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Comment by moistgorilla | Hacker News Reader

You completely misunderstood. I'm not justifying pirating by "pretending" the publisher is a worthless middleman. Did you not read my post? Piracy is not unethical. The fact that a middleman exists gives me more incentive to not purchase through the traditional means.

Piracy is not unethical. It's not wrong. It's not stealing. If the musician wants to own the content they should simply not release it. I could care less about "respecting" the musician. Why should I pay money for low quality content when I could download the flac version for free without drm?

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Does repeating a statement as "Piracy is not stealing" make it true? Does echo-chambering the meme "Artists just ask for this" make it true after enough mindless repetition here and elsewhere?

Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?

Or could you care less? If so, why do you consider payment-or-not-download not an option? (hint: "because I can" was already answered but not considered satisfactory)

> Does repeating a statement as "Piracy is not stealing" make it true?

When it's the supreme court repeating it, that certainly make it true. [1]

> Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?

For the same reason humans have been creating art since much before the existence of copyright? The notion that we can attribute as "property" on something not tangible only appeared recently in human history [2]. While we have been creating art for much longer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

[2] Before UK monarchy started granting monopoly privilege on printed books. The common notion among humans was that knowledge cannot be owned.

8 centuries ago, Piers_Plowman said “Human intelligence is like water, air and fire – it cannot be bought or sold;”

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Plowman

2.5k years ago, Heraclitus said "the logos is common to all".

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

Not to get into the argument (if you can't understand the difference between copyright infringement and theft, good luck), but the suggestion that no one would create work without copyright is absurd.

Plenty of music is released for free, many photographers are happy just to have someone see their work, and lots of software is written with very permissive licenses.

Remember, the entire point of copyright is to benefit society by having more works available to the public. That's it. I don't believe it's proven that we need strong (or any?) copyright in order for this to happen.

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