The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

wired.co.uk

139 pointsjoeyespo87 comments

It is often claimed that piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault--that they need to evolve to embrace digital media, and because they haven't, people are forced to turn to piracy.

There may be a bit of truth to that argument, but if you look at the Apple App Store, you'll find a damning rebuttal. The App Store has embraced digital distribution. Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. It's certainly easier than pirating them. And yet app store piracy is a huGe problem [1].

Why? Because if you pirate, you have money left over for other things. It's that simple. So even though you could afford $2 for an app, you'd rather pirate the app and spend the $2 on something else. It's human nature. This is one reason societies make laws and enforce them with police. If we'd let natural evolution dictate the run our societies, then the alpha males would each have fifty wives and most males would be mateless or dead.

[1] http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-st...

  >Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier.

I wouldn't be so fast here. The app store limits availability by country. For example, you cannot legally buy games here in Brazil on the app store [1]. Which is a huge market. I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to Weird Al Yankovic's songs (I spent months with money in my pocket going from store to store looking to buy his cds when I was young), nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons.

There is also the pay wall barrier. Which is also often derived from a location problem. You may have many easy payment options in the USA, but we might not have it as easy here. (There are many startups working on decreasing this barrier, but so far it's still big)

Also, your argument is subjective. You cannot make an objective case for "how much potential damage" piracy is making. You cannot know how many pirates would have bought if piracy didn't exist, maybe some wouldn't have bought anyway because of the paywall or location bans.

But what you do can prove objectively is that you can make money from digital content without trying to stop piracy. Which is the point that Peter Sunde is making here. Which was also the same point Steve Blank made a while ago [2].

So you cannot simply say "piracy is a huge problem" and just cite that link saying that some pirates exist. Your argument cannot be demonstrated objectively, while the Peter's argument can, and has.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/br/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8

[1] (in portuguese) http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-ap...

[2] http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...

>I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to weird al's songs, nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons.

This still isn't a good argument. Justifying the means by which you acquired content still doesn't make it morally right or legal. "But I can't get it without piracy!" still doesn't give you any right to consume the product. Buying vs pirating... there's a third option. Abstinence. If you can't get Weird Al's media legally, you can always just not get it at all.

I think you are missing the point.

You are not seeing the global issue, rather the individual one.

Pirating is already a reality, that you can not change (much like drugs) and the entertainment music is the only one that is missing out by not being able to adapt.

In today's reality, if the only possibility you give people to not pirate is abstain, well then you are begging for more piracy.

If a man walked into a store, and the retailer refused to sell him a product because of his nationality, what would we call that?

Why does it magically become acceptable--even defensible--on a larger scale?

There's a difference between someone who's in your country but of a different nationality, and someone who's in a different country.

That's vacuous reasoning.

I know the situations are different; I'm asking why one is ethically intolerable and the other is ethically acceptable to the point of making civil disobedience unethical (in freehunter's opinion, anyway).

To put it another way, what about that difference justifies the discrimination?

IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies. Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

> IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies

My understanding is that most licences grant permission to consume the content (listen to music, watch the film ...) irrespective of the country of your physical location (as long as its not public broadcast or rented out). Otherwise I would need to repurchase all my ipod songs and reading books when I go on holiday.

> Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

In physical distribution this makes sense. Each country has a different import/customs bureaucracy which must be followed which takes time and money. Then you need agreements with shipping, wholesalers, etc. But over the web, serving separate countries is trivial. In fact, the web server doesn't know where your customer is until you geolocate their IP address.

Besides, I'm sure there were reasonable business reasons to exclude blacks from certain businesses too. Perhaps allowing blacks into a pub would irrevocably damage its brand with its standard clientele; perhaps allowing blacks to sit on a bus would mean the business would need more buses to ensure that all whites could have a seat; perhaps allowing blacks to rent a room in a hotel would mean it would be more expensive to keep track of whether the bed sheets have been used by a black couple or not.

Legitimate business concerns may explain discrimination but not justify it.

I concur, and that's a succinct description of how this discrimination has been made possible, but it's completely orthogonal to my question.

I thought that globalization and the 'tearing down' of national borders was a good thing? Doesn't this go against the idea that multi-national corporations can divide up the global into separate regions (e.g. dvd region codes)?

> Buying vs pirating... there's a third option. Abstinence.

If we were talking about rival goods, you'd be right. But we're talking about digital information here. You don't remove it from where you get it. So if your only alternative is (illegal) copying vs abstinence, then I see little reason to restrain yourself.

Furthermore, I think it is unethical to forbid the use of, say, The Pirate Bay for copying stuff you couldn't have obtained otherwise. Because it makes you poorer for no benefit at all for the copyright holders.

I hate that this is downvoted.

Content owners have the right to dictate, within the bounds of law, how their content is to be used. The only reason this is controversial is because music is usually owned and distributed by the Bad Guys. If this was a case about illegally using GPLed software, for example, there wouldn't even need to be a discussion.

