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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> Eh, artists have bills to pay.

So? That doesn't change anything. The needs of creators cannot override our need for computing freedom. Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. If they have bills to pay, they can find something else to do. Ideally, they should get paid for the act of creating rather than the final result.

> it feels a bit silly that downloading the epub from libgen is literally less hassle than buying it on Google Play.

"Piracy" is actually the superior service. It's how everything should work. The copyright industry simply cannot compete and will never be able to compete. The only way they can win is by making the competition illegal.

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I downvoted you, but let me try to understand your worldview a bit here, tell me if you are in disagreement with these ideas I'm attributing to you based on what I'm reading:

1.) If it can be pirated, it should be pirate-able.

Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance? With deepfakes I can 'pirate' someone's face and voice to be used for things they would never agree to.

2.) All distribution mediums are middle-men between a creator and a consumer. Whoever is making money as a middle-man is in the wrong. The person making the least money as a middle-man is the least-wrong.

Piracy services only make money on selling ads and file-download/storage subscriptions, and not on a per-consumption basis. They make the least profit from the middle-manning, so pirating services are the least wrong middle-men.

3.) Creators don't need monetary/financial/fame incentives, they should only create for the act of creation-itself.

Consumers will naturally request and "commission" more work from the creator if their work is good.

I know I'm taking it a bit far on the first one, but I can't help but think that you might agree based on reading your comments.

> 1.) If it can be pirated, it should be pirate-able.

If it's data, it can be freely copied and processed. There's little anyone can do in order to stop it even if it's not supposed to be happening.

> Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance? With deepfakes I can 'pirate' someone's face and voice to be used for things they would never agree to.

I'm not sure about this. I feel that the real damage is the defamation of a real person's character by the fabrication, not the act of modifying an image or video of the person.

I generally agree with this. For example, when people buy music CDs most of the money goes to the record company while relatively little goes to the actual musicians. I think that's screwed up.

I also think it's extremely offensive when "pirate" sites try to monetize their sites in any way.

> Piracy services only make money on selling ads and file-download/storage subscriptions, and not on a per-consumption basis. They make the least profit from the middle-manning, so pirating services are the least wrong middle-men.

None of this is necessary. There is absolutely no need for centralized and costly streaming platforms or hidden "pirate" servers. All of these are solutions to problems created by copyright.

Were it not for copyright, we'd be able to share all kinds of data over peer-to-peer technologies like napster, torrents, IPFS. It's a solved problem. The solutions are so good they'd kill the content distribution industry were they legal.

> 3.) Creators don't need monetary/financial/fame incentives, they should only create for the act of creation-itself.

I have no problem with creators getting paid. I just think they shouldn't be able to get paid by exploiting the copyright system. They could create a Patreon and get paid for the act of creating instead. That'd enable them to release their works into the public domain.

> Consumers will naturally request and "commission" more work from the creator if their work is good.

Yes.

> If it's data, it can be freely copied and processed. There's little anyone can do in order to stop it even if it's not supposed to be happening.

Property laws exist to stop the strong from just taking what they want from the weak. Effectively, someone can point to something and say "this is mine, you cannot have it", and either society backs them up on this or it does not. The only thing preventing someone from stealing your car, house, money, etc are laws.

The same is true of digital goods. Someone can point at them and say "this is mine" and the either society backs them up or it doesn't. You can argue that you're not depriving the creator of anything by taking a copy of a digital good, but you are; you're taking away from their ability to support themselves.

That’s a pretty generous view of the purpose and history of property laws. This article is about American media companies using intellectual property laws to get individuals in foreign countries arrested.

You can’t point at intellectual property. The original intent of ip laws were to incentivize the spread of ideas, not to create a system of repression for profit.

  > 1.) If it can be pirated, it should be pirate-able.
  > Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance?

This would fall under trademark, not copyright. It's perfectly consistent to believe that the government shouldn't erect artificial barriers to the price of legitimate copies asymptotically approaching the cost of copying and distribution (near zero in the modern age) while still believing that the government should enforce some trademark restrictions to protect brands (including one's "personal brand").

In your view, how do digital content creators such as artists make a living? I am honestly curious. Are you saying that the entire gaming industry should be open source and sustain itself purely on peoples' charity?

I don't claim to have an alternative, just that the copyright model is broken. Perhaps crowdfunding and patronage will be the answer. Services like Kickstarter and Patreon.

Those aren't perfect either.

Kickstarter makes it too easy to fail without consequence. Even big names like Neil Stephenson did so (with his swordfighting game, turned out the money ran out and the game wasn't much fun so they just gave up). I don't doubt his sincerity but this model is not ready for the masses. The masses want to buy products, not promises.

