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Comment by knz_ | Hacker News Reader

I pirate everything. Honestly, the only things I don't pirate are like 1-2 games a year that me and some friends end up playing together. For software I generally just run whatever FOSS thing I can find, and in the case of movies and music I have never spent a cent on them in my life. I've been pirating since I started using a computer.

The same rich people trying to sell predatory subscriptions and vendor lock-in are the same ones trying to raise my rent and food bill every year, so I have no incentive to give them money for pointless entertainment on top of that.

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It's not as if you're obligated to buy their products, therefore need to find a less expensive workaround. If you don't like the people producing them and think they're overpriced, play dwarf fortress or watch TV. There are some obviously valid reasons for pirating, but I don't understand this sense of entitlement.

TV aint free. Worst yet if the Funimation and others fully got their way with the claims they do I would not be able to watch the shows I did in Japan here in Europe. Not because funimation is showing them here and I dont want to pay for them but cause they own the US rights and will take down any online source with no european broadcaster sending them out.

Funny how you try to justify it. I also pirate, but I know I'm a thieving cheap bastard...

Many people have pirated; includes myself when I was a teenager in developing country. I don't pirate now as its worth neither risk nor time but I can't claim some weird moral high ground - it's a complex issue with nuances and circumstances.

But I still find it intriguing when I see rambling half baked internally self-contradictory attempts at moral justification - do you believe what you said there? Do you even know what you said there? Cause I'm having a hard time following - Food has inflation therefore I'll pirate movies even though they're pointless, and this is just and right?

It takes minimal amount of empathy and observation to notice hard work talented creative people put into "pointless entertainment", so just like I don't buy the notion that every pirate is evil sociopathic villain, so I don't buy notion that watching entertainment for free is inherent right and creators don't deserve any compensation ever. If anything, this type of incoherence and self righteousness feeds exactly the stereotype mpaa / riaa try to portray...

I agree, but would it be agreeable and right if one was to have a free but lower quality version (smaller screen, shortened game, program with fewer options) allowing eyeballs and consumers to best gauge a products quality and thereby validate paying for integral or physical product (licenced/dvd/etc) rather than have a moralistic black and white view (generally held) of pirating bad , paying good (I certainly don't mean you in this case and am just trying to point to a middle way..

You realize that actual people work on those things that you pirate, right? That those people also need to get paid so they can have food on the table? It's one thing to not buy any media at all, but it's contradictory to enjoy media produced by people and then not want to pay them. Their work isn't less valuable because it's related to media production instead of engineering or whatever.

"If I don't have to pay for it then their work was objectively unproductive. It's an inherent failure of market economics"

I feel I'm reading Deepak Chopra - individual words are fine and you'd swear sentence should make sense... But it doesn't, no matter how many times you read it.

Not paying for something makes it unproductive? And you don't feel there are easy trivial immediate counter-examples for your axiom with big-boy words?

I'm not sure what you've quoted, because that is -not- what I said.

People should be paid for their work. Pirating doesn't pay them for their work. Work includes art and media. I'm not sure how I can state this more simply.

I'm not sure why this is even a complicated topic. With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.

I quoted knz_. It may not show up for you because his is a dead comment now so it'll depend on your settings. Not sure why it looks I responded to you, feels we are on similar page.

> With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.

The thing is that making a copy of something digital is really really cheap compared to something physical. The difference between the cost of producing one copy of a software or music and a million is way lower than for a physical object.

I agree that it's not a great analogy. However, the fact that copying technically has a "zero" cost, doesn't mean that we can just ignore the time, money, and effort spent by the people making that media. It's not literal theft but it does hurt the artists/creators in the long run.

The problem with this argument is that most large studios treat their workforce like trash. Any surplus profit they make is going to the executives and shareholders. The developers will be used up and discarded regardless.

It's also funny that you're upset about the guy pirating software (lifetime economic impact in 10s of thousands of dollars) but not the games publishers themselves who regularly dodge taxes - in some cases paying effectively negative tax rates[1] (lifetime impacts in the 10ss of millions of dollars if not more).

[1] https://www.fanbyte.com/news/americans-paid-activision-blizz...

"most large studios treat their workforce like trash ... It's also funny that you're upset about the guy pirating software ... but not the games publishers themselves who regularly dodge taxes"

Where did I say I support publishers not paying their taxes or treating employees unfairly? Those are separate issues completely unrelated to the one we're discussing. (Obviously, I think everyone should pay taxes fairly and treat their employees fairly.)

Company A doing bad thing B does not mean we morally justify crime C. Either pay for the thing you -want, not need-, or don't if you don't support various actions or stances from the company. This also is based on the premise that all media comes from bad corporations, which is not true. Many artists these days can be supported directly, self publish, etc.

Also, I'm not "upset", nor am I looking at one singular individual. I am looking at this from a societal and long-term perspective of the long-term effects of people pirating media.

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