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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

A. Copyright infringement is not stealing.

B. The internet thrives precisely because it is transnational. This allows for quality programming to span the world.

C. There is an international market for current episodes of popular TV shows. There is such a large market that people are willing to commit copyright infringement.

D. Just because your business model doesn't adapt to the market, does not automatically mean that your business model deserves protection in the market.

E. Media content creators have long protected their international licensing agreements with anti-customer technology like DVD Regions.

F. At the end of the day, the customer doesn't care. They will find a better product in the market.

G. It's my experience that people who pirate out of this frustration, are happy to pay when it is available. The person who pirated the Christmas Special would have paid money to see it, it was just not available at any price.

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OK, copyright infringement isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. And copyright infringement is illegal.

I am sorry that some people are "frustrated" because they cannot see their favorite programs at the same time that people in other parts of the world can see them. But what a remarkably morally shaky ground upon which to break the law! My great-grandfather stole food once; his father died when he was eight, and his mother couldn't support the family. Today, people steal--sorry, copyright infringe--Downton Abbey because they can't wait to find out whether Lady Mary is going to marry Matthew.

Presumably, your great-grandfather also jaywalked at some point in his life. I think it's valid to argue that we have a moral obligation to obey the law, but I'm not convinced most people act as though we do if the crime may be victimless and there's a small chance of getting caught..

Lots of people break laws every day. People drink underage, people smoke pot, people speed in their motorcars, people cheat on their taxes, people drive their bicycles on the sidewalk.

Lots of people break laws every day. Why and when they do it is an internal calculus driven by many factors: my need, the damage inflicted of the person I'm harming, my convenience, the likelihood I'm getting caught, the punishment that will be meted out if I get caught.

If you want to curb piracy (eg: stop illegal activity), you need to affect all the parameters. Content creators have done a poor job on many of these fronts. So far, rights holders have almost exclusively tried to criminalize their customers. In my opinion, that's a really stupid way to go.

There's a large grey area between "illegal" and "immoral" though. And the legal system has a long history of playing catchup to changes in public mores, and being dictated by people who don't have the public interest at heart (slavery/segregation, prohibition/legalization, communism).

Morality and legality often intersects, but one does not imply the other. In other words, that something is legal or illegal doesn't make it moral or immoral.

It does not follow from your ancestors hardships that downloading a TV show is inherently immoral, any more that is follows it is moral.

What I consider very interesting in the discussion of the morality of downloading TV series in particular is in the comparison with DVRs:

Legal: DVR'ing a free-to-air broadcast TV show and skipping the commercial breaks.

Illegal: Downloading the same TV show, with the commercial breaks edited out.

The only substantial difference in the two scenarios is timing - whether you will be watching a Christmas special at Christmas or in May, two years later (as is more often the case with US shows in Europe).

Further noting that the the fact these TV shows airs on such a long delay reflects the practicality of how the TV show market work, not some particular desire of the copyright holder, what is the moral principle being breached here?

Just to further underline the divergence between morality and legality, it's worth noting that under current copyright law, it is illegal in the United Kingdom to record (i.e. 'DVR') any television broadcast.

It is also illegal to rip a copy of a CD you own to listen to on a computer or copy to a portable music player...

In the Netherlands, making a copy of copyrighted material is legal for personal use. There’s a levy on blank media such as DVD-Rs which is shared between copyright holders.

Also illegal: Downloading the same TV show with the commercial breaks intact and not skipping them

Yes, but in the isolated world of this thought experiment, that's more reasonable: Commercials are most often targeted for a specific market, so there is no value in someone watching them thousands of miles away. This is true even for global brands ("They call it a Royale with Cheese").

Legal: recording the OTA broadcast and watching it two hours later without skipping ads

Illegal: Downloading the same TV show with the commercial breaks intact as broadcast by your local affiliate and watching it two hours later without skipping ads

Legal: a friend recording a TV show on a VCR and giving you the tape.

Illegal: a friend recording a TV show to an .avi file and sending you a megaupload link.

You acknowledge copyright infringement is a separate act from theft, yet go on to provide an emotive example of the latter as an apparent means of vilifying the former?

I think it's a little bit disingenuous of you to admit they're different and then immediately conflate them. :)

I think also that the really widespread nature of this begins to look more like civil disobedience than opportunism. (The difference being that people who act opportunistically hope that no-one else does; people who act in civil disobedience hope that everyone does.) I hope you're not going to make the case that civil disobedience is a non-virtuous act simply because it's illegal?

As a historical note: without illegal copyright infringement in the 1700s, the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer would still be under copyright. As a British taxpayer (and thus an involuntary investor in Downton Abbey), I'm fully in favour of people who would otherwise have difficulty seeing it downloading it, even if they have to break a law to do it.

The episodes are available for free on pbs.org. I personally would not pay for it. But then again I was happy to wait for it to show up stateside.

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