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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there.

The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.

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At least pirates provide some value from curation usually. In this case the leak is just all of Spotify. It makes it really easy for a competitor to just duplicate the Spotify service without paying licensing fees. Tbd what happens.

As soon as a competitor duplicates Spotify they’ll pay licensing fees or they’ll be pretty quickly shut down. You don’t get a free pass to stream music to people just because you happen to have the file.

Spotify itself started with pirated music.

I don’t understand how the parent comment is downvoted yet this is not. “Stealing is ok because stealing is already a thing”… come on, now

Because it's not stealing. Stealing is a problem because it deprives the original owner of the item - whether the thief subsequently uses the item or not doesn't change that.

This doesn't apply to dematerialized content: the original copy still exists. The only negative impact occurs if someone decides to actually use the pirated copy in place of buying a licensed one.

The mere existence of this new pirate copy being around doesn't automatically imply that, especially if other, more convenient sources are available.

Okay, call it copyright infringement then if you want to be a stickler on definitions. It's still wrong and existing instances of it doesn't make it justifiable to do.

Why is copyright infringement wrong?

Copying is not theft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

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