Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

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While obviously, that doesn't excuse piracy, it definitely plays havoc with the marketplace.

What's there to excuse in piracy? Piracy isn't theft: theft implies somebody being deprived of a copy¹. Piracy is making a copy against someone's wishes. Often greedy wishes.

This is especially true when downloading content that has been released overseas but not in your country. The production company can't possibly lose any money because they haven't released it yet in your country: you possibly couldn't buy it and shove those shiny euros down their throats if you wanted to.

There might be laws in effect that kind of try to incriminate and impose penalties for pirating but a law doesn't equal ethics.

The copyright proponents want copying a movie to be illegal because it might constitute a lost sale to someone who might try to sell that movie in the future. However, if everything worked the way they propose, nobody could ever do anything legally because it just might constitute a lost sale for someone else who might try to sell the same thing in the future.

¹) It has also been established recently that depriving of a potential sale doesn't have a correlation in reality: in one particular case the potential lost sales were estimated to be more than there's money on the planet...

"Piracy isn't theft" is not an argument for or against piracy. No one is arguing that piracy is problematic because and only because it is theft.

Piracy is problematic because it is parasitic. Pirates derive value from a system to which they contribute nothing.

Lost sales are not the point. Lost compensation for distribution is the point. Piracy is not a lost sale, it's a forced sale at the forced price of $0.00.

The point about piracy not being theft deals only with the marginal cost of copies, which is entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Somehow or another, artists expect to be paid for what they do by those who derive value from their art, whether that payment is based on distribution (like the music industry) or prepayment (like Kickstarter).

If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

That is the debate in a nutshell.

Gee, is the nutshell really so small that it can only include your perspective of the debate, rather than the other side's views, or those of moderates?

In fact, the piracy is theft misrepresentation is a core maxim of the pro-industrial stance on copyright enforcement. it is precisely because people view it as dishonest deprivation (theft) that people have a problem with nonmarket, unlicensed sharing of cultural elements.

Yet such positions are rarely precisely defined (and this is true of the other side as well, mind you) - if we accept lost sales as a valid consideration, where does one stop? A slow browser in a newsagent's shop is chased out, and puts down a potential purchase. or isn't chased out, and enjoys - but doesn't pay for - several articles. An influential reviewer, having a bad day, communicates his distaste for a work without tempering his words; at a stroke, ten thousand potential sales are 'lost', the artist is deprived ten thousand times over. Copyright on a work expires (75 years after the death of the artist) - the artist is (sort of?) deprived (or rather, his estate is, or he was, back in the day). People are being deprived of something totally artificial which was granted to them and them unwaveringly, thanks to the Disney lobby, enhanced. Copyright reform has always gone in one direction and it remains illegal to format shift your own belongings in the UK. The debate in a nutshell includes people who'd like to see things swing back in the other direction, without necessarily eradicating copyright, simply because each extension of copyright (a state-granted monopoly right over what you can communicate and reproduce for the benefit of others) grants benefits to the rightsholders at the sacrifice of the commons, and of my rights to use my property (CD burners, CDs, books, etc) freely.

You've explained exactly why I don't consider "lost sales" a valid argument.

In any event, the debate about copyright is indeed much larger than the debate about piracy. I was restricting my thoughts to piracy (and really piracy for the purpose of obtaining new media, not for doing things with paid-for media that you should be allowed to do) and whether or not it is justified. I should have made that more clear.

If you feel I am still missing something, considering my narrow focus, please let me know. It was not my intention to exclude any reasonable perspectives or bias my post to my own views.

> If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

> If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

I think this is a good place from which to look at piracy, but you should also consider the Kafkas, van Goghs, and Dickinsons.

The intellectual contortions used to justify piracy continue to amuse. Unbelievable that this gibberish is at 10 points.

Actually I thought that yason provided a well reasoned argument (hence the upvotes). Your comment, on the other hand, is nothing but an empty statement of disagreement.

That's not really a contortion. yason just does not agree that the copyright laws are a good idea. And since those laws are man-made, he has every right to disagree with them.

All laws are human made.

For me, yes. But I did not want to get involved in religious arguments.

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