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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

Piracy is a moral imperative. The internet was supposed to be free and break down barriers. Instead what we have now is a show available in the UK but not available in the US. This is not acceptable.

This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means the flag will fly high till companies learn.

Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are systems which will make sure you get 4k streams based on any genre you enjoy. New shows from around the world. No need to wait for Netflix to add it to your countries playlist that to hidden behind garbage UX.

At the end of the day it is about availability, user control, artist benefits and showing the middle finger to large corporations.

That is the hacker mindset. That is what I grew up with in the early 2000s and it is substantially better than what we are "supposed" to do now. Hope that makes sense.

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No, it absolutely isn't a moral imperative, quite the reverse.

I don't know where you get the idea that the internet was "supposed" to be "free" or why the fact that a global transport network for information exists implies that everything transported over it should not require any payment.

The logical endpoint of your position is that you will get what you pay for: content that costs almost nothing to produce.

The irony here is from their post history they are a business owner that made 4m in profits last year. Guess it’s a moral imperative to steal from them eh?

you picked up the wrong definition of "free".

They meant free as in freedom.

The internet being free was a 90s cyberpunk ideal. Those ideas were not very well thought out to say the least.

Note the first paragraph - it's not payment (or lack thereof) that is being called into question. It's a matter of availability. Despite the streaming companies' worldwide reach they can't (or won't bother to) get the rights to stream content to different countries.

You are right, I misread the point being made. I still think piracy is the wrong thing to do, and definitely not a moral imperative.

I do agree that restricted availability is one of the key drivers though.

I did once pirate a second series of a TV show when it was not possible to stream it in my country (after I exhausted every possible way to pay for it). These days I just wait to buy DVDs and stick them on Plex. Takes a bit longer but it's not that urgent, and I'm not dependent on a streaming service to access it.

My 12 year old self would agree with you. But I was still opening and closing my friends CD ROM drives at 12 also exposing their home computers to anyone who knew what port to scan. Yeah it was fun but I didn’t fully grasp the consequences at the time. The consequences of piracy are severe to the pirate and to the artist. The true spirit of a hacker is indeed an artist … Someone who questions societal norms in expression of their skills that paints their insight or dissonance for the rest of us to enjoy. In this case your moral imperative is cognitive dissonance. If you find a way to pirate and directly support the artist (cutting out the corporations you hate) that would be more of a moral imperative but also ignoring the importance of the suits that support the artist financially, legally, and pragmatically.

I don’t understand how it follows that if artists are paid a pittance, then the moral thing to do is to still consume their content - while depriving them of revenue from residuals.

They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it. Is it immoral to not watch something that gives someone residuals? Do you owe them residuals just because they made something?

You are using the age old argument of “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway, so they won’t get anything from me either way”

This is just a roundabout way of excusing stealing. If the creator of something says “if you want to view my work, you must pay me a dollar”, then yes it is stealing (immoral) if you view it without paying. The context around it as to whether you would’ve watched it anyway is irrelevant.

Apply the same logic to literally any other item and your argument falls apart (I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway so they’re not really losing money from me)

I would be curious to know what percentage of pirated movies are actually watched. I think a lot of people download things because they are available and might look interesting, but then never watch it. Does the steeling happen when the content is acquired or consumed? If someone isn’t going to watch it, even when it was free, did they steal anything?

With a chocolate bar there is a physical good that could have been sold to someone else, but instead a new one needs to be produced to sell to someone else. This isn’t the case with digital files.

It doesn't matter how many times you can sell the same item. If someone spent time and money producing something, no matter how small, and they dictate they want $x for you to own/consume it, then you are stealing if you don't give them $x for it.

In terms of "when" it's stolen re downloading vs watching, I would say when you download it personally as you now have access to the content without paying.

> If someone spent time and money producing something, no matter how small, and they dictate they want $x for you to own/consume it, then you are stealing if you don't give them $x for it.

Not quite. It's not stealing unless they are deprived of the original item (this is not to be confused with the money they think it is worth if they sell it or "sell" it). What is happening is copying, not stealing.

You are depriving them of revenue, it is stealing.

I have $1000. Currently, I am not giving it to you, and am therefore actively depriving you of this money. Is this stealing?

You're using a false analogy. You're trying to make a parallel between not paying for an item/produced good and simply not giving someone money in an attempt to downplay not paying for created material.

Both of these have a common element:

A: "Not giving someone money for an item/produced good"

B: "Not giving someone money"

B can apply to a near infinite number of cases. A is one case that is "within" B. So... the root meaning is the same. If you call A stealing, you have to call B stealing, but that's ridiculous because, for example, each day, I literally don't give money to the entire world. According to your logic I would owe the whole world population the value of every item/produced good.

It’s not though:

* It’s definitely not stealing in the legal sense of the term, which requires a party to be deprived of physical property that they own.

* It’s also not in the colloquial sense of the term, because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web, taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber, or countless other activities that could be considered “depriving someone of revenue.”

In the US, we do in fact have a legal term for the crime at play here — but the term is copyright infringement, not “stealing” or “IP theft” or whatever other stupid label the content cartels want to apply to it.

> because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web

Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.

>taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber

Yeah no, it's in the name...FREE TRIAL. It's literally given out for free.

>content cartels

Yes how dare companies/people want to get paid for their creative works, must be a cartel.

> Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.

I think I made an error here by assuming that every reader of Hacker News would be at least somewhat pro-adblocking.

So since you appear not to be, let me ask you:

* Do you use any ad blocker at all? If yes, can you define precisely when ad blocking is stealing and when it is not?

