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Comment by earbitscom | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand this mindset.

If one author wants to make the "new market" work for them by giving things away or taking donations, they can do that. If that's the market you like to shop in, then donate or take freely.

But if another author wants you to pay a specific price for their work when you want a copy, and you don't like the price, then you let them know that by not getting a copy. If your reason for not paying is because you don't like their publisher, then you let them know by not getting a copy. Lo and behold, the market will work itself out.

Where does the mindset come from that you're still entitled to those things you're not willing to pay for? Or that your right to have them is more important than the rights of the people who made them? This is to say nothing about overreaching solutions - this guy is saying who cares about the particular solution, any one of them will require me to pay for things I want!

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Ideas and the work of the mind are in the public domain; they belong to the public. If you come up with an original idea, even if this original idea cost you a year's work, this original idea that you and you alone built, belongs to everyone.

Now, in order to encourage people to work on original ideas, it was decided to give to authors a right to their own work, for a limited time.

This "right" is taken from the public domain (ie, the public). The justification is that by helping struggling authors, it lets them coming up with more original ideas, and therefore benefits the public.

The deal is this: the public gives a piece of their own property to authors, in exchange for more work from those same authors.

This system has grown out of proportion with its original intents. (The minute dead authors could earn anything from copyright, the system should have been considered broken).

So, although it's currently illegal, and I don't approve of "piracy", it's not illegitimate to consider that if someone says something, I have a right to know what they're saying (especially if that doesn't cost them anything to let me hear it).

You could really turn your proposition the other way around: if someone doesn't want non-paying readers to read what they write, then they should refrain from writing anything.

> The minute dead authors could earn anything from copyright, the system should have been considered broken

The system was created to encourage people to invest in the creation of new ideas and products. It's not always just an investment of time, which means you have to make it property that can be owned, traded and sold, with a known term. In your system where copyright dies with the author, the interests of others who might invest in a project or stand to gain from it (like a creator's children) are not looked after. By this mindset, everything Steve Jobs helped to create would now be free for "the public" to do with as they wish, and I imagine a lot of people would have stopped funding Steve's ideas when they found out he was sick.

> You could really turn your proposition the other way around: if someone doesn't want non-paying readers to read what they write, then they should refrain from writing anything.

I could, but it makes no sense to me to tell people who want to be compensated for making something valuable to stop doing it so that we can make whatever remaining works there are public domain.

> it makes no sense to me to tell people who want to be compensated for making something valuable to stop doing it so that we can make whatever remaining works there are public domain

It would be an interesting experiment, but I don't think people would stop putting out original ideas if they were to stop being compensated for it. People produce original ideas and original works of art because that's what they do, not because they hope to become very rich doing so. (And it could be argued that the best works of mankind have been produced before copyright was invented.)

The point of copyright was to prevent authors from starving; I think we're well past that point.

(There's a secondary argument in favor of copyright that's often aired by movie studios and the like, that it costs a lot of money to produce works of art, and that if there were no copyright then there would be no economic rationale to create new things.

I think that argument is flawed in principle ("so what? do we need expensive works of art so badly that we're prepared to alienate our freedom for having them?"), but more interestingly, it's also becoming false in practice: it used to cost a lot of money to produce a music album, or even simply to print a book; it will eventually be cheap to produce a movie.)

My general point is that copyright was an interesting idea that has gone much too far; we're not getting our money's worth and we should push back (i.e., make it much shorter).

> My general point is that copyright was an interesting idea that has gone much too far; we're not getting our money's worth and we should push back (i.e., make it much shorter).

That's a fair point, and one that I agree with, but it is a compromise: if there were no legal protection for "intellectual property", the only people who could afford to produce it would be independently wealthy "amateurs". I'm not sure that that is an optimal state of affairs either.

> In your system where copyright dies with the author, the interests of others who might invest in a project or stand to gain from it (like a creator's children) are not looked after.

This is the problem, I think. If a product requires investors, then I can accept that their interests should be looked after. Not for the ridiculous term that copyright currently allows, but it is reasonable that their protection should not be strictly limited to the life of the author.

