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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to me how communities form ideas around this. While “piracy is not theft”, you’ll see people talk about how some repost “stole my content” with lots of support for the supposed victim.

Simultaneously, some people will say that they are contributing by using a product and telling their friends while others will post on /r/choosingbeggars to mock the exposure argument.

This implies we are somewhat short of universal agreement on this subject: perhaps far enough that we cannot determine that just because “piracy is not theft”, it does not mean it is acceptable.

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There's a difference between copying for personal use and distributing to others against payment of any type. Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder.

Piracy not being theft only applies if you would have _never_ bought the product in the first place, had it not been free to copy.

If you redistribute some content on youtube you are "stealing" eyeballs and ad money from the original creator.

> Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder.

This argument can get muddy because of parties that are involved between the creator and the consumer, like record companies. Where sometimes the original creator does not see any money (or an unfair low amount) and all the intermediates reap the most profit for basically sitting on an acquired IP or copyright.

I'd love to give money to a original creator for their effort in creating their art to support them to create more, but I hate to fuel an industry that is actively fighting creation and innovation by lobbying for extended copyright and artificially fragmenting supply and hindering paying users with DRM (digital restrictions management).

By that argument, libraries and resellers are "stealing".

It's only stealing if the person who's being stolen from no longer has something they used to have. Potential things can't be stolen.

You can argue that piracy is wrong if you please but you can't argue its theft in the same way you can't argue murder is rape its a category error not a judgement on its moral acceptability.

"Stealing" eyeballs is another ethical misjudgment as you have no moral right to someone else's attention even wherein you have an ethical/legal argument.

They haven't stolen eyeballs they have violated your legal right to authorize copies according to copyright law. This isn't just a semantic argument. Misidentifying the source of the ethical issue leads one to nonsensical conclusions.

I think it's important to talk about the difference between interpersonal violations ("rudeness") and legal protections ("crime").

The former really is whatever people feel it is - notch can feel any way he wants about how people get minecraft! He could feel it was rude if people didn't send him extra money. We all get to decide for ourselves how we feel about his feelings and we can impose whatever social penalties we want on people for how they are acting. The legal system doesn't need to come into it.

The latter should (imo) be based on a theory of an information ecosystem. What rights do creators need in order to be able to make fair agreements with others? How do we draw the line between new works that are "derivative" v.s. "inspired by"? Obviously people will have feelings about these things too! But at the end of the day how people feel about the law doesn't impact the proper administration of the law as-it-is-currently-written, though feelings will probably influence how laws are changed in the future (after all, we're talking about how we feel about laws right now!).

Isn't this just plagiarism? No one is downloading Photoshop and saying they created it (probably lol).

To me, there is a moral distinction between two kinds of infringement, and I think most of the community will broadly feel the same way.

On the one hand, you have filesharing-esque infringement. This is typically indicative either of social norms that are prohibited by DRM (e.g., loaning things you own to other people), or of demand in a market segment that the copyright owner is uninterested in providing (e.g., digital downloads, demo software). In either case, it is pretty strictly a matter of personal consumption and it often doesn't reflect a lost sale (and in many cases, it can create more sales later on).

The other kind is reflected in bootleg copies, or even outright plagiarism. In this case, the people making these copies are seeking to directly profit off of it (note that this isn't restricted to monetary profit), and they are doing so without any recompense or sometimes even acknowledgement to the original owner. It's fundamentally dishonest.

I see no issue with not calling the first kind of piracy theft but referring to the second kind as such.

A bootleg of a music show done in your city gets created. It get's passed on to friends who love it. Someone sells a copy to a friend of a friend.

There is profitting off from the bootleg. There is a benefit to the orginal band (new fans to buy official releases). The world is better off (think of how many bootleg Dylan recordings wouldn't exist, lost to time)

Things can start off as #1 and move into #2 but it doesn't have to be negative.

The problem is that both forms are treated identically by law, at least in the United States. You can be charged additionally for profiting from piracy but not profiting or not taking credit and mere distribution does not absolve you of the crime. The stakes are always higher when there's a literal loss of liberty hanging as a sword of Damocles and because the terms of protection tends to be arbitrary and punitive in nature, philosophical nuance gives way to legalistic absolutism in applying absolute consequences to potentially speculative harm. As long as the law exists and can be enforced in a way that makes no distinction between the two, anyone who may be affected by its reach must at least put that interpretation first in doing the cost/benefit analysis before more subjective aspects can even be discussed.

Neither is theft and protecting copyright is only justified if society experiences a net positive from enforcing copyright. There is no inherent moral right for a certain pattern of bits to belong to anyone. If you own a handful of quarters and flip them from Heads Heads Tails to Tails Heads Heads you don't inherently have a moral duty to pay me because I registered that particular combo.

If copyright is justifiable which I think is by no means settled those who benefit from the net positive nature of the system have a moral duty to support it.

If you don't believe copyright is a net benefit then all that's left is the legal matter like a speed limit. You go from having a legal motivation to a desire not to be punished. Have you ever felt moral qualms about going faster than the posted speed limit when it was excessively low?

Small wonder if people disagree on the ethics.

If you can wrap SQLite as close-source and sell it for a price, great, go ahead and do that. Because it is public domain, there is no restrictions, and it could be a good thing even it doesn't contribute back to the original author.

The other controversy around Fat Fritz 2 and Stockfish is a clear cut though. You wrap around Stockfish and sell it, which in itself is fine. The argument on why that practice is not OK is not about the harm to the original author (Stockfish) but to the users.

Fat Fritz 2's practice (of hiding itself as a Stockfish variant) stripped the user's right to know there are free-alternative.s By depriving that knowledge, their users will not make the best choice they can make, and that is a net loss (you can make the argument that the price user pay is what the market exploits the information asymmetry, therefore, it helps to create "efficient" market, but ...).

OTOH, if you can display both the free alternative and the paid version, successfully at selling the paid version. Even without any of that come back to the original author, it is a net gain in exposure. The society at large can also benefit (potentially encourage more derived work, and more knowledge sharing besides the original authors etc.).

>Interesting to me how communities form ideas around this. While “piracy is not theft”, you’ll see people talk about how some repost “stole my content” with lots of support for the supposed victim.

You're conflating piracy with plagiarism. Usually when someone says "they stole my content", they mean "they reposted it without giving credit and after removing any watermarks", which is squarely in the latter camp.

When I’m buying a service I want it to cost as little as possible. When I’m working for pay, I want to get paid as much as I think I’m worth.

How someone feels about the impact of piracy on Taylor Swift, and how they feel about getting credit and payment for their own intellectual work, might vary similarly. It’s not inconsistent from their perspective.

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