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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing

Piracy should be more like joyriding[0] because the owner still has full control over the original :)

> "joyriding is not considered to be theft because the intent to "permanently deprive" the vehicle's owner of the vehicle cannot be proven"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyride_(crime)

That's still too pejorative, since there's no deprivation of possession/usage at all, not even temporarily.

Ex: When someone starts playing a pirated copy at home, it doesn't cause their neighbors' copy of the same movie to become unusable for the duration.

Joyriding suggests someone who owns the product loses out - they don't.

Just because you can't prove that the number of times something has been pirated is equal to the number of would be sales does not mean the person who owns the product doesn't lose out.

Parent-poster is talking about "losing out" in a specific way, where rights-holder copies would temporarily vanish or become unusable for some reason. (Which obviously doesn't happen.)

That's rather different from the definition you're using, where "losing out" is much more expansive, including hypothetical decreases in potential future sales of new copies that haven't yet been manufactured.

Trespass is the usual legal analogy, since you’re effectively using someone else’s property without permission.

But it's on a computer, so that would be hacking, which is much more serious.

The “property” being trespassed on refers to the IP not the medium it resides on. Unless you hacked someone’s computer to get access to that IP, which is a whole other matter.

Except you're not. You're using a copy of their property without permission.

If I trespass into someone's house, it's invading their personal space. If they're in the house, it's invasive to them and alarming and would probably make them afraid that I intend violence. While in the house, I may damage things or cause disruption.

However, if I use a device to create an alternate universe with a perfect copy of their house, without them inside (since it's my own private universe), and then I enter the house and do whatever in it, I'm not disrupting them at all. I'm not inside their house, I'm in my own copy of it in my own universe, and they don't even know. It doesn't affect them at all.

It’s not a copy of the copyright itself. The trespass is on the copyright, not the copy.

The disruption the trespass causes is of their sole right to license that copyright.

That sounds like overloading of the term "trespass" to me. The common definition is to physically go to places where you're not allowed to be.

not overloaded, just an older (but official definition):

archaic•literary commit an offense against (a person or a set of rules).

But the word doesn't matter so much as the intent. If enough people just copy your product you cannot sell it. Or worse, others will sell it for pennies because they didn't spend any revenue so any money is profit. That's what's trying to be prevented.

I've been reading on the topic recently and that is referred to as "criminal trespass". I want to put up signs that say "yes trespassing"

Information isn’t and can’t be property.

If you disagree, then tell me who owns the number 2.

Joyriding still deprives the owner of his property, even if temporarily.

Piracy is more like retelling someone a book you've read than joyriding.

have someone steal and abandon your car for a joyride and then tell me how you feel about joyriding not permanently depriving you of anything. you're still going to likely have to pay to pick it up from the impound, it'll be full of garbage or they'll have tossed your shit out. And then likely someone will have slept in it once they abandon it. You also won't likely have it for several days.

Or you can be like my friend who was moving to chicago, and we were at the bar the night before saying good by. Look up at the tv and lo and behold there is his car in a police chase. Could have been any car but nope his stuff was in the back window. Stolen from outside the bar. In a high speed chase. Then we watched as they took aim at and t-boned a cop car. So the car was now totaled and a crime scene. Took him several weeks to get his stuff back and actually be able to move and start his job up in chicago.

Maybe it's more like reading a newspaper over someone's shoulder, but in a sneaky fashion so they don't even know that you're doing it.

There is so much of this going around these days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39308520

Take-Two shutting down servers for games when users still have unused “in game currencies”.

I love the top comment, they point out if the currency is fictional there should be no problem with mods to add currency. "But we lose our money then!" - they cry...thought it wasn't money though, lol.

So someone hacking them and adding more currency to everyone would not be bad. Just very tiny breaking of rules. Not likely worth prosecuting at all. As in that case they would lose absolutely no money...

Piracy has, once again, become a better product than the one being sold. Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), the experience with pirated media is flat out better than anything being offered by any of the companies selling products.

Do you know what piracy doesn't give you? It lacks the torrential downpour of ads and other garbage that are relentlessly jammed in your face. I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. For example, I don't need a rotating billboard of ads on my homescreen when the hardware is barely powerful enough to keep things running. I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years.

I'm going to hack it and if I lose access to legitimate content, so be it.

In Canada, we have SportsNet for NHL broadcasts. It's terrible. Pirate streams are better (video) quality. If it comes to it, I'll pay more than SportsNet costs if I can get and ESPN stream out of the US. Think about that for a second. I'm willing to pay more than what they're charging, but the current product is so bad I refuse to give them a dollar.

If we had actually supported legal torrents we could have paid for link access, legally owned the contents of the torrents, and never ever had to worry about the files disappearing. We would have just paid for some encryption key from a distributed DRM service and there would have been none of this licensing nonsense.

In this particular space (sports streaming) I don't think piracy is any better, unfortunately. At least definitely not easier.

Piracy is frequently more difficult, yet better quality. Let's face it: using torrent search sites and dealing with a BT client isn't as easy for your grandmother as just using the built-in Netflix app on her TV.

I'm talking strictly about sport streaming. There is no "torrent search sites", just random hard-to-find websites with billions of ads (and they change frequently), or paid pirating services.

>I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want.

I got one of these too. It's fantastic: I love it! Well, compared to the competition anyway. The reason is simple: GoogleTV is Android, so you can install Android apps on it. Specifically, you can install SmartTubeNext, a FOSS YouTube viewer that blocks ads and includes SponsorBlock. You can also install Jellyfin to have streaming access to any media on your PC or other server.

>Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"),

That's a big thing to ignore. Of course every company wants to be able to serve all media for a low price (and for zero labor costs). If you need to pay for every license you own, for people to maintain your website, to maintain customer support, to translate media, for the servers to transmit media from etc. Then costs are going to add up immensely.

Pirates don't have to worry about any of that. The only catch here is that pirates are enough of a minority that they still eat their cake. If it gets too rampant, everyone loses. Tragedy of the "commons" (despite this being the exact opposite of a commons).

> I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years.

I've bought a Philips tv some 11 years ago that come with some custom-tied linux distro and bunch of smart apps - the usual stuff: weather, yt, netflix, facebook, some games and of course none of these work nowadays. Luckily there were no ads anywhere in the UI - yet, because that was just about to happen in 2-3 years.

piracy was never stealing and the word was coined by the RIAA and others instead of calling a cat a cat which is copyright infringement

piracy is not stealing because the original “copy” still exists, stealing would mean someone didn’t have something anymore

And no, money is not stolen because they never had my money to begin with

Each time I'm reading about what you wrote I'm thinking about Star Trek's teleportation 'dilemma' - whether the transporter is a killing machine or not

Piracy was already not stealing.

Glib phrasing halts thinking.

Brb going to pirate a rental car

If you pirate it like a movie they still have the car afterwards.

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