However, the current system goes to great lengths to protect the interests of people merely because they have something to gain, not because they actively contributed anything. If I make cars for a living, I don't expect or demand that my children continue to receive a royalty for each mile driven in one of my cars after i die (or just retire). They are taken care of through my estate, insurance etc, not by perverting the market.

I don't think author's children are inherently more deserving of social protections than anyone else. Jk Rowling's kids would be just fine if copyright lasted only twenty years. If they want a secure income after that, they should be able to do some productive work of their own.

> I don't think author's children are inherently more deserving of social protections than anyone else. Jk Rowling's kids would be just fine if copyright lasted only twenty years. If they want a secure income after that, they should be able to do some productive work of their own.

You could say the same about any kid who inherits wealth, and while you might be right, this just encourages people to focus on short term wealth creation, which also has implications for society.

> You could say the same about any kid who inherits wealth

No, you couldn't. If your dad is a car salesman and makes a fortune, you can inherit his wealth, but not his recurring revenue (once he's dead he's not selling cars anymore).

Harry Potter books will continue to earn money for their author's descendants after her death, in addition to all the money they earned for the author directly (and which will have been inherited by her kids). That's a unique feature of intellectual property.

That's exactly the point. Why do we want to let one person pass the value of what they've done along to their children and not another? One man sells a car and generates $1000 in value for his family, he dies, they get it. Another writes a novel, dies 3 weeks before it's published, it is a masterpiece, but his family doesn't earn a dime. Sounds pretty lame.

It sounds lame, but it in no way reflects reality, so i don't understand what your point is. Under the current system, the recently deceased authors book would earn royalties for his estate for 75 years. Grand children he's never met will benefit financially from his work. We grant them a monopoly, and get no social benefit. This is a perversion of the intent of copyright, which was to promote more creative work.

Simple inheritance is categorically different. Your inheriting money from your family has no negative impact on others. But if you inherit an intellectual monopoly, it is taking something away from the public good for no benefit. That may be acceptable for a reasonably limited term. But how anyone can imagine a copyright term that extends across multiple generations is reasonable is beyond me.

it's not illegitimate to consider that if someone says something, I have a right to know what they're saying

How do you feel about privacy?

? I'm not talking about privacy here; if I made you think I wanted to know everything that was being said in the privacy of one's home then I didn't make myself clear and I'm sorry.

I'm talking about contributions to the public debate. If someone wants to contribute to the public debate, then that contribution should be available to all -- and the fact that it's available to all should be rewarding enough to the contributor.

You may find this to be an extreme position; when looking at what copyright has become, I think it's useful to consider the other end of the spectrum (at least as a thought experiment).

You're talking about the control of information, of which privacy is just another facet. Hence I asked. But you also seem to be treating copyright (rights) and publication (intentions) as synonymous, which is confusing.

Suppose I create a film. I screen the film in the privacy of my own home to anybody that gives me a hug. One day, somebody brings a video camera. They record the whole thing and puts it on the Internet for all to see.

At what point would you say my actions indicated a desire to contribute to the public debate?

The US Copyright Law comes to the rescue; it defines public performance thusly:

> To perform or display a work “publicly” means (...) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered

See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf, middle of page 5.

"Any place open to the public" includes your home if anyone can come in and watch your movie in exchange for a hug. So I would argue that the difference between "private" and "public" is well established, by copyright law itself.

Now for my opinion: if any and all public performances end up on the Internet, it's a good thing. (It's a good thing for "information" in general, and it's also a good thing for the economy. The economy benefits from goods being cheaper.)

You may want to argue that posting the video on Youtube deprives you of many hugs, and that you should be compensated for that fact; or maybe you'll ask for Youtube to be simply taken down, to avoid such problems in the future.

But society doesn't owe you the ability to get hugs in exchange for the screening of movies. (What if you decided to provide services for the blind. Then, after an initial success, you come to the conclusion that the only way to grow your business further is if there are more blind people. Should the US Government help you poke the eyes of your neighbors?)

I believe you greatly misunderstood what I was getting at. I only said "hugs" because I'm tired of people assuming it's all and always about money whenever anybody says anything short of stern opposition to copyright, because that leads to infectiously stupid comments about the government poking people in the eyes, etc.

