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Comment by arandomhuman | Hacker News Reader

The word "shadow library" was dropped quite a few times in this. I hate how terminology like this is used to frame discussions in favor of the publishers. At the end of the day, this is just a simple matter of exchanging information over the internet, which should be free.

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That reminds me of words like 'piracy' and 'jaywalking' - words coined by industries with vested interests in delegitimizing, demonizing and eventually outlawing perfectly normal practices. There should be a catalog of such words with attribution to the companies that made it. Similarly, there should be similar sinister sounding names for exploitative practices that industries follow - say 'mugging' for price gouging by publishers.

It's like calling file-sharing "piracy".

A guy with a PhD in marketing made a pretty penny off that one.

Bullshit is so common now. We need to take a stand against it.

I assumed the same thing as you, but I recently was made aware that the term had already been in circulation for centuries to refer to copyright violation. 1668 is the earliest entry in my OED for this usage:

> 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies...

According to wikipedia, the usage dates back centuries.

Wikipedia refers to this 1736 dictionary page: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_030pPyvwS9MC/page/n620/mo...

No marketing PhDs involved, but it probably had the same intention behind it: equating copyright infringement with horrific lawless violence and theft to try to turn people against it.

Since pirates were routinely hanged in the 18th century, presumably there was a desire to apply the same punishment for copyright infringement.

Next up on HN:

Physical theft is simply movement of atoms from one position to another position.

In file sharing, the atoms largely stay put, though some electrons and photons might move a bit.

Therefore, not theft. ;-)

If you steal baryons, it’s “theft”. If you steal leptons, it’s “piracy”. Pretty simple, really.

The electrons barely move, so you're not stealing leptons. Also, generally filesharing involves someone freely giving you copies of files, so you're not stealing from them in any case.

It's more like the "I consent, I consent, I don't" meme.

Not only that, but my joke fails when it comes to stringing up a wire alongside a high-voltage power line. (Like that urban legend about the farmer who got "free" energy by stringing the wire along his fence)

Not only is our farmer not taking the actual leptons from the power line, but he's actually stealing something from the EM field. Our farmer only has claim to his wheat field, Edison owns the EM field.

I guess particle classification is completely irrelevant to property law.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3520/is-it-poss...

If you're just going to comment with a strawman, you probably shouldn't have commented at all.

Do you pay for computer hardware and accessories? Do you pay for ISP for an internet connection? Do you pay Microsoft for Windows? Do you pay for a dropbox account? Do you pay for movies and digital media? Do you pay for books?

Why are books (and probably movies) the only one you don't pay for?

Information is not free, information requires 24/7 elecricity to be pumped through thousands of internet connected computers, manned by thousands of engineers keeping the whole thing working. The information requires thousands of writers/coders to be created.

It is a peak luxury to sit back in a Herman Miller Aeron chair in a tech company, sipping lattes and say something like 'information should be free' while millions of people are working to keep the whole charade that 10101 (binary code rising out of electricity) actually means something legible to human eyeballs at all.

Writers are just another brick in the wall, another link in the chain. Pay them like we pay everything else, that fits.

My ISP isn't funded by my taxpayer dollars and does not use said money to squat materials that it had no hand in creating. Research publishers do exactly this, while paying researchers a pittance.

I am also not convinced that this is harmful to the field whatsoever, when it has done no damage to art, music, film or video games.

They're different because the MPAA and big book publishers are actively abusing the system and their customers to fatten their bottom lines.

I gladly pay authors and creators every chance I get, but it's getting to the point where it's ethically questionable to pay a big publisher, movie studio, or streaming provider.

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