  > Content owners have the right to dictate, within
  > the bounds of law

So if he lives somewhere that didn't sign the Berne Convention, then it's ok, right? Or is that where we drop the premise of the 'good == legal' argument and start trying to debate the morality of it?

I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free.

I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.

Quite a large number of people pay to pirate, like those who paid for Megaupload, and those who pay for Usenet access. The charge is almost what Netflix charges (~10$ a month), but the selection and quality is much better (for pirated content), and catalog is also better. And better yet you don't loose the stuff that can be watched because some licensing agreement failed.

I think even if Piratebay starts charging what Netflix charges, it will remain a huge website.

  > I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to
  > charge for their superior distribution system

1) The logistics wouldn't be there. Not necessarily because people won't pay, but because paying is a barrier to entry. Even paying a penny would filter out a number of users. Would you really believe that the reason those people wouldn't pay a penny is because they are cheap? Or is it more likely that the paywall is a barrier that they are too lazy to overcome?

2) Charging out-right for the service vs. making money on advertisements would also be a shift in their image. This may cause a number of people to jump ship out of principle. I.e. a 'hipster filter' if you will ("they're too big and corporate now", "they've sold out", etc).

Your argument beats around the bush. You and I both know that if TPB were to charge, their traffic would drop by several orders of magnitude. This is not because of logistics, not because of image, not because of inefficient distribution and not because of DRM. The simple reason for the huge drop off would be that most pirates want that sh't free. Why oh why do people insist on sugar coating this blatant reality?

Because this heads towards the concept of thought crime. Who cares what the motive of a pirate is? Do we only want pure virgins who can lie in a unicorn's lap downloading stuff? Or can we get beyond criticising people for not being pure of heart.

The only issue with piracy isn't the motive of the pirate - it's whether it damages the industry, and studies regularly show it doesn't. In fact a) the biggest pirates tend to spend more, and b) isn't it about time we found ways of rewarding creators that didn't involve artificial scarcity?

We're heading for a time when we can deliver all of human culture to everyone and the only thing stopping us is that some people want to rent-seek.

On your other point, I wouldn't advise anyone to pay for the Pirate Bay because payment identifies the payee. There's a significant chance it would be considered illegal and records seized by the US, leading to huge fines, extradition and prison. That alone would deter me.

While your assertion may very well be true, the link you provided is not, in any way, any kind of proof. There's nothing in there - at all - to support your claim that "app store piracy is a huge problem".

Do we have any actual figures to support this claim? I highly doubt its validity, you see.

There was a blog post linked here on Hacker News that talked about it from the perspective of an iOS game developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it right now, but the synopsis was the overwhelming majority of their users had not paid for the game (in iTunes). While this is purely anecdotal, one could argue it's probably representative of the market.

For apps and music, I think Apple does a good job of making the process cheap and easy, but there will always be people with more time than money.

"There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"?

If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand?

This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!

It's pretty easy: stop buying DRM/protected products (and stop pirating them too). If there was no piracy and you just stopped buying, big companies would lower the price/do something different. But, now that they don't really know why, they will continue to add more protections.

But, most people don't have that kind of commitment or discipline and the rest are just part of the movement because they want free stuff.

Why do people always resort to the same argument ("stop buying") as if it were a solution? Isn't it obvious by now that it's not a solution and it's not going to happen?

Voting with your wallet works when you can stop paying one company and go to its competitor. But if they all get together and decide that you have to do it their way or you're screwed, then guess what's going to happen? The majority will find the best way to procure what they need under the circumstances and the minority will fight to change the situation. It just happens that it in this particular situation the best way to procure what people need is not by choosing the least evil of the providers, but you have a choice to copy stuff for free, instead.

Let's make things clear: this doesn't make it legal to pirate stuff. On the other hand, "legal", "correct", "practical" and "optimal" are never the same thing. Just as no amount of arguing will change the fact that piracy is (still) illegal, no amount of arguing will change the fact that the industry needs to evolve.

"Why do people always resort to the same argument ("stop buying") as if it were a solution? Isn't it obvious by now that it's not a solution and it's not going to happen?"

Whenever we have discussions about companies violating the GNU and people say "just don't use GNU software", I say the same thing. But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine with pirating are against essentially the same thing with the GNU license. What a world we live in. I'm going to keep bringing up these points until they stick.

"Voting with your wallet works when you can stop paying one company and go to its competitor. But if they all get together and decide that you have to do it their way or you're screwed,"

You don't need music or movies to live. If they all decide to do it, just stop buying all together.

This isn't new. I saw this same "movement" 10 years ago with Napster and it's nothing more than an excuse to get movies, music, and software for free.

Music is so cheap. All of the original demands 10 years ago have been met. Guess what? piracy is worse than ever. It reminds me why you never negotiate with terrorists.

