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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

I hope that one day all this talk of property and whether piracy is stealing or not isn't needed any more because people have RESPECT for each other and their work, enough respect that if someone wants to sell their work they can without worry it will be taken by people who didn't pay. If an artist, musician, game developer, programmer etc creates something and wants to sell it for $100 nobody will take it without paying, if they want to give it away for free instead of charging that should be their choice.

Piracy shouldn't be a crime like murder or pyshical theft, but it should still not be something that is accepted by society, it's disrespectful to the creator of something. It should be the creators choice and consumers should respect that.

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In the US (where pg lives and the MPAA/RIAA are based), the only reason that anyone is allowed any intellectual property protection is to advance society:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The obvious way that this works is that authors are motivated to create because they have the exclusive right to sell their creation (and thus make a profit). That seems pretty OK to me.

However, no amount of money is going to be able convince Mr. Lennon and Mr. Harrison to get the band back together. So, why are we still paying for that content? How is that advancing the arts? Would giving current creators the ability to use the entire back catalog of the Beatles without any cost or legal hassle advance the arts more? I would argue yes.

I can't find an article for this, so sorry, maybe someone can, but I believe that the majority of books go out of print rather quickly. However, we're not allowed to copy them freely. When those books go out of print, we're taking society backwards. They're impossible to acquire legally. That's really bad.

We need a balance. I think five to ten years would be fine. Opening up access to a new generation of small creators is better than providing further income to the JK Rowlings and Paul McCartneys of the world. They're already rich by that time anyways.

This comment will get lost in the chorus of "no, selling art is like warping society to charge money for smells!" but I want to chime in to say I agree with you completely; normally I'd just upvote, but that won't suffice here for obvious reasons.

You're oversimplifying things. Copyright is about way more than requiring people to pay to listen to music or watch movies. There are other interests that need to be balanced, such as the ability to create new works based off existing works, and the ability to preserve works for posterity. Copyright has to be a compromise between the artist's interests and the public interest. You can't just create a legal framework that absolutely enforces the artist's wishes.

I agree. I'm not suggesting there's no merit to the argument that the RIAA/MPAA have an antiquated business model, but the way we usually get there is odd. People don't want to pay for it. Now they have a way to not pay for it. Thus, the old business model is broken. Of course, if the business model is broken and you want to make a principled stand, you shouldn't consume the content. But that's rarely what happens. Instead, it's just used a scapegoat to do whatever it is we want on some whacked out moral high ground. I wish people would just be honest about their intentions. At least then we can have a philosophical disagreement.

Maybe, but you're really pushing water uphill there. Literally everyone I know has several illegal copies of something, and don't think twice about it. The idea of sharing content is pretty deeply ingrained. Just think of lending books or a DVD. In terms of lost sales it is exactly the same is copying a DivX.

EDIT: To clarify: I'm not saying artists shouldn't get paid, only that was has traditionally been purchased is essentially access. Changing that mindset is likely to be difficult.

Can't agree more. I thought we all agree on contract law, and respect each other's work. Apparently people here ignore it completely just for the convenience of watching some stupid movies and musics for free. Really?

The way you hurt media people will eventually hurt software people. If you don't like the authors' terms, please don't be a lazy consumer, be a producer yourself, and offer your work for free, if you think that would be better to society.

Greedy people sucks.

Respect? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I hope that one day comments like mine aren't needed anymore because people on Hacker News have RESPECT for each other's comments and don't down vote reasonably valid perspectives like yours until they are hard for me to see.

Also, I don't know if its wise or not, but there's a middle ground between Pirace not being a crime at all ,and Piracy being a crime like murder or theft. Piracy shouldn't be a criminal offense, but it could still be a civil offense.

Would things be really bad if the punishment for pirating a movie was 4 times the ticket price? "Ok, you got me, I'll pay my $28 to disney."

"Artists should be able to dictate whatever terms they want" is by no means a reasonably valid perspective. It's a selfish, naive perspective, the dismissal of which is literally the first step in creating a reasonable copyright system.

How is it selfish and naive? The rights to the content should belong to the creator (unless they transfer them) and they should dictate the terms surrounding the use and consumption of the content they created.

Would it not be more selfish of you to say "I'm going to download that persons video game without paying even though they want me to pay!" than it is to say "I made this game, so I want people to pay me $20 to play it. If they don't pay, they're not allowed to play."

You shouldn't have any right to the work of others.

Your rights are worthless unless our courts help you enforce them. Why should anyone ever bother to serve on a jury in a suit you bring against someone who did something you don't like with your idea? Why should our tax dollars fund that legal framework? What's in it for the rest of us?

You aren't entitled to use the government as your personal regulatory agency - that's a privilege granted to you the artist in exchange for limitations and guarantees designed to ensure that society can also benefit from your work in ways that you may not approve of.

