Comment by Slow_Hand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Slow_Hand | Hacker News Reader

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While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.

Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.

Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.

Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.

> It is technically stealing

It is technically not. Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not. You can’t steal a copyright (aside from something like breaking into your stuff and stealing the proof that you hold the copyright), and then a song is downloaded the original copyright holder still have copy.

Calling piracy theft was MPAA/RIAA propaganda. Now people say that piracy is theft without ever even questioning it, so it was quite successful.

> Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not.

that seems like an overly narrow definition… what about identity theft, or IP theft?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/superseding-indictment-...

See my other comment. Identity theft is the bank being defrauded and passing the problem onto you. They are the victim, not you and it is their money that’s gone, not yours.

IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the knowledge, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.

Moreover discussions of IP gets into whether it even makes sense to be able to patent algorithms which are at their core just mathematics. So before you can talk about stealing the quadratic formula you need to prove that the quadratic formula is something that can be property.

Mitchell & Webb's take on "identity theft" is worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

You may not be stealing the actual content, more so “making a copy”, but in doing that you’re taking away money the artist would have earned if you bought their album or streamed it on Spotify (admittedly that’a a very small amount for the artist but that’s another thing)

And if I stole something physical you had for sale, you wouldn’t make the money, so the end result is effectively the same.

The “if you bought their album” is the non-trivial part of that sentence. A pirate is not necessarily going to fork over $20 for an album if they couldn’t pirate. Chances are they will simply not buy the album. In either case the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 (6% to the artist the rest to the studio and distributors). So the result is really not the same because the artist and the pirate can both have the album in different ways and in both cases the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 unlike a physical good which cannot be cloned.

What this really is exposing is that most art is not worth the same. A Taylor Swift album is not worth the same on the open market as a Joe Exotic album. Pricing both at say $20 is artificial. Realistically most music has near zero actual value, hence why if you are a B tier or lower artist you won’t make much compared to an A tier artist on platforms like Spotify or YouTube which pay per listen/watch.

Can you post your social security number and other personal info here then? You will still have it afterwards!

Oh also, I don't see why I should ever pay for trains or movie tickets if there are seats available. I can just walk in! The event will happen anyway. Its not stealing.

Everyone should just download all art, music and literature for free. Musicians, artists and writers can all make money some other way while I enjoy the works of their efforts.

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/images/straw-man-arguments

What the music/movie industry was claiming in court was not theft. There is no statute that identifies piracy as theft. They were claiming copyright violation and wanted to collect damages for lost revenue.

You are bringing up “identity theft” which is also not theft. If you post your PII here and I use it to open a credit card in your name and then spend a bunch of the money using that card on buying goods and services, you are not the victim. What I do in that case is defraud the bank. They are the ones who are the actual victim and in the ideal world they would be the ones working with the authorities to get their money back.

Of course they would rather not do that so they invented a crime called identity theft and convinced everyone that it is ok for them to make you the victim. They make your life hell since they can’t find the actual criminal while you spend thousands of dollars trying to prove that you don’t owe thousands of dollars. But in reality you were not any part of the fraud. It is on the bank to secure their system enough to prevent this. But they have big time lawyer money and you don’t so here you are.

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