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Comment by throwawayacc2 | Hacker News Reader

Let’s say there’s a hamburger restaurant. Now, this hamburger restaurant has an interesting business model. They way it works is, they give out burgers for free. They do that because they get money from lettuce producers to put lettuce in their burgers. It’s a pretty good model right? People get free burgers and lettuce producers get their lettuce in the peoples mouths.

I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?

And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.

So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?

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This is a pretty weird analogy, because I don't see what the lettuce producers are getting out of it. But ok, let's say that the government is strongly in favor of people eating more vegetables, and richly compensates lettuce producers for each leaf of their lettuce is eaten. The deal the burger producers have with the lettuce producers includes putting cameras in the restaurants, so money only changes hands when people actually do eat the lettuce. The government audits these logs, to ensure their subsidy is being spent effectively.

Then yes: in this contrived analogy by taking the burger but not eating the lettuce you're freeloading. The more people that do this, the less likely the restaurant is to continue being able to provide free food to anyone that wants it. And I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to have signs like "patrons who do not eat their vegetables will be asked to leave" and "strictly no takeout".

The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.

I suspect there's issue with the term "freeloading". It doesn't really make sense for someone to make a business model where they give me something for free and then say I'm freeloading when I take the free thing and don't provide something (attention, time, whatever you want to call it) in return.

There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.

The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.

That's reasonable! I wouldn't say someone who blocks ads (or doesn't eat lettuce) is breaking an agreement. But I do think by doing this you undermine a business model that is letting a lot of people read things (or eat burgers) for free, and that's making the world worse.

Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

> Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?

When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.

As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.

> rent for data that's otherwise freely available

That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?

I can admit that it is not necessarily rent-seeking (I've seen some cartoons from the 90s / 00s on streaming services, which were in mind when for that comment) but it still seems to me that it is a problem with the business model. It's the business owners' fault that they ran out of money and can't produce any more shows because they tried to make a broken model work especially if the reason they couldn't gather revenue is that people were simply able to bypass their attempts at doing so.

(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)

Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)

> ... that's otherwise freely available.

Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.

Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.

Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.

It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).

It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.

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