Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

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so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible.

The only way to stop piracy is:

1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated

The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone will expect it for free). This is exactly what is starting to happen.

Back in 1999, there was no antipiracy technology, yet piracy was just as rampant as it is today. We have: Last.fm, Pandora, Youtube, Grooveshark, etc,etc. Yet, people still pirate music.

It's funny because back when Napster first started, everyone said that the artists weren't getting treated right, so that's why they were downloading music. Now that any artist can pretty music start a website with no record label, those reasons have changed.

I don't think it has anything to do with any of those reasons. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on something they can just as easily get for free.

This parallels many of the people protesting wall street: Just as investing in an education doesn't mean you are guaranteed a good job, investing your time and effort in software, music, and movies doesn't mean you are guaranteed a profit.

> Yet, people still pirate music.

Do they really?

I remember 15 years ago when a lot of my friends started building mp3 libraries, ripping the CDs they had, and downloaded huge amounts of music.

Now, none of my friends have their libraries anymore, or care about it at all. They use Spotify, or Last.fm, or something similar and never pirate music, because it's simply too much work to do it, compared to just searching for exactly what they want in some paid service.

People have spent billions of dollars buying music on iTunes. Its pretty obvious that people will pay for things if its more convenient than pirating it.

But piracy hasn't stopped or slowed down.

     Yet, people still pirate music.

I pirate music from time to time, because (1) I can't find the albums I want from my country on iTunes or similar and (2) wages are lower where I live, and these services are still too expensive. Both issues are fixable however.

It's also the case that some people will always pirate stuff -- but does it really matter when the market got a lot bigger? To me it's really not an issue of price -- BUT I do refuse paying for crappy content or for content that's too expensive relative to my monthly revenue.

The biggest problems with the movies/music industries for example is not piracy, but crappy content. For instance I go watch movies at my local movie theater, and I regret paying for 25% of all movies I'm seeing, even though I'm pretty selective about it. That's just sad.

    Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money 
    on something they can just as easily get for free.

This is true, but the MP3 file itself is not the only thing you're paying for when using iTunes or similar.

Other things would be convenience (searching for stuff on PirateBay is totally not fun), free online backup (100 GB on DropBox is $20 / month - and with my current needs, I would need 3 times that storage and constantly growing) and the insurance that you're buying quality.

You see, even if people prefer Free all the time, people also think that quality reflects directly in the price paid. That's why people still buy Nike shoes, even though there are hundreds of brands producing cheaper clones with reasonable quality.

And back to searching on PirateBay, I can't count the number of times I downloaded something, only to find that it was not what I wanted or that it was of poor quality. Sometimes whole hours would pass until I found something that I liked, or until I gave up.

And that's the thing -- some people will always pirate, but other people will prefer buying if it is more convenient. And yet other people have this feeling of accomplishment when rewarding authors that they like (me included) ... like 2 days ago I bought a copy of an ebook called "The Making of Prince of Persia", even though you can find the whole book in the author's blog.

I wish people would not downvote based on their own personal opinions.

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