You don't need music or movies to live. If they all decide to do it, just stop buying all together.

Correction: you don't need them to survive. They are, however, a part of everyone's lives nowadays. We all grew up listening to music and watching movies. It would require tremendous external pressure (such as war or plague) to change that. Maslow's Pyramid and all that jazz.

Music is so cheap. All of the original demands 10 years ago have been met. Guess what? piracy is worse than ever. It reminds me why you never negotiate with terrorists.

I'm not sure what demands were made 10 years ago, but I can tell you that I, as a customer, am far from satisfied. I want to be able to

1) buy digital music (MP3, OGG, I don't care) in an online store

2) access that store via HTTP(S) using my browser, not some proprietary bloatware

3) find a variety of songs in the store, have lots of stuff to choose

4) download that music to any device I have, as many times as I want

5) be able to play that music without being connected to the Internet

6) do all of the above regardless of the fact that I don't live in US, UK or Germany, to name a few favorite countries

When those conditions are met, you'll have people like me -- people who want to try buying the content instead of pirating -- try to switch to these new services. The piracy will start declining, albeit very, very slowly.

People have had a freaking decade to get used to getting stuff for free, because the industry refused to adapt. Worse, the industry is still resisting the change and refusing to evolve. These things have their own momentum and inertia. It would be extreme optimism to expect a change to happen overnight, once good alternatives are available. As things stand, it's beyond extreme optimism to expect that change -- it's completely ridiculous.

So, because their product is not up to your arbitrary set of demands, you feel justified in pirating it? Couldn't they meet those and you could just come up with more demands?

I don't buy it. Hiding behind a list of demands that must be met in order for you to be okay with actually financially compensating the people who financially backed, created, and then distributed said content is just posturing. At least, that's how it looks from the perspective of someone who a) doesn't pirate and b) doesn't buy media when the terms are not to his liking.

I've met a few people who pirate songs and then buy band merchandise in order to get proceeds to the band (more than otherwise, if I am to understand it correctly). Those guys are cool guys, and they back their moral rhetoric with their actions. Something tells me the majority of pirates are not like these guys, though (admittedly) I have no facts to back that up - just the anecdotal evidence of knowing quite a few pirates, most of whom, to put it bluntly, really don't give a fuck - they just want the content.

I think these demands are reasonable, especially the geographical one since you can't buy something if it's not available for you to buy.

The issue is that sometimes when you pay for something you end up with an inferior product, for example being required to install additional software that you either don't like or may not even be available for your platform.

I think you can mitigate piracy a lot by simply providing a slightly better service. For example I know plenty of people who used to pirate most of their games but now they buy them on steam as soon as the price is reasonable to them.

I can always add one more reasonable demand to my previous list of reasonable demands to hide behind. The final one will be 'accept bitcoin payment' and then I'll never need to pay for anything again! Let's face it, they could charge 0.01 USD over the face of the globe and the only requirement would be paypal or credit card, and that would be too much for some people. Piracy would still run rampant, because piracy is easier than paying (to some people).

Cynicism aside, the geographical requirement is reasonable. I still won't pirate even if it's not available here unless there is some way to pay for it (damn my parents and their persistent morals) but I do see the argument for 'There absolutely is no other way for me to get it.' It's nearly impossible to argue against that one, especially considering any geographical restrictions are likely arbitrary. Though I fail to see why anyone would restrict themselves from a potential market, especially if your content is digital.

Sure, there will always be people with unreasonable expectations but I think that the more of peoples requirements you can satisfy the less appealing piracy becomes.

There are also network effects at work, I remember when Napster first became popular (I was quite young at the time) and literally overnight everyone at school had gone from owning a handful of CDs and cassettes to having huge music collections.

People spent a lot of their time discussing the various artists they had discovered through Napster and you would have been considered pretty odd if you didn't have at least a couple of gigabytes of music. Not to mention that everybody suddenly had more disposable income to spend on other things. So whilst you could take a moral stance on it, you would most likely become an outcast to a certain extent. Besides, people tend to decide their morals based on what they see others do.

This can also work the other way though, as with my Steam example. As well as selling games in a convenient way they also provide tools you can use to find out what your friends are playing and join games with them. This means that adoption can spread around a peer group pretty quickly.

Discussing an artist whose music you've heard is in no way guaranteed to compensate that artist. At best, someone, somewhere, will hear the word of mouth and spend some money that goes back in the direction of the artist. There is no guarantee though - you end up hand-waving in a benefit when it cannot be proven that your piracy helped anything, though it can be proven that you didn't pay for what they are asking you to pay for as, currently, the means of profit is mostly tied to the distribution channels, not the production. Saying 'they should have done things differently' and then pirating their music is a lot like blaming the victim.

Now, hearing their music and then going out and buying a CD / paying for a legal download / picking up some show tickets or t-shirts is a different story, and is the best possible outcome of piracy. I'm not arguing against these people - these people are cool people, and are trying to affect a change in the system. If more people did this, show and swag revenue would increase and reduce the dependency on the digital content distribution as a source of income, which might have a very meaningful impact on new artists when they see the example.