It's not about the hugs, or money or compensation of any kind. If it were about compensation, then under your scheme[1], I would be better off screening films that other people made. (Profiting from other people's work you seem to have no issue with.) But that's not what I want. I want to be able to share things I created, where I want to share it, with the people I want to share it with.

Again, it's not about the hugs. It's about your claim of public ownership extending into my private life because I didn't adequately secure my creative work against that kind of intrusion. It's about having to treat my work like a secret if I don't want someone else's hand in it or name on it.

[1] To be explicit: I presume a world in which you're allowed to own a theater you did not create yourself but where the public owns a film you did create yourself.

The speech analogy is pretty insidious considering we are talking about multi-million-dollar games and movies.

Maybe games are more "things" than "speech" (although they are protected as speech by the First Amendment; see the recent decision

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf

It would be pretty ironic if in order to free games from the demands of public domain advocates, you also stripped them of free speech protection).

But how is a movie not speech? How is it not a work of art, how is it fundamentally different from a book or a song, or a painting?

Because it costs a lot of money to put together?

For one, this argument is not going to hold for long, as producing a movie at home for next to no money is becoming not only possible but commonplace (The Blair Witch project was shot in 1999 and at the end of principal photography the total cost of production was under $20k (not a typo)).

But secondly, just because the form of art one decides to express themselves with is costly, doesn't justify that the public domain be amputated, or that the public abandons its freedom, more than is strictly necessary for a functioning society.

The right of the public to be informed or educated, or simply to have any conversation they please, should come before the "right" of individuals to make a living in a manner of their own choosing.

I don’t want to give a false impression. I don’t advocate this mindset. But from a historical perspective it isn’t that hard to understand. The history of mankind has always been a process of vacillating between societies motivated by self-profit and societies that attempt to live communally.

Right now the world has shifted more towards self-profit because we’re still living in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s collapse (the largest communal society ever attempted). But that doesn’t mean the idea of communal living has gone away completely. What the USSR proved more than anything is a society needs self-profit motivation in order to get people to put in the effort to excel.

There were no startups in the USSR because no one was willing to put a large amount of effort into something that would eventually be owned by the government.

But in that context artistic expression takes on a different bent because it is something most artists feel compelled to put effort into even without a profit motivation. So the question becomes “if something costs almost nothing to produce and the creator is compelled to create it without a profit motivation should it then be communal?”

| There were no startups in the USSR because no one was willing to put a large amount of effort into something that would eventually be owned by the government.

While this is correct, people were prohibited to start their own enterprises in the first place. Hence it's not the lack of profits that stopped the people - it's the fear of getting punished by the government.

In my humble opinion, Soviet Union did not prove that society needs self-profit motivation, not in terms of accumulating wealth. What it did prove is that the State will sooner or later collapse(because of the class war) when it threatens, oppresses and all the power is situated in the hands of a few people at the top.

I've read an interesting paper on the pioneers of Soviet Computing. These guys were as passionate and hard at work as anyone in the Silicon Valley, and even did skunkworks on stuff they weren't allowed to work on...

I'd say self-profit isn't the main motivation for creators, most of the time.

Here's the book BTW: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/05/08/pioneers-of-soviet-c...

The Soviet Union was not a communal society. It was a dictatorship paying lip service to being a communal society. I'd venture to say that those running the USSR were quite motivated by self-profit.

I would agree with that statement. The goal of communism, as Marx states, is a society in which everyone is equal. It would also infer pure democracy, as people would have the right to modify the commune. There would also be no leaders, as nobody is above another.

Where I find general distaste is how Marx decides how to craft a country under that system. His commentary generally include removal of children from families for education, elimination of religion and faith, and massive intermediary civil war to a socialist dictatorship that will _eventually_ lead to a utopian commune.

Most get stuck on the socialist dictatorship and like the power and resources taken for their benefit.

The question is: where does your mindset come from?

Promoting a freer market does not mean sacrificing rights. To have my creation used and enjoyed by many would be great. The compensation I think I deserve is only symptomatic of the current economic system under which we live. Don't pretend that you're starting from square one and the OP is suggesting a great shift. It's you too that should explain your motives.

