe Photoshop but if they use a pirated copy once they are at a company they will want to use it. Or, in less charitable terms, you can't get blood from a stone, so why bother.

This argument is so untrue for books it's not even funny. There is a huge treasure trove of free ebooks available and very often you can get a used mass paperback for less than a dollar. And there's no win from a pirated copy.

Books, like movies, videogames and often software tools, aren't substitutable. If I like Photoshop, or want to use it because it's popular, I'm unlikely to accept GIMP as a free alternative. If I want to read or watch The Expanse, I'm 100% not going to read some random free e-book or dollar paperback, because that's a different book. You can't substitute Shrek for Star Wars, nor Slime Rancher for Call of Duty.

Commodities don't get pirated. Commodities get market competition.

So you decided on not just merely passing the time with reading but reading a specific book and because you can't afford to pay for it, now you think you are entitled to it for free because why? If I want to buy a Vuis Luitton suitcase but can only afford American Tourister then I can just help myself to it? How is that right?

> If I want to buy a Vuis Luitton suitcase but can only afford American Tourister then I can just help myself to it? How is that right?

If you could 3D-print yourself a copy that looks just like the original, then sure, I'd say it's absolutely right to do. But that's my opinion, I'm not a fan of the concept of intellectual property. Regardless, what you did here is trying to equate piracy with theft, which is incorrect. Copying does not make the original disappear. Copyright infringement may be a crime, but it's a different crime than theft, both legally and morally.

> but reading a specific book and because you can't afford to pay for it, now you think you are entitled to it for free because why?

Well, if I can't afford it, I'm not going to buy it anyway. The publisher loses nothing over me making a copy. And there's an argument to be made that popular works of art are essential, because they form a shared cultural background; not having access to them means being excluded from the discussions your society is having.

There have been many occasions in my life where I've pirated some Adobe product. I was about to do so again a few months ago and was worried about downloading malware until I had the realization: "Wait, I have a job now. I can just buy the software!"

It felt good to give Adobe my money, and I am not certain I would have paid for the product today had I not donned my peg-leg and eyepatch growing up.

Another factor usually ignored is the effect on substitutes. That student who can't afford several hundred dollars for Photoshop? Maybe everything they actually need to do can be done with Pixelmator and they could afford the $30 for that. But they pirate Photoshop instead.

Or maybe GIMP can do everything they need so nobody needs to get paid. But if nobody gets paid anyway, might as well copy photoshop instead. Legal issues aside, it doesn't seem that irrational.

I think in practice, the moral argument just doesn't work too well for intellectual property, and creators need to deal with it. Which, unsurprisingly, they do, in different ways (be it through making payment convenient like Netflix, prosecuting individuals like MPAA, or focusing on enterprise deals like Adobe, ... or still pushing the moral angle because a statistical effect is better than none).

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