I'm not really going to address the 'social pariah' argument, because I've never been one nor do I know what it is like to be have friends that would 'shun' for the crime of not pirating music (not committing a crime?). I will say that using the 'everyone is doing it argument' is not particularly constructive.

Games, IMHO, are a completely different animal in many respects, and since the only way to actually compensate the developer (currently) is to pay for the game, then I am actually about as hard-lined on this as it is possible to be - you shouldn't be playing the game if you haven't paid for it. Steam is a great example of offering services in exchange for content restrictions, and is (IMHO) the reason PC gaming is still alive as anything other than an indie-playground.

My personal opinion is that PC games (in particular) are actually headed in the direction of always-on MMO-like behavior that requires an internet connection in order to be part of the game world, and this is by design. I'm not necessarily talking Ubisoft's reprehensible always-on-even-during-singleplayer DRM, i'm talking about games that will act like MMOs in order to ensure the playerbase needs to be online in order to get most of the game. Sure, you can play a gimped pirated version, but why would you? All the good stuff is on their servers, which require authentication.

I will point out that despite the ease with which one could pirate a game like Skyrim, it still sold 2.8 million units in November alone. Mostly, I'm sure, because people want to pay for the game, not because of anti-piracy measures... other than Steam, which I suppose counts as that.

So I guess what I am saying is that despite the fact that I will argue for the moral necessity of funding development of digital content by paying for it until such a time as the means of distribution is no longer the primary income source, I am unconvinced that piracy is such a huge problem that it requires anything more than prosecution of the most blatant violators and those that profit from it.

Just wondering, do you have any guidelines as to what it takes to become a cool guy? Does buying a $20 tshirt justify my previous pirating of a band's three albums? How about paying $25 for tshirt+CD after pirating two albums? Is there an equation for this? I'd like to make sure I'm a cool guy here.

Pretty simple actually. Two albums cost, what, around 20 ~ 40 depending upon the band? Buy enough swag to make up the cost. More of the profits will go to the band than would have before.

Problem is I don't necessarily want a T shirt (if the band even sell them in the first place) not to mention that buying the T shirt might bring up other moral issues (overseas child labour etc).

It would make more sense for the artist to sell me the tracks I want in a convenient way (direct download, no DRM, standard format, easy payment) rather than for them to distribute their music in a DRM format that I don't want and to have it pirated and then buying T shirts to somehow make up for it.

It would - I agree completely. But are you better served by pirating their music, which only gives the RIAA more ammo regarding piracy stats to get their asinine laws passed, or just finding music from people that satisfies your requirements and paying for that? I'm obviously a fan of the second - I consider it a form of boycott.

What if I had bought the CDs used for $8 or $5 each? Do I have to go by the full retail price, and if so, is this price at introduction, or is retail price a couple of years later okay?

Oh yeah, I forgot - how much is buying a ticket to seeing them live worth? Full ticket retail price, or less?

Compensate the band for their efforts - it's really not hard, your attempts to muddy the water with asinine value qualifications notwithstanding. You don't owe them anything more than what you would owe them by acquiring music through legal means - but you do owe them something. At least as long as the means of profit is tied to distribution. I have nothing more to say about it - you obviously can't see the forest for the trees.

EDIT: I'm going to add in that I'm also not going to bother replying anymore because you obviously think the downvote button is the 'nuh-uh!' button. How productive.

> You don't owe them anything more than what you would owe them by acquiring music through legal means - but you do owe them something.

What does the band get from me buying a CD of theirs used? Is it substantially more quantifiable than talking about the band?

> I have nothing more to say about it - you obviously can't see the forest for the trees.

I'll admit I'm trolling with the questions, but it's hard not to when you're attempting to divide pirates into "cool people" and the other kind based on categories you yourself seem to not have thought out very well.

> EDIT: I'm going to add in that I'm also not going to bother replying anymore because you obviously think the downvote button is the 'nuh-uh!' button. How productive.

Hacker News doesn't let users downvote posts in immediate response to their posts (replies one deep). I upvoted your responses to me as a matter of personal policy. The only other post of yours in this entire thread I've voted on is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3590726; I recall downvoting due to general flimsiness of your argument, particularly the irony of dismissing word-of-mouth arguments as hand-waving when yours were no stronger, and the ill thought out attempt to distinguish cool pirates from uncool pirates. Thanks for asking.

> What does the band get from me buying a CD of theirs used? Is it substantially more quantifiable than talking about the band?

I would argue that the profit from first sale has already been made, and the terms of that distribution include the ability to resell. They've already made money off that CD, and you are paying the person who owned it originally for it now, not the band. Since they produced the CD, they agreed to these terms when they sold the physical media.

