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Comment by noodle | Hacker News Reader

no, silly, piracy is not theft. piracy is piracy, its not a theft or not theft issue, its a different animal.

the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop.

so, piracy does not steal income.

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OK, accepting your made-up figure of 90%, what about the other 10% who would pay for the item they're pirating?

The simple fact that you can divide the users downloading copyrighted material into multiple groups would mean that the term 'piracy' is a broader term.

it's like piracy is the main subject and theft or non-theft piracy would be the stubs.

          PIRACY
         /      \
  LOST REVENUE  NO LOST REVENUE
        |               |
      THEFT          NOT THEFT

Piracy is not theft. This is one of those...a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square...type of deals, or maybe not.

You're inappropriately focusing on revenue and not access. Suppose I had a goose that laid golden eggs /ad infinitum/. I have infinite net worth, but if you take one of my eggs, you now have access to value which you otherwise wouldn't have had. Just because your theft didn't impact my revenue it doesn't follow that you didn't steal.

IP is actually quite similar. Suppose I wrote a book (.pdf) that contains important business information about the future of the oil market. I obtained this information at great personal cost. Your accessing that information doesn't remove that information from me, but it's still stealing access to information you otherwise wouldn't have had.

Saying, "But I wasn't going to buy your crappy business book anyway!" doesn't change the fact that you've still taken information that doesn't belong to you.

So you think that the definition of theft requires lost revenue?

Would you accept that in end cases?

Say you steal a toy from a child that has piles of em? They don't even notice. Not theft?

i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species.

and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.

I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".

The 10% is not spread across every item of the whole. 90% of the time, there is no lost income because there was never any potential to begin with.

Piracy steals income infrequently at best.

I think you guys are going down the wrong path here.

It doesn't matter (to the status of piracy) whether or not piracy is harmful or any other consequences. If 90% of shoplifters get hit with a sudden case of Dostoevsky & slip envelopes under doors resulting in 120% ... It would still be theft. Just like assault is still assault if they sober up & buy you an icecream.

I'm not saying piracy is theft. It is different enough to warrant its own word (& its own treatment). 'Preventing revenue' is not a reasonable explanation. Standing outside a store and yelling like a madman scaring away customers is also preventing (stealing?) revenue.

In some cases, I think that piracy is helpful to companies (photoshop might be an example) in others it's harmful. But that's besides the point. You can invoke that in a wider discussion of how laws should be made or you may be making a moral assertion that rights & such aren't important, only consequences. But that's not really our system (or most people's understanding).

Anyway this discussion is 90% semantics. It's only important to propaganda campaigns (saying stealing is more effective then saying violating copyright).

90% of the time, there is no lost income because there was never any potential to begin with.

You seem to be making an argument about how rates of piracy are distributed across different products. How does this make the effects of piracy any less harmful?

thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income.

what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income

I want to remind readers that this 10% (or <=10%, as you just phrased it) is a made-up figure.

what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

If you backed up that assertion with hard evidence, and demonstrated that this effect outweighs the loss companies sustain from piracy, I'd take you more seriously.

Are you claiming that these companies overall make more money because of piracy? Software and media companies are diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of their budgets into anti-piracy measures. If piracy didn't drain their profits by at least the aforementioned hundreds of millions of dollars, why on earth would they throw away so much money into something that reduces their bottom line (and annoys me and other consumers, therefore making us less likely to buy their products)? These companies might be capitalistic, greedy and [insert adjective here], but they're not dumb. Follow the money.

i think the claim i'm making is that piracy is a wash. some people who otherwise would purchase something now won't, and some people who otherwise wouldn't have now will.

canadian governmental study on music piracy:

http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/pubs/music_industry/tdm_e.cfm

When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases. The study estimates that one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.

When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population), there is no direct relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchases in Canada. According to the study authors, the analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.

I'll read that paper when I have a chance.

And adding to that, the piracy can become a very valuable form of marketing, where the kids pirate it for school and buy it for business, thus possibly increasing your net income.

I downloaded The Man From Earth and liked it so much I recommended it to a lot of people who had never heard of it. They mostly bought or rented the DVD.

Get a new business model. Trying to 'sell' software is like trying to hug water.

This is exactly the reason any software I develop in my spare time I'd release as an open source project.

I think open source also has a more attractive price tag too, but maybe I might consider selling support somewhere down the line...

Unless you're Apple

More like; Unless you restrict the use of a piece of software to a highly marketed and desired piece of hardware.

Piracy most certainly steals income, it's just not 100%. If 10% of people who pirated a song would have purchased it for $1, then each pirate is effectively stealing 10 cents. Just because it's not 1:1 doesn't mean it isn't a loss of revenue.

Do you have some evidence for that claim?

Because in Canada here we allow downloading music as part of fair use like listening to the radio. The artist gains exposure from music downloads which could increase your sales.

So what if this 'stealing' was causes 10% of the users to not buy the music, but 20% of the user to buy the music they would have been otherwise unaware of.

You pay 'royalties' on anything that can record music in Canada, which is about a BAJILLION times worse than what the RIAA is doing here. In Canada, the fee on mp3 players (or audio cassette tapes) affects everyone, even if I didn't want 'free' access to music in the first place.

It's also illegal in Canada to upload or share music if you don't have the rights to do so , so at least theoretically you're downloading that music because the artist/label wants you to.

(( http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39118537,0... ))

Good point here. In case of Adobe and Microsoft piracy actually creates income.

If we didn't have pirated MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite folks would improve openoffice.org and the GIMP/Scribus/Inkscape instead and these monopolies would die and lose everything.

Piracy actually helps software monopolies to be de facto standards and kills all alternatives (or keeps alternatives unusable).

Thus software piracy "steals" only our own freedom.

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