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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people. That's pretty much the highest impulse a human has, right up there with "protect your offspring".

As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy.

Copyright is a subsidy to distributors, not artists. And the distributors know it. There's no need to protect the business model of content distributors in a world that has the Internet.

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> I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people. That's pretty much the highest impulse a human has, right up there with "protect your offspring".

I don't think you can assert this without providing some backup. It's certainly the case that sharing certain information with certain parties is a high impulse, but the idea that we have a strong impulse for all information to be shared freely is highly unintuitive to me, merely based on my experiences.

Furthermore, that something is an impulse does not make it ethical. We have many impulses (sex, food, violence), and acting on them unquestioningly would lead to many unethical things. We also do not categorically say that all of these impulses must be fulfilled in an ethical society. For example, most people would not agree that I have a certain right to act violently at times, because of my violent impulses.

> As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy.

That's not what a monopoly is. A monopoly would be if only company could “create” culture. (Or if it was group, it'd be an oligopoly, but I'd still understand your point.) But we're not in that situation. Especially with the internet, we're not in that situation. Anyone can create culture, and they have the ability to choose how exclusive it is. I would guess, though I can't back this up, that at this point in history we have more free culture than ever before. We have the opposite of a monopoly on our culture.

> Copyright is a subsidy to distributors, not artists. And the distributors know it. There's no need to protect the business model of content distributors in a world that has the Internet.

It's both, and why shouldn't it be? The studio executives behind making Game of Thrones play their part just as George RR Martin and Aidan Gillen do. There is an argument to be had that perhaps the compensation for these roles is skewed relative to their importance, but I don't believe that argument would lead to “therefore, no one has any right to make money on Game of Thrones.”

It isn't a 'human right' to be able to watch Game of Thrones or Batman Begins without paying for it I don't believe. It is ignorant to try and claim otherwise.

Is it a 'human right' to make money off of Game of Thrones or Batman Begins?

Copyright is a monopoly granted by congress' interpretation of the constitution's directive to promote progress of science and the useful arts. I think it's time to reinterpret.

>Is it a 'human right' to make money off of Game of Thrones or Batman Begins?

Is it a right to make money off of Game of Thrones? No. Is it their right to charge for content they've created? In my opinion, yes.

I am a huge advocate of open source software. I'm not an advocate of taking other peoples' software and forcing it to be free, against the creators' wishes.

Sharing a book, or facts from a library or notes from a university lecture is one thing. Downloading a copy of a movie, a video game, or software is another.

Let's say you made a startup that, rather than SaaS, actually wrote a thick client. They're cool, so let's make it easy and say it's DRM-free. Let's say it's a cool, new IDE.

You spent the last year of your life working on this IDE, and you see that it's up on The Pirate Bay. Sure, at first you'll probably be flattered. Then you realize, wait a minute, this is getting 1000x the downloads my actual product is getting. Maybe your sales increase as a result of the "free marketing," but that is the best case scenario.

If sales don't increase, you've worked hard and not been compensated. Do I think that most movies (especially in theatres) are overpriced and a rip off? Hell yeah I do, which is why I spend my money on Netflix which seems more sanely priced.

You don't have a right to all the software you want without paying the people who made it; you don't have a right to watch the latest movies and TV shows without paying the people who created them; you don't have a right to listen to that new CD in the store without paying the artists.

I think that big business/media generally rips off consumers. I don't think that pirates are evil; I think that they're desperate and that business needs to adjust to their needs. Have I ever pirated computer games? Sure. But when Valve's Steam became more convenient to use than a badly cracked torrent, that became my number one resource for games.

I used to pirate movies because renting or buying them was such a pain in the ass. With iTunes rentals and Netflix, that problem has been solved too.

If you want to make a stand, maybe against DRM with which you disagree, do so by purchasing from people who are making a stand too; for example, I hope you bought Louis C.K.'s $5 DRM-free show a couple of months ago.

>Copyright is a monopoly granted by congress' interpretation of the constitution's directive to promote progress of science and the useful arts. I think it's time to reinterpret.