> I'll admit I'm trolling with the questions, but it's hard not to when you're attempting to divide pirates into "cool people" and the other kind based on categories you yourself seem to not have thought out very well.

I wasn't actually trying to imply group A is cool and group B is not, 'cool' was just the verbage I was using to indicate that I didn't really have a problem with what group A was doing, as they were following the spirit (if not the letter) of the law and were attempting to compensate the band for their efforts. I apologize if my poor choice of wording called you 'uncool' by accident. :-)

I will return the upvote for the civil reply.

You did read the comment where I said that piracy is not legal, no matter how one puts it, right? Just checking, before I go on.

First of all, I resent your assumptions and insinuations. Self-righteous rhetoric like that sounds appealing to the listener, but it doesn't really add any rational weight to your arguments. Contrary to what you imply, I do buy the music I like, whenever I can find an outlet that satisfies my conditions. I could just go on listening to that stuff on YouTube and even pirate it down do MP3 from there, but I try my best to find a way to buy it. Occasionally, I succeed in that. Does that make me one of those "cool guys" you're talking about? Or am I still one of those who "don't give a fuck", according to your admittedly anectodal evidence you used in your own moral rhetoric?

Anyway, yes, I feel justified pirating stuff that doesn't meet those demands, because -- contrary to what you claim -- those demands are not arbitrary. Almost all of those demands are there to protect my rights, the ones the industry insists on denying.

The demand #2 protects the same rights you enjoy when you drive the car of your own choosing on a road. Having to use a proprietary application to purchase a song is pretty much like being told you are allowed to drive only a Honda along the Route 66.

Demands #4 and #5 are there to ensure that I can listen to the songs I bought with my money, songs that I have a right to listen to, with as few restrictions as possible. I'm pretty sure someone could offer to sell you a hairdryer that works every day except on Fridays, but I'm also pretty sure you wouldn't buy it unless you had no other choice.

Demand #6 is there to cut through the arbitrary bullshit imposed by the industry. I could wrap my mind around export restrictions on crypto that used to be in place before, but applying similar logic to music should be unacceptable. It's as if you were granted the right to be called by your own name only in certain countries; in the rest, people will just have to point fingers at you.

I admit that demands #1 and #3 are just there to ensure a comfortable experience. Without them, things are perfectly fine, as long as I don't mind having to go buy useless physical media or finding it anywhere between hard and impossible to find music that I like in case my taste doesn't conform to that of the mainstream masses.

I'm aware that you could find flaws in most of the analogies I used above and that most of them boil down to "Yes, but these are not physical objects we talk about, it's digital stuff that can be copied endlessly, without degradation." See, that is why we're talking about evolution here and why the industry is shitting bricks. The only thing I can say on that topic is that it's not really my problem as a customer. People who ask me "how would you fix the problem, then?" are missing the point: it doesn't take a doctor to point out that someone is bleeding to death. Right now, things are bad and there's no reason not to point it out, even if you don't have a solution.

I believe my demands are reasonable. In the end, it doesn't matter much. This is, and has always been, a power struggle. It's naive to claim that this is about artists and paint it morally right or wrong. But let's pretend that it is, just for a moment. How come nobody applies to artists the same argument on which I called BS? How come nobody says "Well, then, artists should stop signing contracts with companies that keep pissing off all these people?" Why do you expect consumers to vote with their wallets -- when they can't, due to collusion in the industry -- but not the artists to vote with their feet?

If the answer is "pirates are breaking the law and the industry and artists are not", that's just legality. I've already said that piracy is illegal and nothing short of a change in laws will change that. It also used to be legal to deny rights to women and people of certain races. My point is that I feel that my rights and my freedom are being denied. Not essential, fundamental rights and freedoms. As a matter of fact, some of the rights I'm talking didn't even exist before technology enabled them to exist. That's no argument that invalidates those rights.

Think about it: we're the consumers, it's our money that the industry thrives on. Damn straight we have demands.

So you think your demands are protecting your rights, and you think you're hurting the industry that goes against them. We've established that. But these rights haven't actually been established as 'rights' - which might need to change - which makes them just consumer demands on your part. It seems to me as though we've reached the point where piracy makes them make more repressive DRM, which makes more people pirate, which gives them more legal ammo to make more repressive DRM and lobby for laws, etc. and so on to infinity or until the laws change. You can see why I don't choose to be a part of this cycle.

Besides, the reason artists sign contracts is the same reason game developers go work for companies like Ubisoft who then make their games use repressive DRM that they completely disagree with - that is the industry we have, and they'd rather be a part of it, making money and exercising their talents, than standing on the outside struggling to get by while they rage against the machine. It's not their fault the current institution is set up the way it is.

Also, I'm pretty sure if Honda sold a car that only worked on Route 66, people would just not buy it, but I feel the comparison doesn't completely do it all justice because we've long argued that physical goods are not equivalent to digital media, otherwise piracy would be stealing instead of... well, piracy.