Patreon on the other hand, makes it too easy to stay forever in alpha, the money will keep coming in while there's interest and eventually it wanes and the author moves on to something else. But the product never actually gets finished. In the mean time over the many months more money will get spent on it by each 'customer' than on an actual finished product.

Another big name that's currently in this situation is Star Citizen (which was a bit of combo of both models, with continual crowdfunding). Who knows when that'll ever be finished. They certainly have more than enough money but what's lacking is the role of the publisher in the traditional model, who keeps the project on track because they want to see RoI eventually.

The crowdfunding models are great sometimes but they're seriously lacking on this point.

Is a "digital content artist" and "gaming industry" even in the same category? This is an extremely large scope where I would be happy to see (for example) EA crash and burn, but do want creators to succeed. So generic an answers may be hard.

Since you mentioned the gaming industry: most popular games make money without relying on charity or selling copyrighted files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_game...

>Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. <

Grr, the idea of a society where creators get paid a fair amount for their content just makes me so mad. Won't anyone think of the pirates?!

I have absolutely zero problem with creators who make a Patreon and get paid for their work through patronage. That would work even without copyright. The problem is copyright, not creators getting paid.

In order for creators to get paid via the copyright system, artificial scarcity of data is needed. In order to create artificial scarcity, people's computers must be compromised with DRM so that they won't be able to make and distribute unauthorized copies of works. Allowing anyone to compromise and own our computers by design and for any reason is a really bad idea and will probably lead to total worldwide surveillance.

You're equating the existence of copyright as a principle/law and the existence of DRM as a technological means of enforcement. They are not the same thing at all.

I could, physically, go drive my car at 100mph past a school, and nothing about the vehicle would prevent it. Everyone would rightly think me a dangerous idiot for doing it, and the police would probably arrest me, and I'd likely go to jail after being found guilty of motoring offences, but none of that requires the car itself to physically intervene. The likelihood of being observed, investigated, convicted and sentenced is, for most people, a sufficient deterrent even if they might otherwise be so cavalier.

The strange thing about copyright is that unlike other "minor" crimes, copyright infringement is primarily treated as a civil matter in law. The state typically will not invest significant resources in investigating minor infringements or punishing those who break the law. It is left instead to the rightsholder to protect themselves, yet the legal system typically provides no cost-effective means of doing so, nor does it provide access to the investigative powers that police officers or other government officials would have in connection with many other types of illegal behaviour.

The creative industries have fought back with technological measures like DRM and the related laws because, even though we all agree they are deeply flawed, they are also among the few somewhat effective tools that have been left to the legal rightsholders to protect themselves.

> You're equating the existence of copyright as a principle/law and the existence of DRM as a technological means of enforcement. They are not the same thing at all.

I'm not comparing copyright and DRM. I'm saying DRM is a consequence of copyright.

As you noted, technology is the only way rightsholders can effectively protect their property. Since the copyright industry is worth many billions of dollars, they have more than enough money and influence to make their DRM technology a reality. The computer industry is going to back them up. The result will be computers that obey them, not us. Computers that only run the software that they approve, software that does their bidding.

The source of this evil is copyright. There should be no imaginary property to protect in the first place.

I think the parent's point was that paying someone to copy and transfer bits of data from one computer to another is weird and impossible to fully control and enforce. Paying someone for the act of creation itself is reasonable. While the current system uses the former as a sort of proxy for the latter, that's not the only current system, and it comes with some really bad side-consequences, like ever-expanding copyright terms, corporations as gatekeepers to content (who often end up profiting far more than the actual creator), and DRM leading to forever-locked/disappearing creative works.

Are you at all involved with software development? How do you feel about people breaking the GPL?

I'm not arguing in favor of piracy, but isn't GPL anti copyright (copyleft)

Fair question. =) No, it's not.

"Copyleft licenses exist within the legal structure of copyrights. Despite what the name implies, copyleft isn't about abolishing copyrights. Rather, copyleft licenses are a subset of copyright licenses, and the goal is to restore freedom to users."

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copyleft-copyright-key-concept...

You are right, thanks for clarifying.

I asked that question as the GP made the case that breaking GPL is equivalent to pirating (breaking any other copyright). But GPL ensures a resource is always shareable and anyone who tries to break it would be limiting shareability of the resource, essentially it would be opposite of piracy.

If you use GPL software in non GPL code, you are still “pirating” the code and using it in a way that the person/group didn’t give you permission to use the license. This is no different than sharing any other copyrighted content. The copyright holder controls how the content is shared.

> Are you at all involved with software development?

I've been programming since I was about 13 years old. I am no longer a professional software developer though. I've released some works on my GitHub. My most recent contributions to free software: binary QR decoding for ZBar and a small program for configuring my laptop's backlit keyboard. I also reported a GPG bug and sent in a fix some time ago.