I think most people (both in general, but particularly on HN as we make things here) wouldn't bother explaining what we generally take for common sense. However:

- People that make things should be able to charge what they they want for them.

- If people don't like the price that's fine, they're not forced to buy the item.

- Taking something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Edit: People convinced that the ability to easily take something making it right won't be convinced otherwise. This is HN - we make apps. Posts that advocate taking them without our permission should simply be flagged.

The way I see it is the dilemma isn't between pirating a single project or not pirating it.

The dilemma is whether society encourages people to build ideas upon ideas and push forward, or to lock up ideas in their own owner's domain, where nobody can build great things upon them.

The open and closed worlds are not independent and disconnected. Whenever someone creates a closed, proprietary product and wants to restrict uses of it, he is directly harming the open world too, by drawing away resources from the creation of an eco system and net effects around the open product to the closed product.

Also, assuming a person places some value X to openness, if the closed product is created and adds value Y to that particular person, and Y>X, it's effectively encouraging a closed world.

I think the single greatest thing we're losing on is derivative works. We live in a world with almost no derivative works, because of closed creations. For that I partially blame the closed content authors and really wish they had created less of it.

If you share these beliefs, it's easy to reach the conclusion that piracy is better than purchasing and encouraging these closed works. Of course it is better to avoid using it altogether (to avoid creating net effects around it), but if you are going to use something, it is better to pirate it than to purchase it legally.

Dogma is harmful to a thoughtful discussion of alternatives, and suggestions that a class of ideas which are not objectively bad should be flagged and not allowed to be discussed because it goes against our economic interest is reprehensible.

> ideas which are not objectively bad

Piracy is objectively bad. Using someone's art without compensating them is wrong. It has not successfully been argued otherwise.

People for piracy simple keep stating that digital replication somehow changes the ethics of this, but cannot specify why this changes the ethics.

> Taking something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Here lies the problem : define "taking". If I download a music file, I'm not removing it from where I've got it. I'm not depriving anyone from it, or preventing anyone from listening it. Therefore, I didn't take anything.

This has nothing to do with the fact that it is or isn't easy.

> Here lies the problem : define "taking".

You're right.

Using something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Fixed.

I find your ethics disturbing, and will not be subscribing to them.

Would you consider parodies to be unethical, since they involve using something someone made without their permission? What about the other traditional exceptions to copyright? What about something that goes way beyond copyright, like an architect putting up a building and then saying that nobody was allowed to look at it unless they paid him money first. Would you say that people would be morally obligated to pay him money in that case? If someone decided that they regretted publishing a book, would they be within their rights to insist that everybody with a copy of that book destroy it, provided they got their money back?

I'm having a hard time understanding where your attitude here originated from. Copyright in the US has always just been a matter of practicality from the founding of the US through hundreds of years of jurisprudence, and you can see that in how readily aspects of it are traded off against other public interests. Copyright as basic morality would result in a system radically different from the one we have now.

> Would you consider parodies to be unethical, since they involve using something someone made without their permission?

No, as the value being provided isn't the item being used, but the satire. Piracy doesn't add value like satire does.

You switched from "using something without someone's permission is morally wrong" to "using something without someone's permission is morally wrong, unless you add value to it". From the perspective of the person whose work was infringed via parody, they don't care that something was added, only that their work was used without their permission.

Which is why intellectual property isn't a moral right, but a tradeoff. And currently a lopsided one, at that.

I changed the language to illustrate that whether the originally copy still existed makes no difference.

> From the perspective of the person whose work was infringed via parody, they care only their work was used without their permission.

No, they care that that are being made fun of. People who attack parodies aren't concerned that someone would buy the parody instead of the original work - very few people would.

To Paul McCartney, it doesn't really matter whether I'm making a crappy metal cover of Hey Jude, or a parody of it. Why is one unethical, but not the other?

One could argue that I'm profiting from the original song either way--people are more likely to buy a parody of a song they've heard than one they haven't.

Fair enough point and I do agree that this guy's article is perhaps lacking in proposing solutions or fully explaining the problem.