How do you suggest we reinterpret? Should everyone get everything they want for free? Should all the tech startups that we read about on Hacker News and root for have no business model, because charging for software or media is so wrong? We live in a capitalist society, and in order to "reinterpret" science and arts as free-for-all, we'd need to completely reorganize our economic system.

I'm not saying that we've got it down perfectly (in fact, I'd say the opposite), so I'm open to your suggestions and ideas.

> How do you suggest we reinterpret? Should everyone get everything they want for free?

A Kickstarter-type patronage model would work: the creators of Game of Thrones ask for funding for a new series, then release it directly into the public domain.

We are seriously looking into that.

I don't believe it would be wise for movies.io itself to engage into business (and profiting from content we don't own would definitely be unethical, from my point of view), but what we could do is work with a third-party platform that allows the financing of small productions (Movies, TV shows), and have a partnership with us so they are featured / show up in our results etc.

Exciting stuff happening there with the right partners, please contact us if you have leads.

This will eventually be perceived as holding [Game of Thrones] hostage until there is enough money in their Kickstarter account.

Ah, the false dichotomy that there are no other options between piracy and purchase.

> If sales don't increase, you've worked hard and not been compensated.

That's the same thing that would happen if nobody downloaded it for free but only a few people purchased it.

>That's the same thing that would happen if nobody downloaded it for free but only a few people purchased it.

Agreed. In that case, I think it would make sense to conclude "there is little to no interest in my app," instead of "people want my app but would rather not pay for it."

Yeah, there's a continuum of

don't want > I'll take it > I'd pay for it

My point was that copyright is not a matter of rights, it is a matter of business.

If I am going to spend a year of my life developing something I intend to sell, I should make sure it's a good idea not only to make it, but also to try and sell it in a form like a fat client. If I do it anyway and no one buys it, regardless of the reason it was bad business.

Nobody weeps for the carriage makers because we like our cars. No one will weep for the media makers who couldn't adapt to the new market forces.

Treating piracy as anything other than a force of nature will only leave you drowned when the DRM dam breaks. All the examples you cite of being willing to pay content distributors are examples of businesses who have adapted to the new realities of the market.

I don't think businesses should be forced to give away things for free, I just think they don't need artificial monopolies in order to profitably contribute to science and the useful arts.

There used to be a dial on that particular machine that could be rationally set somewhere between "always free" and "locked away from society forever". Some very unethical people paid a lot of bribe money to crank it all the way up and then rip the knob off. We don't need to "reinterpret", we just need to use it like it was intended in the first place.

I actually do believe it is a human right to have access to all the art and knowledge. Other people seem to think so too, thats why we have public libraries. I don't know what the solution here is but good things are happening like Spotify were people have the ability to expand their minds, listen to something new and support the artists at the same time. We probably wouldn't have had Spotify without the threat of piracy.

It's contested whether Spotify really supports the artists though.

And that's because artists have crappy deals with their record labels.

No offense to you personally, jellicle, but why is this the top comment and why can't I downvote it? This is more of a tangential provocative comment than a response.

This is a rather extreme argument. You really think the impulse to share is universally stronger than the impulse to be secretive, the exact inverse, for example? Specifically, what about private data?

How far does this ethical obligation to share go? How much effort is one ethically obligated to expend to share? Before I knew what I was doing with HTML and CSS, some stuff I did didn't work due to what I am now quite sure were browser bugs. Was it unethical for me not to share that knowledge? Is it unethical now for me not to be trying to figure out how to reproduce those bugs again to share?

Is it unethical for artists, writers, coders, even mathematicians not to share unfinished works, code and proofs?

> No offense to you personally, jellicle, but why is this the top comment and why can't I downvote it?

It's the top comment because HN's formula(votes, time lapsed) ranked it highest; and you can't downvotte replies to your comments.

It's interesting that, today, it seems most ignored creative people would be content with merely getting and, for a spell, keeping some small part of the world's attention. To be richly compensated is really just a bonus.

That said, I suppose one nice thing about getting money is that it will stick around even after the spotlight goes elsewhere.

Bullshit and you probably know it. You are not just destroying monopolies, but independents too.

>I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people.

How about your personal data ace?

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