> How do you feel about people breaking the GPL?

It's pointless. People can use your software despite any terms and your only recourse is legal action. Seriously doubt individual developers will waste their time and money pursuing violators in court. Even the organizations dedicated to GPL violations won't take all cases. Violators in foreign countries might as well be untouchable, especially developing countries which have better things to do than police the use of imaginary property. The GPL is most useful to projects like the Linux kernel which have massive amounts of leverage over the companies that want to violate the license.

Like copyright, I don't think licenses in general should exist. The GPL was itself created in reaction to copyright protection being extended towards software. It depends on copyright in order to work.

The real value of the GPL is the hacker spirit it represents. I give you the source code and you send back any improvements you make. This core virtue is widely shared and respected by the developer community.

> binary QR decoding for ZBar

I just saw a video the other day about storing video games in QR codes where the poster submitted a patch for ZBar. Was that you?

Video games in QR codes? That's interesting. Do you have the link to the video? Is it this one?

https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/commit/5bc323849569a629aa0d1...

If so, then the patch he submitted builds upon my work! He fixed a line feed conversion bug that was present in Windows. I use Linux so I did not experience this issue.

I remember seeing that patch get merged but I didn't know about the whole video game context. This is amazing. I wrote the patch because I was trying to print a 4096 bit RSA secret key as a QR code. Awesome to see it getting used for something even more awesome.

Here are the links to my contributions and related pages:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/55

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/82

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=703234

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=710009

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Paperkey#Restore_the_se...

https://stackoverflow.com/a/60518608/512904

ZBar used to automatically convert binary data to text when decoding 8 bit QR codes, mangling the data in the process. My patch adds the option to disable that, enabling the data to be extracted without corruption.

I also added the one shot feature to the ZBar tools to make it easier to use in automated scripts that expect exactly one output:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/60

Looks like we have a real world application for tiny ELFs now!

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

Yes, that's the one!

Storing secret keys as QR codes is an interesting application as well. I remember reading on here about a CEO who printed out a database encryption key as a base64 string and then couldn't type it in correctly when it was needed to restore backups. A machine-readable format definitely seems the way to go.

Pirating GPL-licensed software is explicitly allowed by the GPL. That's kind of the whole point of the GPL, to ensure that that stays true.

That's more like the BSD/MIT licences. GPL goes beyond that, in particular requiring that if you distribute modifications you have made to someone else's GPL'd code then you must also distribute your own source code. It is a different kind of restriction on taking without giving back, and it too relies on copyright to be effective.

> GPL goes beyond that, in particular requiring that if you distribute modifications you have made to someone else's GPL'd code then you must also distribute your own source code.

> > That's kind of the whole point of the GPL, to ensure that that stays true [even of future uses of that code].

Distributing a copyrighted work in a mangled, unreadable format to impede and discourage people from exercising their rights (to share or modify it) is basically DRM, and the GPL is right to prohibit that.

(And yes, this would apply to, eg, Photoshop project files, although even more so than video game source code, I don't consider prefered editing forms for primarily artistic works to be a particularly high priority.)

Computing freedom is a hippie dream. The castle in the air of "open source" will come crashing down once courts and scholars realize that open source licenses are bare licenses under copyright law. As such, they a) are difficult to enforce; b) can be revoked at any time by the licensor, presenting considerable risk to anyone who uses software under such a license without having paid monetary consideration to the authors of such software.

Special circumstances applied in the Jacobsen v. Katzer and Artifex v. Hancom cases. The rulings in those cases do not generalize to open source licenses in general.

Even without that unfortunate legal wrinkle, the response by the industry has been to close down hardware platforms and transform their existing software into SaaS. In a few years, for instance, Macs will run only macOS -- enforced by hardware and the DMCA. I have no reason to believe PCs won't follow suit shortly thereafter.

By computing freedom, I mean the ability to run whatever software we want on our machines. I didn't mean it in the free software sense.

> Even without that unfortunate legal wrinkle, the response by the industry has been to close down hardware platforms and transform their existing software into SaaS. In a few years, for instance, Macs will run only macOS -- enforced by hardware and the DMCA. I have no reason to believe PCs won't follow suit shortly thereafter.

That's exactly what I mean. I don't want such a future. I want open platforms that aren't owned by the manufacturer. We have free software because programming is an accessible activity: all we really need is git, a text editor and a compiler. Hardware is different: we can't fabricate our own computers and factories cost billions of dollars.

Free software is meaningless if the hardware doesn't allow us to run it.

Indeed, and without free firmware and operating systems, the hardware is at risk of being locked down. The two concepts are linked.

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