Hacker News Reader

Comment by obiterdictum | Hacker News Reader

OK, so, it's that post.

Consider the following cases:

1. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not releasing source code.

2. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it without the artist getting compensated.

3. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of Facebook/Groupon and whatnot).

4. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested site.

In all these cases, noone lost any money when bits got copied (in fact, sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK. I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see the cognitive dissonance.

View on HN

I think one big difference is right there in the word "company" that comes up in each of those examples (or the equivalent "site"). Companies are inherently profit-motivated, so every one of those examples is something done to make money, and we often draw a moral line at profiting from something.

Just starting from the idea of individuals rather than companies, it's easy to come up with a bunch of competing examples which are just as clear cut:

1. A person loans their copy of a new single-player video game to a friend.

2. A person goes to a gallery opening, which is funded by art sales. They look at the art, but it isn't that interesting to them, so they don't buy anything.

3. A new movie comes out. A person likes the story, but they already read the (public domain) book, so they skip it in the theater. A couple months later, a friend gets the DVD from the library and invites everyone over.

I won't belabor the point any more, I'm sure you get what I'm saying. This isn't to justify piracy necessarily, just to point out there's more going on here than pure cognitive dissonance; yes, there is a clear double standard around intellectual property, but it's because intellectual property is a complex issue to people.

I've been thinking about this issue recently... I've come to a conclusion: I don't support copyright in it's current form (at all, in any situation). I think it should be similar to the patent system - the knowledge/information is shared for free with all the world, but the commercialization of the idea is limited - you shouldn't be able to make money using copyrighted stuff, but private persons should be able to copy it at will. The alternative would be, as with the patent system, to never release your idea to the public, but keep it private instead.

Perhaps a more relevant analogy would a hypothetical popular newspaper example: you can buy it at the local store of some countries on the day of release, or if you live in those country where you can access them online for free or included with your TV subscription, you're fine. But if you don't live in said country and the newspaper doesn't distribute to you, or it gets to you some months late and it's old news by then, you might go looking for other access avenues. You'd very much like to get todays news so you can participate in the global discussion.

Have we not already come to the agreement that the problem is not piracy, but the lack of access in our new global arena? None of us here would be so naive as to believe that piracy will end when each of us have access regardless of our geographical location, but at least then we will be able to have a real conversation about it.

Nobody in my household has pirated even one track since the advent of Spotify in our lives. I know it's not the best sample size, and it's only anecdotal, but I suspect that would be the pattern across the board if similar models became adopted for other forms of media.

Assuming Spotify is available in your country...

While technically true, frankly spotify might as well be.

While exact numbers aren't disclosed, I've seen a $0.004 per play royalty thrown around enough that it's probably at least ballpark.

But their payout is based per stream, not per track, isn't it? At amounts that still exceed that of radio?

"For a 99c sale of a track on iTunes an indie artist gets 70c. At the time you need 140 Spotify streams to make the same 70c." (Source: http://www.spotidj.com/spotifyroyalties.htm)

These figures are hardly comparable with piracy, and for an artist with a reasonable audience, should more than exceed the $.918 average royalty for a song per unit sold that record companies provided in the era of CD sales.

The Avengers has been released nearly everywhere in the world, yet it leads in terms of piracy.

The interesting thing about black/gray markets is that they crop up when demand isn't otherwise being met. So yeah, the Avengers gets pirated for one of two reasons:

1) It's not available where people want to watch it

2) It's not available for a price they want to pay

It's a fascinating problem, really. I doubt movie studios will ever be able to meet the "free" demand, but piracy in general has put all sorts of pressure on them to get movies into peoples' hands quicker. The Hunger Games was a huge hit and will be on BluRay within about 5 months of its theatrical release. It'll be out on iTunes at the same time.

Historically, this is a vast improvement. Titanic took about 10 months to go from theater to VHS. This was back in the day when places like Blockbuster had exclusive rental windows for a while too, so it was more like a year before non-pirates could purchase it for home use.

If people could reliably pirate high fidelity copies of movies between the theater and DVD releases, I suspect that timing would shrink even further.

It also leads in box office revenue, so I'm not sure that's sufficient to disprove a correlation between piracy and availability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd8BeDiHawQ

Bleh, you can get todays news if you buy your local paper. Why do you think you have a right to access the popular paper?

I would posit a challenge to you: for one month don't consume any media, read any newspapers or magazines except those available to you locally. If you live in NYC, great. If you live in Santiago or Sydney, after just a few days you'll find the global discussion quite weary as you are not privy to references, certain author's critics and reviews will not be available to you, you will start avoiding most discussions that pose a risk of exposing spoilers for your favourite series.. as an native english speaker who travels and does not have access to such things in various cities I find it very difficult not to contemplate piracy just to remain up-to-date with the few media items I care about.

An example: the Daily Show is available on the Comedy Central website, but it doesn't work well in all countries due to the nature of their streaming method (buffering.. buffering..). What level of piracy is it, to open the Daily Show website, be exposed to their ads, then actually watch it from another location? Another amusing point on this is, if you watch it in the U.S. you are presented with ads at the breaks. Watch it in Mexico: no ads.

+1. Also, I find this comment to be #2 the most ridiculous after "your business idea needs to be your passion":

"One Million page views on movies.io. In a bit more than a week. We gotta be touching something right? But what?"

This sounds so stupid. Well, giving another example, I assure you if you start selling heavy drugs on the street, you will find people willing to buy. You will find a lot of them. That does not mean you are doing something "right".

I think that this:

  We gotta be touching something right?

Is missing a comma:

  We gotta be touching something, right?

I doubt that they were implying that they were touching something correct or moral. The question mark doesn't make sense in such a case. If that's what was being said, then it would be better as:

  We gotta be touching something right, but what?

Yeah, right. Now tell me how I can legally download Pinky&Brain, or "28 days later" from Poland.

I know that from U.S. perspective it's all fine & dandy, with Hulu & Netflix letting you access movies, but most of the world has no reasonable access to a fair share of media.

Secondly, without piracy pushing for easier access, even U.S. wouldn't have legal means of downloading the movies. Hence the positive sentiment. It's sites like Movies.io that are pushing for easier access to the movies on the Internet.

Finally, the copyright establishment doesn't look at what's moral (see their support for SOPA/ACTA), they only look at what's legal. Any reason we shouldn't do the same?

Also, notice that while a sentiment towards sharing "Avengers" is "yay", a sentiment towards sharing indie artists' drm-free creations is "no" (Louis C.K case).

My impression is that it has to do with the perceived commerciality of the entity doing/facilitating the copying.

In each of these examples, the credit is obscured. In Cushman's examples, credit is preserved. Perhaps the outrage is really about lying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com