But these rights haven't actually been established as 'rights' - which might need to change - which makes them just consumer demands on your part.

Like I said before, I'm not arguing the legality here. I'm not sure what prevents the big shots in other industries colluding to treat their customers like crap, but I don't really care whether it's laws or something else.

You can see why I don't choose to be a part of this cycle.

Of course. That's your decision. I wasn't objecting to that. I was objecting to the tone of moral superiority and implied accusations.

Smells like a false dichotomy.

It's not their fault the current institution is set up the way it is.

Not my fault, either. Let's face it, both artists and pirates have choices and a wide variety of reasons and motivators behind the choices they actually make. Yet pirates are invariably branded as bad guys, parasites and criminals, while artists are generally perceived as having no other choice. Why? On the surface, it's because piracy is not legal. Scratch a little deeper and you'll see that the real reason is because it's easy to just shrug and say "that's the way things are".

Are there pirates who are mere parasites, who just want free stuff? Of course, there's a whole lot of them. Would all of them still be pirates, even if there was a really good, cheap alternative? My anecdotal experience of human nature makes me incline towards "No, a lot of them would buy their stuff without thinking twice." But that's just me, of course.

Thing is, what pisses me off is the way entertainment industry treats people who would like to spend money and be respected in return. And yet pirates are the bad guys, just because there are laws that need to change.

Missed the point. The analogy was "Route 66 accepts only Honda", not "Honda can only run on Route 66" and the point of it was that such nonsense would not be acceptable, even if all of the car manufacturers got together with the government and made that kind of stuff legal.

Amazon answered your demands already. You can buy music via a browser, there's a large selection, it's DRM-free, you can stream or download as many times as you'd like, and you can play it while offline.

Amazon also offers a pretty fair price. $0.99 isn't a lot (and it's even cheaper per song if you buy the album). If $0.99 is too much, then I suggest the person go get a better job rather than pirating songs and feeling an entitlement to someone else's work.

... and Amazon offers this service in all countries around the world?

... and I don't need to download a 'special' piece of software to download an entire album at once (vs. requiring me to click on each individual track and download it separately)?

Oh, you're right. Maybe there's a few songs here and there not available through no fault of Amazon's. Maybe you have to download a piece of software freely available on all major platforms to download an album. Or, you know, just click buy multiple times (it doesn't take that long honest-to-goodness). But I get that since everything isn't PERFECT, you might as well go pirate everything, cause you know, that's your right.

I didn't say that it was justification for piracy. I was pointing out that your claim that Amazon met all of the parent post's 'demands' was false.

Yes, it did, except for the last one, which just happens to be crucial, since I live in Chile. Did you honestly think I did no research whatsoever? I understand when people want to discuss someone's arguments, but in order to miss checking out Amazon, I would have to be either a liar or a fool. Neither of those is an assumption on which you can base a discussion.

>> Music is so cheap. All of the original demands 10 years ago have been met. Guess what? piracy is worse than ever. It reminds me why you never negotiate with terrorists.

All the news I've read regarding streaming services (they have existed a lot less than 10 years, mind you) is that they are decreasing piracy. Do you have any other data points?

Quote: "But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine with pirating are against essentially the same thing with the GNU license"

You probably have cause and effect reversed. I'd wager that one of the biggest reasons for their wanting an enforcement of the terms of the GNU license is to show the big companies what it feels like to be in a situation where your choice is limited to one of (a) stick to the terms, or (b) don't use

  > But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine
  > with pirating are against essentially the same thing
  > with the GNU license.

Do you have actual concrete example of this? Or are you just attributing opinions to 'HN' as some sort of singular entity?

"The funny thing is" that I see claims like this all the time from both sides of the fence. "HN is just a bunch of Google apologists!" "HN is just a bunch of Google-haters!" etc...

GNU License? What? Your comparison breaks down heavily when you actually consider it. GNU software tends to be competition for proprietary/non-open software. They are substitute products.

Comparing them to music isn't really a good thing to do since you can't find a comparable substitute for Incubus's style and Brandon Boyd's voice, where as I can change out GCC compiler for Solaris Studio, Visual Studio, or ICC any day I want with minimal effort and precisely the same results.

> But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine with pirating are against essentially the same thing with the GNU license.

They could be against it because it hinders sharing, not because it violates copyright.

Haha, them be fightin' words. Better hope the EFF doesn't get wind of that! ;)

If there's a legal (or standards-organization) mandate for DRM (and there have been legislative pushes for such in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordab... to note just two such efforts) then nothing I can do will move the market.

