Ask HN: Why Is HN Pro-Piracy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Is HN Pro-Piracy?

13 pointsmcwhy15 comments

Based on recent top stories and their comments of people bragging the best ways to share their ill-gotten TBs, HN seems pro-piracy. Which is a strange position to have for knowledge workers whos main output is also intellectual property that is stolen constantly by others.

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Hacker news has a lot of "hackers" (older meaning of the word) participating in the discussions. Hackers are usually pro-free information flow on the private level.

So it doesn't really surprise me.

The Internet interprets censorship as breakage and routes around it.

If your company doesn't allow me to pay for your content because of some inane corporate dealings, I will find a way to get my content anyway.

The world is global now, and it's impossible to be a part of a fandom if you cant access the content.

Case in point: HarmonQuest[0]. It was on some really weird tiny channels in US and Canada, neither allowed anyone from outside of NA to even give them money to see it. -> Yarr.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5905038/

This is hacker news, not boot licking statist news.

It’s not a strange position, infact, I would say going on a hacker board and moralizing is a strange position. Hackers just want information to be free.

The "hacker" ethos and the phreaker mindset it descends from have always been generally pro-piracy. Not all of us are 'knowledge workers', either.

As a writer, I must say that this always makes me feel sad. If I complain about piracy, I get modded down. It's pretty clear to me that a few people with the power mod down any anti-piracy sentiment. I'm almost certainly going to get modded down now.

Many of the others have posted some good explanations that tie the pro-piracy people to the idea that information wants to be free. In other words, asking people to pay is somehow kind of equivalent to censorship.

It's worth noting that the pro-piracy vibe is only for pirating the work of writers, musicians or movie makers. Not pirating software. If someone suggests simply stealing someone else's code -- or even just ignoring an open source license -- people jump all over that person. The programmers stick together. But the artists are in another tribe so it's okay to rip them off.

On the other hand my code is paid by the hour and belongs to my employer, whereas books, music recordings and movies have a 95 year long copyright enforced by law. I know which tribe is ripping off the other.

The lawyer one?

Uh, your code is protected by the same copyright law as books, music recordings and movies. The only reason the GPL, for instance, has any teeth is because of copyright law.

If there's no copyright, anyone can steal your employer's code and then your employer won't have money to pay you by the hour.

Mostly out of practicality. Gone are the days of safety running binary warez. (Code) [malware]. Too many malcode and viruses.

Data on the other hand, is far less risky, as malicious content would need to exploit the file format parser, etc which is much harder than Trojan using a binary. You probably are not getting malware from mp3s.

For majority of the companies I worked, the only copyrightable content - at code itself - was rarely the main driver of success (or failure), it was nearly always some combination of luck, culture and business strategy.

> a strange position to have for knowledge workers whos main output is also intellectual property that is stolen constantly by others.

It's not that strange for folks who consider the value of even significant chunks of code or distributed software to be close to zero. Combine that with the lack of value of copy protection at its significant and it makes total sense why developers may have a weak stance on piracy.

I think at the end of the day people just don't care.

We lived through a lot of the controversial bullshit tactics of the RIAA. Remember when they sent out requests for DRM settlements en masse, threatening to take people to court if they didn't cough up a few thousand (regardless of whether they actually did download copyright material)?

as a knowledge worker myself i wouldn't mind people using it privately (not presenting it as their work or building a business around it)

I don’t mind e-books but other media like movies and music are a bit iffy. Many here are Aaron Swartz types who want information to be free and not gatekeeped or paywalled. Whether free access is ‘wrong’ is a tricky subject. It’s my understanding the Internet should not stop knowledge seeking behaviour and honour it instead.

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