Hacker News Reader

Comment by quaunaut | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason you have pirate parties is because of your governmental systems, not because it's more popular there. First-past-the-post elections essentially force a 2-party system, where the European style has a lot more support for smaller, side parties.

This isn't to say it isn't a US centric thought- honestly, I don't know enough about Europe to say definitively. But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke.

View on HN

That's because everyone who is under 30 has grown up with the ability to download things for free. Of course entitled consumers are going to support free things for themselves. I don't expect many to actually know anything about copyright nor would I expect them to have any realistic concept of how to "fix" it.

Well ... so far we've let the "copyright experts" write our copyright laws, and they've shown total willingness to burn the internet to the ground to stop any and all infringement.

Historically, the content industry has been paranoid of any new technology, and it took legislation to drag them into the new age. Were the consumers of the late 70s and early 80s entitled because they wanted to own VHS players to record their TV show and rent VHS movies?

> But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke.

Are you serious? I'm genuinely interested. I'd claim this is simply not true. But dear lord I hope it is! That would be fantastic.

I'd argue it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who understands how copyright law actually works. But if you explained it to them, yeah, they'd probably find a lot of it a bit odd (there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable).

> I'd argue it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who understands how copyright law actually works. [...] But if you explained it to them, yeah, they'd probably find a lot of it a bit odd

I think this is true of most people under and over 30.

> there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable

Exactly. Most informed people conclude copyright law is a joke because it is a Mikey Mouse joke.

Hopefully the SOPA fiasco has led the general public to pay more attention to copyright, which hopefully will prevent the term from being extended again.

Unless they've studied a little economics. Like, not enough to be a real economist, but enough to have a shot at running for Congress.

Oh, I know someone. But they weren’t interested in debate. They basically were convinced that legality == morality and their pastor said piracy is theft, so that’s that.

Ouch. It's always sad to see someone forfeit their intellect and take someone else's thoughts as absolute truth. And I say this as a churh-attending Christian. Shame on my religion.

Here in Canada most people don't know how copyright law works because they just don't care. Even the RCMP (federal police) has said that they'll only go after people who make a living selling bootleg DVDs/CDs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com