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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear your best guess/rationalization for how nothing is being taken.

I'm an app developer. I implemented all of the tricks I know to make it as difficult as it gets for the paid versions of my apps to be pirated. And I also try to detect if the user is using adblockers to make so that they can't use my free apps without seeing the ads. But I'm not at all against the user being able to bypass my security measures. Nobody is stealing from me by not GIVING ME MONEY THEY OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN ME. I'm not entitled to anything. If someone has the knowledge to bypass my security tricks, good on him. He have one less bill to pay. I grew up very poor, and I still live on a 3rd world country. I do not remember to have paid for any software in my life, so I won't be a hypocrite. To compare making a copy of an intangible thing to stealing something "real", like a cookie from someone elses jar is absurd. If 10 million people make 100 million copies of one of my apps, I'm not being robbed of anything. If one guy takes for himself an Iphone I bought yesterday, he is in fact robbing me of my resources. Not earning possible hypothetical future income does not equate to stealing realized gains of the past. Copyright law as it stands today is an incongruent reliq of a time when technology did not allow for things to have no associated costs of reproduction.

These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie.

One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.

> When I steal a movie on a torrent site

Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do?

Remember that I didn't mention anything about economic loss.

You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone.

Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics.

The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.

You're absolutely right- this is an ethical issue. Perhaps it's a moral imperative to not pay massive conglomerates for a "license" to view content, or perhaps it's just a good idea to not support the privatization of culture. Personally, I won't judge you if you decide to pay off Disney to stay out of legal trouble, but...you know you're doing something wrong, right? Same if you're supporting Spotify's exploitative business model, even if you try to justify it by pointing at the scraps actual artists get.

Oh, you mean you're trying to say unauthorized copying is unethical? Oh, darn it, scratch that. Sorry!

> Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing?

People have said it better than me, but in short: Disney and friends have legally stolen public domain from all of us and erected a barrier between us and our human right to access to our culture. I therefore consider it my moral right to take back what should be mine - I may not have the means to buy the laws that would make it legal, but I have the technical means to do it and therefore I do.

So yes, I consider it the right thing to do. Civil disobedience, if you will.

So you only pirate Disney?

Not the person you were responding to, but -

I don't really consume TV or movies.

I do listen to music, and lots of it. I have a YouTube Red subscription (or whatever Google has decided to rename it this week), mostly for supporting small creators on Youtube (when they don't have a Patreon / I don't watch enough of their stuff to fit them in on Patreon). So basically all music from major labels I listen to, I do through Youtube (or Youtube Music, when I remember to open the right app up). But that's a small fraction of my listening habits.

Mostly I like stuff from small, independent artists - a lot of which I've discovered through Youtube, and a lot of those Youtube videos were probably copyright infringement (unauthorized uploads). If I listen to something more than a few times, I buy it on Bandcamp- last month I spent over $100 on Bandcamp purchases.

For creators I really love, as mentioned earlier, I fund them directly on Patreon. This adds up to over another $100/month.

If I dropped the YouTube Red subscription - which is, due to their comically low revenue share, practically indistinguishable from piracy for artists in economic terms - I don't think I'd be in a meaningfully different position, ethically, if I chose to continue consuming music from major labels without a license.

On the other hand, if I stopped buying things on Bandcamp and instead listened to music from small artists through YouTube Red, I'd feel awful, and I'd consider that to be rather unethical, even though I'd have a license.

If you weren't going to buy it anyway, yes it's absolutely the right thing to do. Your utility increases, nobody elses decreases. Total utility increases therefore it is ethical.

As long as fairness has no utility for anyone.

I can't figure out what you mean here - could you explain more about what fairness has to do with this?

Even if we could agree on what constitutes fairness wherein exactly lies the utility value of fairness?

Scenario A) 5000 people paid and enjoyed it

Scenario B) 4500 people paid and enjoyed it 50000 people enjoyed it without paying.

We can pretend that the percentage lost is equally taken from all people that participated in the production but it beggars belief to imagine bobby the grip got paid less because you pirated Indiana Jones. The reality is that the funds earned from the creative efforts aren't divided like friends sharing a Pizza gains and losses overwhelmingly hit the pockets of those whose interests in the matter are directorial or financial.

Ultimately creative work already enjoy such a ridiculously slanted treatment with insane punishments, public resources invested in policing, and terms that perfect enforcement would yield such a very small increase in utility for companies focused on creative work and much less for those actually engaged in it that it isn't worth the decrease in utility gained by more free distribution of creative works.

Fuck fairness if it results in a net negative utility for society I'm not interested in promoting a schoolyard notion of fairness at the expense of society.

>Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do?

Some philosophers (like Max Stirner) would argue that not only are those questions irrelevant, but that their whole basis (morality and right) are categories which become real and exert their influence only due to our own reification of them. That is to say, to someone unconvinced of morality (and in particular what other people say about morality), and further unconvinced by the legitimacy of the state and its opposition to the individual, the questions would be laughable if only it weren't so tragic that to many they extert their control over us and we let them.

What if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee. Nobody has "lost" anything, as in your cookie jar example. Does that make it OK?

I hope that you would agree that if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee, then it's something very, very different from theft?

Like, people can argue if it's as bad as theft or not as bad than theft (I would definitely argue that it's substantially less bad than theft, but I know that some people would disagree), but no matter what, such an action is not theft, it's something else.

"something else?" You can't come up with an alternative name for it because it is, in fact, theft of services.

Replace "movie theater" with Disneyland. Is it not theft to sneak into Disneyland without purchasing a ticket, even on its slowest day of the year?

I have actually long-wondered how theaters would fare if they pro-rated seats based on demand. Charging just a dollar or two for a Tuesday matinee seat otherwise expected to be empty would certainly drive ticket sales, and with them concession sales. What does the theater have to lose?

Totally agree that matinee prices are not low enough to match demand. I defended the MoviePass business model vigorously, see my comment history. (with that said, they do have to reimburse studios for each ticket sold, so the theater doesn't have full discretion)

But that's totally irrelevant to this conversation. If the theater is charging $5, or $2, you still can't just sneak in the back door without paying.

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