Hacker News Reader

It's still not morally acceptable or legal.

It's illegal, yes. But the question whether copying published works is morally unacceptable to people is debatable.

Comparing sharing with killing or stealing is a common mistake.

Citing http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal.

And yet, people still kill each other on a daily basis. At some point it may become practical to take precautions not to get killed, or to move into a line of work or a place where you're less likely to get killed.

We've got a system in place to ensure very few people kill each other. It would be nice if that same system could ensure people wouldn't just copy photographs (for commercial purposes). And it actually does a reasonable job of that.

This guy wasn't arguing he has a hard time making a living, which is the argument that people seem to be replying to. He's arguing that people shouldn't copy photographs for commercial purposes. It's hard to see how anyone could disagree with that: I don't want my code copied either (well, specific parts of it). The question of what you should do when people in fact do copy your photographs is mostly separated from that.

The question of what should be done in cases of copyright infringement is the only one that can really be usefully discussed, which is probably why most people are addressing that instead. Should people copy photographs for commercial purposes? Of course not. End of discussion, not much more to say.

This seems to come up fairly often - an article making a moral argument that copying is wrong, followed by comments saying "Yeah, but it still happens, so you should do X", followed by replies saying "no, but you don't understand, it's wrong!"

Strangely enough, this seems to come up mostly in the context of music (or, in this case, photography). I haven't seen many software blogs making a purely moral argument as opposed to a practical discussion of what to do about it.

If I'm a programmer, and I let my customers download my program for free and include a crack -- who's fault is it if someone doesn't pay up for the program? This is the internet. I had to download a copy the photograph just to view the image. It's stored in my cache right now. You have an unlicensed copy as well. Do I feel like a murdering thief? No, I don't.

If you run a bike-shop, don't leave the bikes out front without locks. They're going to get stolen. Don't bitch about society when they go missing. If you're putting art out on the internet, don't bitch when everyone has a copy. At least watermark that sucker.

"If I'm a programmer, and I let my customers download my program for free and include a crack -- who's fault is it if someone doesn't pay up for the program? This is the internet."

It's called trust, it's why we've been lauding Louis CK's latest effort. Also, Apple used to distribute their OS software that way, it didn't require a serial number or online validation.

"If you run a bike-shop, don't leave the bikes out front without locks. They're going to get stolen. Don't bitch about society when they go missing. If you're putting art out on the internet, don't bitch when everyone has a copy."

Nice argument for DRM. I thought all of us here were opposed to that kind of thing.

"At least watermark that sucker."

What is that supposed to accomplish? Even if those who appropriate the picture don't crop the pictures, that doesn't justify republishing it without permission and/or compensation.

Slap your website name across the whole image. I don't think anyone here is against DRM -- just shitty DRM that dilutes the user experience. Steam is an example of DRM done right IMO.

The belief that morality and practicability are the same thing just scares me, really. Individual humans become more powerful all the time. We need to respect arbitrary, consentual rules to keep the world going instead of going back to "strong eats weak, bad luck".

> We need to respect arbitrary, consentual rules to keep the world going

Such as PIPA and SOPA?

Believing that a concept such as a digital pattern or an idea is property that belongs to someone is borderline religious -- because I'm sure you fervently believe it without any supporting evidence. Just because you can monetize something doesn't mean you own it. If I discovered the wheel first, does that mean society owes me money bags for stealing my invention?

> Such as PIPA and SOPA?

Bad legislation and lobbyism are no reasons for or against anything.

> Believing that a concept such as a digital pattern or an idea is property that belongs to someone is borderline religious -- because I'm sure you fervently believe it without any supporting evidence.

That is arbitrary from an objective point of view. Now name me a law or human concept that is not.

Thank you for your assumptions about SOPA and fervent religiousness in a thread that has to do with neither.

> Taking good photographs is as hard as it always was.

Untrue. With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance. That wasn't true before digital.

Photos are simply recording something that exists. It's not creating art as such (IMHO). So unlike painting / writing books / writing code, you could just sit a monkey there with a good camera, variety of lenses, filters, etc and have him take a fantastic photo sooner or later.

