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Comment by wrp | Hacker News Reader

In South Korea, educational inequality due to inability to afford educational materials has been an issue for many years.

The argument against piracy is that people have the right to be compensated for their work. Consider this argument in the context of medical services. The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free. The extreme industry position is equivalent to saying doctors should let patients die on the sidewalk if they can't pay.

I'm torn on the issue of sharing files, because I've watched its rise over the past 25 years and seen how tremendously it has improved educational opportunities for poorer peoples.

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It is important to note that authors are not compensated when you buy access to an academic article in a journal.

In fact, since the authors both do the work of creating the content and peer-reviewing submissions, they must also pay the journal in exchange for doing this work.

Think of it like the patient paying the hospital, the doctor paying the hospital, and in exchange the doctor can do their work at a prestigious hospital, which is all very lucrative (for the hospital)

Journal articles represent an extreme where sharing is most ethical. An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games. In the range between are things like monographs, textbooks, literature, etc.

> textbooks

Textbooks are not that distant from academic publishing in terms of the rent seeking that goes on. Textbook publishers essentially bribe academia for the right to rip off their students by providing courses with testing and academic services that are tied to a license in a new textbook that the student is required to buy.

>An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games.

There's further extremes still: sharing a game made by a solo-developer who's only compensation comes from sales is less ethical than sharing a game made by a team who were paid a salary while they worked.

>The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free

This analogy is not even remotely applyable to piracy. Piracy is about content that can be shared, you can't grab a surgery and share it with someone else after buying it.

It's not even about "piracy". It's about "unauthorized copying".

The problem with copyright is that gives the owner too many other rights that can be summed up as a right to also prevent distribution. This creates an imbalance. The owner should only be given the right to be compensated; but other rights should be stripped. For example, why not to require the right to publish a book to always be a public offer that any publisher can join on the same terms?

How should such a publisher set the price?

The author sets the price. Specifically, the price the publisher -- any publisher -- pays the author to make a copy. Publishers can add a margin to this to cover distribution costs, but then they're in competition with other publishers and customers can buy from any of them.

No other contractual terms. The author only sets the price publishers pay and that price is the same for every publisher. Authors can sell directly to the public but still can't impose any additional license terms nor sell for a lower price than the one publishers pay. Individual members of the public can also make copies on their own as long as they pay the fee.

Then any publisher that wants to publish the work simply does so and pays the author the author's fee, which the author can only change once a year and only change uniformly for all publishers.

The anti piracy stance would be making it illegal for a surgeon/person to copy the procedure another surgeon invented without payment. Copying does not require additional labor from the inventor.

Obviously we would like the inventor of the procedure to be compensated, but is it worth depriving other people, or potentially them dying, to protect "intellectual property"?

would you say the cost of copying a pdf file is similar to the cost of several hours in a surgical theatre?

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