Hacker News Reader

Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

In general these days I have mixed feelings about piracy, mostly because a lot of people don't want to pay because "everything is very commercial and they only want money", yet a lot of the pirated content are incredibly commercial mainstream things (e.g. blockbusters). This leads me to the positive aspect of it: I recently remembered an old Canadian movie from my childhood, and wanted to watch it with my son, but despite so many streaming services, tough luck finding it legally. I bet I could find it within minutes on torrent.

So I would be happy if we were at least able to legally download things you can't really find "officially" because too few people care and nobody sells it.

View on HN

Another case I find myself grabbing pirated copies of movies is when I click play on and the best bitrate (once it decides to "automatically tune" to it on my symmetric gig fiber) makes me think the members of YIFY went to go work at Amazon to try and get 4k HDR encodes to fit on DVD-9s.

This! I would say that if there is no simple way to find commercial content (for the location of the potential customer!), the law should treat the case as if the copyright owner waived their right to the copyrighted material.

So if you ever offer a work for sale, you're obligated to either sell it forever, or have it given away?

I think of this more like: Just while you're not offering your work for sale in a country, then we all just agree as a society to look the other way as it's pirated. But you can end this get out of jail free card at any time by providing an official alternative.

Not doing this creates memory holes for artistic content. TV shows from decades ago with unclear rights ownership will be gone, disappeared.

Not just offer it for sale, but if you ever publish it. Once you've let something be part of the common culture, it belongs to the people.

What's the difference between offering it for sale and publishing something? That seems like an artificial distinction.

Plenty of things are widely published without charging money for them, and things are sometimes sold but privately to a limited audience (e.g. Kit Williams' artworks) which I wouldn't consider to be publication.

I don't see how it's unreasonable these days. You can just simply leave it up on Bandcamp, GOG, and whatever may emerge in the future as a video ownership platform (as opposed to video rental).

Not unreasonable? It forces people to engage in commerce whether they want to or not, and "but we want it!" doesn't seem like the kind of compelling public interest that could justify that. Beyond that, it's trivially easy to work around (ok, now my software costs $10M a copy.)

I think of society as in the best case providing good for the public, not simply as a vehicle for companies to extract money from people.

If a company creates something, that does not happen in a vacuum, it requires the support of a whole society of people to happen.

The value created should ideally be for the whole society to use.

If a company can't even be bothered to sell it, or goes out of business, then that work that the whole of society did, was wasted. The historical record, which belongs to everyone, becomes incomplete.

I don't think that's right and in my opinion they should then forgo their claim to it.

Our historical record should not be at the whim of bean counters.

Yes.

Yes, this is a huge positive. It serves as a kind of archiving enabler too.

I'm sure many years from now we'll be thankful that we can find 'obscure' movies and TV shows from the early 2000/10/20s etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com