But beyond all that, the whole "Piracy!" excuse doesn't take into account whether the proposed problem actually merits a solution, whether the proposed solution actually cures the problem, and whether the proposed solution causes more problems than it cures. "But, but, Piracy!" is just a way to whip up a confusing semantic fog around an issue, demonize a set of viewpoints, and use that demonization to pursue some kind of agenda that hardly anyone would go along with without the associated confusing and witchhunts. You're doing it yourself, subtly, by implying that I habitually "pirate" stuff, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Although I'm not a church-goer any more, I'm a citizen, and a taxpayer. I don't cuss, I obey the Law of the Sea, Canon Law, and the Laws of Thermodynamics. I do not advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and I have no conflicts of interest.

I would also like to see some proof that piracy is a huge problem. Files being available and free for download on the 'black market' does not mean that people who would pirate said files would otherwise pay for those files. It would be nice if someone did a scientific study...

Does it matter if it is a problem or not, really? As long as it is against the law, well then it can be considered a problem.

Until the law is changed that the music you demand should be free to everyone, anywhere, anytime, it is still a 'problem'. So you shouldn't be upset when websites that are profiting off of activities which are illegal get shutdown.

I think the 'problem' here is that you are equating legality with morality. Should I be concerned about the 'problem' of medical marijuana clinics (e.g. in California) profiting off of a Federally illegal substance?

I'm not equating this with morality whatsoever. I do find it quite humorous that somehow after the creation of easily distributable music due to the Fraunhofer Institue and high speed bandwith, that somehow music, movies, and television and the demand that they be accessable for free, or instantly available anywhere at any price you choose has become a 'moral' issue.

Note the movie industry is doing perfectly fine with piracy in its current state, I don't debate that. Just look at the yearly numbers: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/ not too bad IMO.

So, seeing as how they are doing just fine in the face of all this piracy, why shouldn't they try and do as much as they can to crack down on the money they think they are losing? They are doing just fine, which means there is an obvious demand for their product, so they should be trying to stop people who are eating into their profit margin, what is wrong with that? Sure you might not agree and believe that 'the man' is evil and stealing 99 cents out of every dollar that goes to your beloved band which no one has ever heard of, but it is still their right to protect their investment. It isn't an inherent right put forth in the Constitution that states you should be entertained for free, or at whatever price you choose.

I wish upon you getting pulled over for doing 56 in a 55 zone.

You're in luck:

https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577076

Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.

"Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy." (Italics are mine)

Here's a link to the actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299

Did you read the paper though?

"Taking this triple-difference [their metric for determining piracy rate] as a conservative estimate of the effect of piracy on box office sales, we infer that pre-release piracy causes the foreign box office returns for a movie to decrease by 1.3% for each week of lag between the U.S. release and the foreign release of the movie."

...

"We estimate that movies in our data would have returned a total of nearly $3.52 billion if not for piracy, implying that piracy caused films to lose $240 million in weekend box office returns in the non-US countries in our data during 2005. Thus we estimate that weekend box office returns in our data were about 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. This estimate may be conservative if the actual losses to piracy are greater than those suggested by our tripledifference estimate or if returns in the US box office are also reduced by piracy."

Also, the paper only talks about box-office sales, not even touching the DVD/Blu-ray/download market.

You really need scientific study? Just look at Napster. When something is easily available for free, the masses will choose it over paying for the exact same thing. Wouldn't you?

Yes, I do need a scientific study. When Napster came out my friends and I finally had access to hard-to-find singles and b-sides that were not available anywhere else. We also still bought tons of records. I'm looking at Napster now - it feels a lot like Pandora and Spotify. I can't take an anecdotal story from a company ('the story of Napster') and treat that as hard evidence in a fact-based argument, sorry.

Do you?

You are demonstrably incorrect. If you were right, there would be almost zero purchases of anything available on Pirate Bay. As it is, Hollywood is raking in cash.

I don't think it's that simple.

Time and reliability are strong factors as well.

If the paid service saves you time, then yeah, it'll get lots of use. What's $2 compared the time you might spend to track it down elsewhere? Let alone a clean version of it. Piracy just isn't that reliable over a long period of time. Your sources could be shut down at any moment, or even lead to unintended consequences if you're using some of the more shady websites out there.

I'd happily pay for content to get those stronger guarantees. To immediately find that thing that was recommended to me. To not have to question its integrity. And to continue to do the same thing for the next few years without needing to learn something new when I'm not ready to.

Unless you're bored / want a challenge. Boredom is a reason people pirate that's probably not really worth solving.

  > Boredom is a reason people pirate that's
  > probably not really worth solving.

There's also hoarding urges. If everything is free, it's possible to have a huge comprehensive collection of films, tv, etc. More than one could ever actually watch.

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get.

Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the informational sense, only free is hard to monetize in a world of Pirate Bay self-righteousness, where mass piracy is accepted and even praised. I'm told that Sirius XM already has a mathematical key revocation technique that's uncrackable, though I'm also told they haven't used it because a general crack to their radios isn't around yet.

We're approaching the world of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"[1]. A world in which piracy is acceptable isn't a world of free stuff for everyone--it's a world where content is locked down, or never made at all. A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time. Then it will be so long to fair use, to reasonable sharing, to grey-market cultural exports.