The problem as I see it is that technology allows someone to avoid paying those "other authors that specific price for their work" as long as they are willing to spend some time and energy to pirate it. I believe people with more time than money will always exist. SOPA may make piracy more difficult, but it's not going to stop it, just as killing napster didn't stop music piracy. Is it really going to create more jobs other than employing people to respond to the new SOPA takedown requests?

I think iTunes/Netflix/Rhapsody-type services are the right solution to this problem. Sure, a college kid can always pirate stuff for the sake of pirating or because they have no money, but most busy people that can afford to pay for it, as long as the asking price of the studios is not too egregious, they will usually pay it happily as long as it's easy. Simple paid options are the real solution here.

Simple paid options may be the best option for all involved, but again, if someone makes their product difficult or expensive to get, nothing says every person ought to still be entitled to have it however they can get at it. Saying that you can't stop this behavior completely is irrelevant to whether you should aim to reduce it. None of the laws we have made something go away completely just by it being illegal.

Great point, making something illegal doesn't stop it, but it just raises the price. Drugs come to mind as I read this. It becomes a problem to me when making something illegal raises the cost to society overall versus actually solving whatever problem it claimed to solve. Again, drugs is a great example because we have great costs as a society for law enforcement and prisons dedicated to making drugs illegal versus quite possibly less costs if at least some drugs were legal.

To tie this back to the issue, I think SOPA taxes the Google's, Facebook's, etc of the world in an attempt to deal with piracy, which will only increase our costs as citizens for those services and not really solve the problem. Similarly, we also pay taxes to imprison drug offenders whilst drugs continue to be consumed at will.

Making something illegal that people want to pay for raises the price higher and we probably shouldn't do that. Enforcing laws that prevent people from taking things without paying for them also carries expense, but so does enforcing any laws. Just because the war on drugs is dumb doesn't make paying to enforce other regulations poor economic policy.

Agreed. We should enforce laws and we shouldn't make laws where the cost of enforcement outweighs the benefit to society of having those laws.

Sure, except that the price tag one person assigns to the art and culture we lose out on when people cannot stand to profit from it is different than another's.

Although it may be leased out for rather long periods of time life+70 years, the general public has a legal entitlement to the work under copyright law.

When an illegal activity doesn't stop, maybe the laws and the business models are inherently broken.

Maybe "sharing" is a basic human need, just like doing sex. Maybe making "sharing" illegal is exactly as having to get a certificate to be allowed to have sex.

Music artists have always made good money from concerts. And they are still making much more money from concerts than from album sales. And in a time when album sales where justified by the scarcity created by the distribution model, it made sense. But now that distribution costs over the Internet are zero, the scarcity is only artificial.

The music industry also considered tapes and CDs to be the plague that will destroy their industry because anyone could make copies. But then they embraced these storage mediums and made even more profit. So what the fuck?

The technology makes it a bit more complicated, by enabling almost zero-cost copying. This is very very new and when a lot of rules and laws were created nobody could foresee this case. I don't advocate piracy, but there is a stupid notion of "lost profit" when every pirated copy is assumed the copy not purchased. Sorry, but it does not work this way. If someone thinks that the price is to high or simply does not have the money then in the piracy-free world that person would simply not purchase the product. So, does this kind of person really harm the producer when he pirates in real world? What if he shows the pirated movie to his friends and they like it so much that they go and buy a copy for themselves? Then there is the whole "piracy as convenience" thing. The whole picture is very complicated and will take a long time to sort out.

Just because it only costs $0.00 to make a copy, doesn't mean that's what it costs to make the product.

And just because people talk about lost sales doesn't mean they assume every stolen copy is $.99 out of their pocket. It means that some people who take copies would buy them if they couldn't pirate them.

Whether one wants to justify piracy by saying they wouldn't pay for the product anyway, or they end up buying a lot of products they pirate first, or they help "spread the word" to others who pay, at the end of the day they're all self-serving justifications for engaging in an involuntary exchange of disparate value with the creator.

There seem too be two flawed mindsets.

On one hand you have people claiming that every pirated copy is lost revenue and that there are no positive benefits. Pirates are thieves destroying the lively hoods of hard working creators.

