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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

Gabe Newell makes good points. Piracy is about price, but it's not just price. Piracy for me has been about cost / value decisions:

  Useful software for < $50 on the App store? Buy.
  Useful iPhone app for < $10? buy
  Useful software I use rarely for $800 (Adobe CS5.5)? Pirate
  Drm free music album for $10? buy
  Movie rental I can't find on iTunes for < $5? Pirate
  TV Show season on-demand without commercials? Netflix, or Pirate

Any time it's easier and relatively inexpensive to buy, I'll do that. Any time it's a pain to buy, obscenely expensive or a worse experience, I'll pirate.

I don't justify that behavior, but I've noticed I buy when it's easier, and I pirate when it's easier.

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I'm pro pirating RIAA artist music, even if it's more difficult than buying through iTunes, since money paid to RIAA artists funds the RIAA (and corrupt artists like Lars).

I sort of feel the same way about the MPAA, but they were less obnoxious in the late 1990s/early 2000s (mainly due to technology not allowing video piracy to the same extent).

I also think all Disney content should be pirated as much as possible, due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

Why pirate though instead of simply not buying?

I also don't consume much, but encourage others to not buy, and if giving a bunch of 1080p rips or FLACs is what it takes to convince them, ...

Why not buy instead of simply pirating? If you don't care about the industry and would prefer in the long run to see it die always, what's the difference?

Pirating still serves as free advertising for the labels, and gets people angry at you.

This is the truly principled stand -- not because of any particular squeamishness about "piracy", but because piracy actually helps the RIAA labels to a significant degree by serving as free advertising.

Because you want the product but don't want to support evil corporations?

Pirating Disney's works doesn't help anything much. It doesn't overcome the problem of not being able to use Disney works as the basis of new, derived works to expand and enrich our culture, which is the real loss where Disney films still being under copyright dozens of years later comes into play. I mean, if Sleeping Beauty was never made, the difference from a world where we aren't allowed to do anything interesting with it as inspiration for further works is not huge -- but the difference between living in that world where it exists but we can't really touch it and a world where we can create derived works to produce enduring culturally enriching works is tremendous.

Still . . . if people are going to acquire it anyway, it's better if they're not giving money to Disney eighty years after it was created thanks to copyright extension robbing us of our culture.

How do you know if music is RIAA music? (That could be a useful web service.)

Check the publishing record label for the song, album, or band in question, then check that against the list of RIAA labels (I seem to recall finding such lists in simple, textual form). There's also RIAA Radar:

http://www.riaaradar.com/

Do you pirate a Disney movie, then contact each and every person in the credits to pay them for their work, while avoiding giving money to the Disney corporation?

If you're not, you're just trying to justify your intellectual theft.

They were already paid for their work, by Disney.

Very few credited contributors are going to have points on the gross of a Disney movie, especially not the animated ones.

In addition to blasdel's excellent point, there's the simple fact that if the copyright extension act were not passed it would have entered the public domain (where it belongs so long after the fact), and there'd be no legal infrastructure for enforced revenue generation and royalty distribution, anyway.

. . . but yeah, a gaffer doesn't get royalties for the move on whose set he worked. You seem remarkably naive about how this stuff works.

Another big factor for me is knowing that my money is going directly into the pocket of the creator, or at least someone providing obvious value, instead of some opportunistic middleman. The former feels completely different than the latter -- like I am helping to make the world turn rather than just losing money to the void.

No clue on why you are getting downvoted. I make a point to only buy things from musicians where they get most of the money.

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