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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Of course you can steal information, there's no reason why the notion of theft ought to be limited to physical goods, we're not living in the stone age. 90% of what we do and own exists in digital form. We can take possession of it, protect it, lock it away, attribute ownership to it as much as we can do to any physical property. If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.

People just try to rationalize their behavior and play silly word games because they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.

Kant gave us a good principle, universalizability. If everyone pirated, creators would not get compensated, therefore they could not sustain themselves and it would be obvious that the value of their work is being stolen. Evidently, pirates are free-riders and their theft just isn't evident because enough people usually compensate for it.

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If everyone pirated, the only people who would create content would be people doing it purely for the sake of art or their own enjoyment, far more people would be personally involved in creating art (in music for example, there would be far more people going to see local performances if there were less music produced as mass media due to loss of profitability), mass media would be reduced and more art would be local (and still physical), increasing the richness and diversity of the media landscape.

In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.

How would you create Titanic locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make a film, especially one like that, without expecting a return?

What’s so special about that cinema? Won’t we live without it? It’s just pure entertainment. I can live without it quite all right.

That’s a whole different discussion. I was replying to a comment that seemed to suggest that we could have a remotely comparable but decentralized entertainment industry somehow.

I’m not interested in a conversation about whether we really even need entertainment, that’s a whole different premise.

It might have come out 50 years later than it did but then it might have been done thousand times cheaper made by a handful of people using appropriate technology for fun.

Does society really benefit that much by seeing piece of entertainment 50 years earlier at the cost of millions of dollars?

If making a movie about going to space costs more than actually going to space maybe you shouldn't do it and wait instead till video creation technology advances enough so that single person can do it as passion project? Maybe what copyright enables is just a pathology?

How would you create the Encyclopædia Britannica locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make an encyclopedia, especially one like that, without expecting a return?

People who want to see it created and are able to rally other people to help them of course.

That's not to say that no copyright means no way to fund big projects, you just have to collect those funds up front or rely on generosity - both of which are less likely to succeed because copyright makes the result into something you "own" rather than society and people are less inclined to fund your own private enrichment.

> If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.

I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.

Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.

Right, so when you give your credit card info to a vendor, they are free to pass it on. They have no obligation to keep it private between agreed upon parties.

It's wrong if they share it. But then they did not 'steal' the information. They shared it (wrongfully).

> they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.

It's not. A pirate is just another non-customer. There's robbing involved when someone chooses not to buy something. Watching a movie at a friend's house isn't robbing the producers of anything. Neither is buying something second hand. These are all non-customers of the original creator.

That's a huge stretch to say anyone that watches or listens to pirated entertainment would never pay for it. I wish people that use pirated entertainment would just admit that they don't want to pay for it.

It's the same stretch as saying people pirating content will never pay for it. All non-customers are simply not paying a creator for content. It doesn't fucking matter why they're a non-customer. From the perspective of a media publisher a pirate is no different than someone buying media second hand or never watching it in the first place.

If I buy a used Blu-ray I'm not giving a dime to Disney. I get to watch the Avengers all I want without ever paying them anything. They have lost nothing because I didn't take anything from them nor prevented them from selling a copy of the Avengers to someone else.

If you replaced my second hand copy of the Avengers with a pirated copy, nothing would change about the situation. Disney was deprived of nothing. The same is true if I rent it from the library, borrow it from a friend, or just never watch it. To Disney I am simply a non-customer.

If everyone pirated music, musicians would make all their income from merch and touring and it's not clear that they'd be worse off.

And if you read or watch much about all the musicians reviewing their Spotify Wrapped this year vs how much they were paid, you’d see that we’re already there. The value of their work went to music streaming services and everyone using their music in their productions, very little made it back to the creators.

It works very differently, as getting a free digital copy of anything don’t leave others without it. There’s no shortage of the product. If I steal a piece of bread from a shop, it won’t be there. If I pirate an episode of whatever tv show, it won’t disappear for others who were to buy it. Company won’t see a difference if I won’t buy the product otherwise. Even the opposite, it’s net positive for the company, as more people familiar with the product may come back to it later and buy it, or make others buy it. See Windows, Photoshop. Or for books, I may download expensive books to read, and if I see the book is worth buying, I may buy it if I can afford it. And/or I may tell others the book is great, so they will buy it. And in the end it gives the company more benefit then me not ever touching their product in the first place.

> piracy is robbing other people of their labour.

That's a coherent position, but it is also perfectly reasonable to argue that it's not because you have a copy and have not removed the original.

Edit: Note that this doesn't inherently make piracy okay, since it may deprive the owner of revenue or other benefits; there's a difference between objecting to piracy and saying that it's exactly theft.

After someone steals a movie, the studio can no longer stream that movie as they do not possess it any longer.

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