Don't get me wrong, I love taking photos, and try to make my photos better each time, try to learn what settings, composure etc will make the best photo etc. But at the same time, pretty soon you'll have cameras that take a billion photos all at the same time with every available setting, then allow you to navigate through and select the best. Taking photos then just comes down to judging what makes a good photo, which most people can do (And can also be automated by surveying people or doing A/B testing etc).

> You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal.

If you kill me, it affects me. If you copy a photo of mine, I haven't lost anything. It's a bad analogy.

> "With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance."

This is simply untrue.

It's true that at one point simply getting everything into focus at the right moment took a skilled photographer. But that was never the sum total of what a skilled photographer brought to the table.

A sunset photo isn't good simply when it's the best of a million possible photos of a sunset. It can be good because the photographer found an interesting location to set the picture. It can be good because the photographer waited-for and/or was present for an opportune confluence of elements such as weather, tide, etc. It can be good when the position and angle of the camera framed the scene in an appealing way, including or excluding other elements to enhance the shape, color and symmetry of the composition. It can be good when the focus highlights an interesting subject, and de-emphasizes non-essential visual noise.

Taking a billion photos can guarantee that you get a solid reproduction of whatever you pointed your camera at. But it will never render irrelevant the skills of subject identification, color balance (artistic balance, not simply accurate reproduction), composition, framing, etc. And lastly, it's absolutely no substitute for inspiration, education and experience.

And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?

There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you.

We've also been fed so many fantastic photos online etc, that we rarely go "wow" any more. For all we know it could be a photo, a photoshop, a CGI. What was once amazing is now often the norm.

I really wouldn't like to be a professional photographer these days, as I just don't think you can make much money at it.

"And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?"

Haha yeah, I guess if you disregard the context of time, weather, effort, mobility, and all that non-idealized crap, you could probably systematically move around with your magic jetpack and a camera with infinite battery or whatever it is camera's have nowadays. Then you could simply brute-force every available composition like a computer would. Beep boop.

"There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you."

Fellow computer: sudo take a gorgeous photo of a snowy landscape, and fall back on the brute-force algorithm if necessary. Make it quick, I have to find my way back by noon and I don't trust my A* algorithm.

I've thought about this a bit. And my prediction is that a wedding photographer, for example, will set up several cameras around the room that will recored very high res video.

Later a computer will recreate the entire event and the photographer will fly around with a virtual camera and select the best shots.

Ridiculous. By that logic, we will soon all stop writing (let alone write for any sort of direct or indirect compensation) because "no massive amount of skill is involved". Instead, we can just brute force it and simply pick the best novels, technical documentation (or HN comments, for that matter) from the many choices of million-character sequences presented to us.

It's an orders of magnitude different problem.

Taking photos is just recording light that exists. You can change the position, lighting, a few options on the camera, but it's easy enough to say that for a given location, probably a few thousand photos would cover most of the possibles.

Writing involves thought. After you've typed even a few characters you're past a few thousand possible combinations. Brute forcing writing isn't feasible.

  If you copy a photo of mine, I haven't lost anything. It's 
  a bad analogy.

If people consistently copy your photos with impunity, you've lost your job. The same goes for writer and movie makers.

  soon you'll have cameras that take a billion photos all at 
  the same time with every available setting, then allow you 
  to navigate through and select the best.

Good luck navigating through a billion photos...

  (And can also be automated by surveying people or doing 
  A/B testing etc)

... or autoselecting through a billion photographs. What's a good photograph is independent of how many people feel it's a good photograph. If you ask the general public to pick the best photos between some Cartier-Bresson's and some of your own black-and-white shots intended to appeal to the general public (assuming you have a moderate ability to make such photographs), I know what the outcome is. Entirely independent of what are actually the best photo's.

And even if you could auto-select the best shot, a billion photographs of people on some village square wouldn't include the shot this guy made. A billion photographs taken around noon would never have included this shot. A billion photographs with a different cliffline would never have included this shot. A bajillion monkeys will never write Shakespeare in the lifetime of the universe.