On the other you have people claiming that piracy doesn't harm the industry (where music, film, software and books are interchangeable), and that piracy actually helps authors by increasing the publicity for their work.

Both these stand points seem way to extreme. If a kid pirates Photoshop rather than drop a grand for it I don't really think Adobe has been harmed. On the other hand if the same guy grabs a movie of a torrent rather then dropping a few dollars (which they can afford) on a rental then that is lost money. Maybe for some artists of developers that loss will be offset by increased recognition or maybe it won't.

It's a shame that so many people take such hard and fast stands for or against piracy, and we lack the more nuanced opinions that reflect the situation as it actually is.

I guess "Pirates are thieves" or "Unknown band becomes smash hit due to torrenting" make more effective headlines then "Piracy is really complicated and effects different stake holders in different ways".

I think you're right about the points being extreme, but who's to decide that a broke kid taking Photoshop is better than a broke adult? And why is it not the fairest proposition to say that neither is entitled to this luxury product?

Sorry to be clear I mean that ignoring moral or ethical implications, some one who is broke and pirates something they can not afford is not harming that rights holder. Regardless of their age.

Not harming in a financial sense anyway, you could argue that there is one sort of moral harm maybe.

is not necessarily harming that rights holder.

If my neighbor comes by and borrows the ladder from my garage, it probably isn't hurting me. Probably. There are a number of scenarios I can think of in which it does in fact harm me, some morally, some financially.

That doesn't change the fact that it's my ladder, and my neighbor has no right to take it without my permission.

Absolutely agree with you.

I would object though, if after your neighbour took your ladder you claimed financial loss despite not being hurt. I would also object if your neighbour claimed they have the moral right to take it since "you weren't using it any way". Or even worse that since you don't offer ladder rentals it's your fault they took it without permission. Both those extremes are, well extreme.

> Where does the mindset come from

Most importantly, it comes from thinking about why the current laws and conventions are justified. They are not simply there in reality. Why do we have them?

It is not about justifying piracy, it is saying we should not even have the laws in the first place that lead to the possibility of piracy.

You might reply that this is ridiculous: simply changing the name of an act does not remove the harm it does. But this is the core of the matter: with copying, that reply is basically false! (Piracy is in legal terms a malum prohibitum not a malum in se.)

Look at the underlying phenomena, prior to any legal construction. Copying is an abstract relation: there is no physical connection between an original and a copy. It no more harms someone to be copied than it harms the number 4 when you write it down. Since copying renders no harm, and in fact the opposite, it is very beneficial, and furthermore it is an abundance, why should we restrict it? (No moral argument for copyright/IP/etc. seems ever to have answered that.)

In practice it may possibly be that selling creative effort is difficult to do optimally without some structure like copyright etc. That is the contention of the standard economic view. But that gives only a very particular and limited justification. Such restrictions on copying are justified only insofar as they actually turn out to help us overall.

Which returns us the gist of the article: if those restrictions do not help much, or rather have comparable alternatives, the justification for their existence is gone.

So if you go to the doctor for a regular check up and they take biological waste from your visit and send it to a company who uses your DNA to make multiple clones of you to be given to adoptive parents who can't have children, you're good with that?

Thinking about it, yes, that seems OK. It is not clear what the real problem is. It just seems challenging because of the oddness.

There is some question of privacy: it might be objectionable there. But that does not really bear upon the core of copyright, which is about items that have been made public.

One could pose a similar question: what if someone else decides to dress exactly like you, and go about like that? What grounds are there for your objection to that? (There do not seem to be any . . .) If they went so far as to impersonate you in the sense of identity fraud, there is a problem. But that is really about lying rather than copying per se, like counterfeiting.

If someone wants to dress as shitty as I do, more power to them. And if you don't mind being cloned, then that's fine, too. I just want to make sure you're not drawing an imaginary line somewhere.

It is simply false to assume that everyone who consumes a work of intellectual property (music, movies, television, etc.) has purchased a copy of the work. That has never been true historically. The difference today is that technology has made possible new ways for people to consume IP without direct purchase and some publishers have yet to adapt.

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