This world will happen because people want to buy the best, latest, greatest, biggest budget music, movies, apps, and so on. Confronted with this, piracy advocates theorize a Marxian post-scarcity paradise where all content creators do it for the love of content creation, where people have woken up and thrown off the shackles of capitalist big content. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Are trying to imply that deep down everyone inherently would choose theft over remuneration? Or that we all would prefer a world where everything is free?

Piracy exists sorely due to bad business models, where it is distribution of expected value of a product; Teens aren't going to pay $300 for Microsoft Office to use for 3 hours the night before a paper is due, I don't want to have DRM on my music.

If your opinion was the case we'd see businesses burning to the ground, which we aren't. We're seeing business like Spotify, BandCamp, Steam, Kickstarter, HumbleIndieBundle all flourishing.

I have to disagree, piracy does not only exist due to bad business models. Back in the day, it was generally more convenient to buy a tape instead of copying it from a mate. While convenience/"bad" business models is a big part of the reason for piracy it is by no means the sole reason for it. E.g. people love collecting stuff, but could not rationalise to pay for it. There are people with multiple TB's of music/films/books/pictures that they never consumed, just because collecting it is their only interest.

Also, the Microsoft office Student example is obviously flawed. Office costs $300, if the student cannot/does not want to pay, he CANNOT USE it. There is absolutely NO business flaw on Microsoft's side there, except that their pricing might be a little to high for students. Maybe students are not their target group then. (I only use MS Office in this example because it is a response, students however can of course use the >FREE< MS Office (with ads) for their 3h-late-night-project).

No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

Piracy exists because easily replicable goods are not available to some people, price is just one of many possible reasons for this unavailability -- look at tv, shows from free-to-air channels are being pirated in millions(!) of copies every week.

> A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean by a 'content lockdown', but as I read it, I couldn't disagree more with this statement - how could we ever have a perfect content lockdown?

The question of intellectual property is moot. It is impossible to adequately police teh intertubes without outlawing encryption.

Why do the media companies insist on continuing to attempt the impossible, instead of cutting their losses and investing in distribution infrastructure? By pursuing the kind of ham-fisted, extra-legal "piracy fighting" that the article describes, they are doing themselves a huge disservice. Strong-arming internet users, interfering with judicial processes, and pushing unpopular bills doesn't do a whole lot to stop piracy, but it does promote the view of the media industry as a mafia.

"The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was." [Article]

Every time something like this happens, more people who in-principle support the idea of intellectual property become hostile towards media lobbies and companies they represent. Instead of trying to win the "hearts and minds" of internet users, they are turning "convenience pirates" ideological and legitimizing the very fears that push internet rights-activists in the same camp as the "ideological pirates".

i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones?

i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it.

and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster.

people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder.

why am i wrong? ;)

Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it couldn't be.

Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the Gnutella superpeers'.

you ignored the problem i saw with it. if there's no public component to it and people would only share with their friends, the availability of piracy would be severely limited.

and if there is, the content industry could still get their "spies" in.

They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.

OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal.

As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population.

This would allow anyone to effectively teleport into any house/shop or workplace, take what they wanted and leave with an extremely low chance of being caught (yes, I know piracy isn't theft etc etc, that's not my point here).

Would this then make the entire concept of owning anything that could be easily carried by a person obsolete?

It's a weird hypothetical, but I think it would: if you need something, just teleport and grab it. With the exception of personalized items (basically just my computer these days), I don't care much if somebody takes something I own given that I could get something equivalent easily.

As long as the technology was symmetric (that is, everybody had equal access to it), I think it would just make allocation of most items more efficient. Why should I own a hammer that I use once a year if I can just grab it from somebody who isn't using it at the moment? And then they could grab one from somebody else when the time came.

The issue with personalization actually has a parallel in the IP--there is copyright and then there is privacy; the two are different and it is eminently reasonable to support one but not the other.

Now, there would be some issues with your hypothetical world (e.g. who would produce stuff in the first place?) but I do not think they would be insurmountable. So yes, I think that would make owning small impersonal items obsolete.

Your analogy is like almost all of them flawed, in that it is missing to contain the specific characteristics of the thing in question. You yourself state that, so what is the point? That not all possible things should be done and that's why the industry shouldn't have to change? Please.

But more importantly: that is not the main argument. The article, as i read it, is about the corruptness created by the refusal of industry to change. If the industry controls the US, and the US dares to control Sweden, and the justice-system is not working because of that control, than it is not longer about entertainment. It is about force and control. It's about

  If you don't give up before you're sued, they corrupt the legal system.

Not much of a Wired fan, but here's the video to that article:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-w...

Edit: forgot to add the link

I can't really get behind someone that:

1) makes money on advertising on top of other people's copyrighted material 2) starts a service for donating money and then charges a 10% transaction fee. Even Paypal isn't that bad.