> Why should our tax dollars fund that legal framework? What's in it for the rest of us?

Isn't it contradictory to want to copy what a content creator produces and then deny that the content itself has value?

Which is it, does the thing have value that makes others want to copy it so it's worth respecting that content as property of the creator, or is it valueless and there's no need to copy it in the first place?

You can't really have it both ways. If the content is worth copying then it obviously has value so it's worth it for society to protect that value. Not protecting that value means dis-incentivizing content creators.

What is that value? Well, like with everything else, that's a negotiation between the buyer and the seller. For mass-market products, that means that the seller sets a price and the buyer makes a purchase or no-purchase decision based upon the price and the perceived value of the thing being purchased.

Once again, we're talking mostly about entertainment content here.

In weighing the societal benefit of the content creator vs the pirate who wants to have a system that would deprive that content creator of any means of earning money from his work -- guess to which party society will probably always attach more value.

So as a person who funds creation of content that I enjoy, I have to ask you: Why should my tax dollars fund your legal framework?

A good idea is worthless if nobody ever thinks it, and it's value to society increases as it is shared with more people. This is completely opposite from the economics of scarce goods: once a good idea has been discovered, the macroeconomic optimum strategy is to eliminate as much as possible barriers to spreading that idea, so that everyone can benefit. Hoarding information may let you increase the price, but it doesn't increase or protect the value. "price=value" isn't a definition; it is only true for scarce goods in a competitive market. Would the Pythagorean Theorem be more valuable if you had to pay a fee to use it?

And no, we're not just talking about entertainment here. It's impossible to objectively separate entertainment content from more "important" ideas like Uncle Tom's Cabin or even geostationary orbits (popularized by a sci-fi author). It's also impossible to fully separate copyrights and patents, since they have the same legal foundation and purpose.

I would agree that a good idea has more value across the society if it's shared. So that's one part of the equation.

What about the other parts? Why would you want to kill the incentive for working on good ideas by preventing their creators from having control over them for a time after they create them? The capitalist system has shown over and over that financial incentives drive progress more quickly and more surely than any other system ever devised by any society on earth. Content creation isn't magically different.

Further, why would you so callously wrest away control of someone's labor? That person who created that thing has a meritorious right to benefit from that labor. To ignore that person's right to the benefits of his labor is to enslave him in a society of forced egalitarianism. It's basically, morally wrong, and it always seems to go hand-in-hand with ruthlessly authoritarian communist regimes... and there are reasons for that.

I'm not advocating the complete repeal of copyright and patent law. I actually think that the constitutional provision for such laws is exactly right. What I'm trying to point out is that copyright and patent rights are not the natural order of things, and that without specific enactment, it is not the default state of the law, and that exclusive control over ideas is not something that authors and inventors should take for granted.

Any useful copyright system must be a balance of competing interests, and it is not in any way tyrannical to suggest that the authors should not win by default and then go on to use public resources to enforce their own rules for how their ideas can be applied or disseminated.

Imagine a world in which Harlan Ellison wins every lawsuit he files. That would be horrible.

Ideas are inert. What is called "control over ideas and labor" is really control over other people who wish to use and build on them, and that is at best a necessary evil we should minimize.

Ideas are fairly different than books, or movies, or Emacs, or MacOS X, though, aren't they?

Not really. I'm using "ideas" here as a substitute for the term "intellectual property", which includes copyrights and patents. The term encompasses a range of abstractness, but how abstract an idea is doesn't change the fundamental lack of natural scarcity or the property of having more value when more widely disseminated.

Serious answer: "a good idea" is something you can describe in a paragraph, or a few pages. A book is something that takes months or years to write, and may well be something read for pleasure, and thus does not have many positive externalities as per your comment above. IP is something you've got to be specific about: software patents are different from biotech patents which are different from copyrights on various things, which are all different from trademarks (which no one seems to complain about all that much).

Snarky answer, which I feel somewhat guilty about including, but I liked it too much to erase it: if you can't spot the difference between an idea and a book, perhaps exposure to more of both would be beneficial to you.

No hard feelings, I guess I owe you a beer.

The conciseness with which an idea can be expressed is in no way related to the amount of work that went in to developing the idea, or the potential value of the idea to society.

FYI, trademark law is not based on the same constitutional foundation as copyright and patent law, and serves a different purpose, and is typically dealt with much more pragmatically than copyright and patent issues, so it's seldom relevant to the same discussions.

The producer of a good sets the price, it's that simple. You don't have to buy it, especially not with a luxury good like media.

If it were a monopoly on grain that's another matter.

The producer can certainly set the price, but can they attach other strings? The first-sale doctrine says no, except where explicitly allowed.

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