* If I visit a random website with ads, and I don't have an adblocker, the ads on that site may be used to track me across other sites, build a profile of me to sell to data brokers, serve me malware, bog down my system resources with audio, video, crypto-miners, and other garbage, or a myriad of other undesirable things. Would you consider any of these things to be the website (or the ad network) stealing from me? At what point, if any, does the website's right to extract revenue from me end and my right to privacy/security begin?

> Do you use any ad blocker at all?

With your second question:

Tracking - Tracking isn't stealing, that's a privacy question.

Building a Profile - I mean not stealing but also vague so not sure what's the point of trying to argue this one? Like if you keep going with this line of thinking you end up with "you looked at me funny which made me feel weird so you're stealing by stealing my joy". (Absurd example but trying to show how abstract arguments don't end up working) Then we would probably loop back to fallacy of composition.

Malware - Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.

Bogging down your resources/other garbage - I mean idk, case by case basis.

You keep trying to paint with broad strokes but that's not how these things usually work. In my original example, it works because it's a simple transaction the artist wanted. Pay me 1$ for my art and you can view it. They created it privately with the intent of selling, and by downloading it for free, you're breaking that intent and depriving them of potential revenue.

> Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.

I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence. So that is actually the primary reason why I use adblockers, and blocking the visual noise is just a nice side effect.

How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker? AFAIK there's no way for me to know ahead of time when and on what site malware will be served.

I'm sorry if you think I'm painting in strokes that are too broad -- I'm trying to understand your viewpoint here. I would also like to be clear that I do think copyright infringement is a thing, and in your example of "pay me $1 and you can view my art," viewing the work and not paying is ethically dubious and probably could be considered copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. I just vehemently object to it being called "stealing" as you've done here.

> I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence.

I would love to see a source of a large company like CNN knowingly serving malware in the guise of ads. I've never heard of that but I'm all ears; I feel like it would be big news if CNN knowingly put a crypto miner on your device.

> How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker?

I don't know but also now you're committing a fallacy known as "Irrelevant conclusion". Yes, there's a genuine question on how you can block malware without depriving website owners of their ad revenue, however it's irrelevant to the original argument of whether blocking ads is stealing (which we've somehow come to from a piracy argument but whatever). The argument becomes "Is blocking ads stealing when some of them give me malware", but that's separate from "Is blocking ads stealing".

Alternatively you might be trying to argue "but I block ads because some of them give me malware" which can be an appeal to pity[2], but I don't think you're trying to go that far.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity

Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies! I should just change my username to fallaciousgoats.

How about this: I didn't use the word "knowingly" anywhere in my statement, and in fact I have no earthly idea whether the countless examples [1][2][3][4] of malware being served via ad networks on major websites was done knowingly. My guess is it wasn't?

So you've got the beginnings of a straw man fallacy here, questioning an argument that I never actually made.

If you'd like to learn more about why malware shows up on cross-site ad networks, there's a good quick read available at [5].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550808

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

[3] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/01/18/google-ads-increa...

[4] https://blog.fox-it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-...

[5] https://theconversation.com/why-bad-ads-appear-on-good-websi...

> Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies!

Ad hominem

Haha good one!

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, and you've broken them in other threads too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695587 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539273 ).

We have to ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, that would be good.

I apologize; I’ll review the guidelines and try to do better next time.

You're back at the start again though - if I wasn't going to buy it, then the vendor hasn't lost anything if I steal it. All that happens is I gain a free experience I would otherwise not have had.

Except because you now actually went out, downloaded/took it, and experienced it, it implies there was a non 0 interest in the work, therefore there is lost possible revenue since you might have eventually went and bought the work.

It's also possible I might not have bought the work. There's no sale until money changes hands.

If you run a store, and a customer shows interest in a product and physically touches it is he/she stealing if she chooses not to buy it? Let's say it's perfume, and the customer samples some of the perfume, then decides not to buy it. The customer has experienced it; if the customer doesn't buy the perfume, is that stealing?

You are stealing... what, exactly?

(It’s not stealing any thing at all)

If you want to read this comment, which I created, you owe me $100.

Okay, now pay up. If you don’t, you’re stealing from me.

> I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway

> Please take a logic class before you commit a really basic fallacy.

Agreed.

Work on the chocolate bar analogy some more, especially the part about how it's still there after digital video pirates steal it.

Thanks for actually contributing instead of being obtusely sarcastic...ah wait.

It's interesting that people devalue a good just because it's digital on a tech focused website named HackerNews lol.

> Apply the same logic to literally any other item and your argument falls apart (I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway so they’re not really losing money from me)

The rest of your argument notwithstanding, that's because stealing chocolate bars is zero sum, whereas copying films is not.

> They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it.

That doesn’t make the actions equivalent.

And in OP’s case, it certainly doesn’t given him any moral authority to speak for the plight of the artists.

I’d be curious if he’s spoken to any of these artists, on the best way to support them. Somehow I doubt most of them will be appreciative of the moral stand the OP is taking here.

> They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it.

Someone dying of natural causes and someone being murdered both end up with the person dying, that does not mean they're the same thing.

If I watch a movie at a friend's house, do I have to somehow compensate the studio for the privilege? Did I rob those poor artists of residuals every time I rented a DVD from Netflix and Blockbuster before it? They after all rented me a physical artifact under the first sale doctrine. They didn't have to pay the studios anything for rentals. Their compensation to the studios ended at their original purchase of the DVD.

If renting DVDs or watching a movie at a friend's house doesn't magically rob artists of residuals, then neither does piracy. In each case I am not purchasing a movie yet I am able to watch it.

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