Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

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"The price isn't being destabilized. The reproduction cost of digital goods IS zero."

It was never about the reproduction, it's about the original and the "value" to the user. If they know they can get it for free, they will download it for free. How is this not destabilizing?

Currency is just ink and paper and pretty much costs nothing to reproduce, yet it has a value.

"Piracy is running rampant because the laws have been manipulated and skewed in favor of the content generators so their work get all the protections but no longer ever fall into the public domain."

Right, because people that are downloading the latest Lady Ga Ga album are doing so because of these laws. Why can't people admit that they are selfish and just don't want to spend their own money because they know they can get it for free?

"The collective public thus no longer have incentive to follow copyright laws and have quite a bit of incentive to violate and disregard them as totally and as quickly as possible."

Piracy is running rampant because:

1) The Internet is now mainstream and it's very easy to tell mass amounts of people how to download something for free. 2) The risk involved with being caught for pirated materials is almost non-existent.

It's funny because when the discussion is about open source and the GNU license, opinions quickly change. Using software against the spirit of the license is "theft" and shouldn't be allowed. Even though it does nothing to harm the original content creator (the original open source work is still there and open, you just don't get the changes).

Months ago when there were discussions about the Thesis wordpress theme, there was nearly a witch hunt on HN. This is why it's difficult to take any of these discussions seriously. It's all about politics and has nothing to do with freedom or rights.

Both currency and 'intellectual property' only have value because they are backed by the government. Currency is very hard to reproduce without a substantial investment and has a lot less anonymity when being used. IP, on the other hand, can be redistributed in mass with a 5 year old computer you pull out of a dumpster almost completely anonymously. Piracy just isn't going to go away without public sympathy to the cause. Its like why everyone throws a fit when you violate an OSS license but actively encourages downloading a track from the latest pop artist. The public receives value from the one and has it extracted from them by the other. People are smart and can tell when they are getting screwed even if they cant sufficiently articulate how its being done.

In my opinion the only feasible way to fix the system is to bring copyright duration back to a reasonable time period, like maybe 10 years or so, with a way to extend that duration for high value properties. One way would be to declare value on that particular property, paying property tax on that value, and limiting the liability of infringement damages to that declared value.

I'm not saying that piracy would go away totally at that point, but certainly more legitimate business models would emerge and even illegitimate ones would make the transition to reduce risk. Cost of enforcement would also go down as the volume of infringements decreased and those resources could be concentrated and directed along with a greater public support and sympathy. If the public can actually see that they get value out of protecting copyrights they will. If not they wont. I have zero incentive to protect the latest pop artists music if it will never go out of copyright in my life time, but if see that I can do whatever I want with it in 10 years, then yeah, I'd stick up for them and so would a lot of others.

The big label/studio/publisher companies dug themselves into this mess with a money grab and pretty much lost all sympathy from everyone that they cant buy off. Their only way out of this is to either be more open with their content or go back to fair laws. Other wise, the rest of us will go on without them. It also comes down to culture. Like it or not, music, movies, books, games, software, or whatever are our culture. You just cant reasonably expect people to not not have access to their culture forever. Its fair to have to pay for the latest and greatest, but as it is now, there is pretty much zero free access to anything since 1927 and that system just doesn't work. Now with technology, people just circumvent the unfair system like they should.

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