Hacker News Reader

Comment by Devilboy | Hacker News Reader

Piracy for personal use is a 'victimless' (don't bite my head off please) crime, that's why it's OK here. Stealing is not.

View on HN

Piracy is different from stealing, yeah. But I find it kind of short-sighted this notion that it's "victimless."

Not intending to bite your head off. :-)

A very simple thought experiment:

A rap artist is hired by a label to create an album. Said artist later dies. The label goes bankrupt soon thereafter, or perhaps simply folds up shop and leaves the business without auctioning off its assets.

I have produced a copy of the album, which I host at my own cost from my server, once these events have transpired. There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement, and indeed I'm helping to reduce the scarcity of this product in the world.

While somewhat contrived, this thought experiment is not particularly far off from reality.

No, it's pretty far off from reality. It's an extreme edge case that doesn't at all justify pirating Photoshop.

Ah, you're correct--we were talking about software mainly, not music.

Software companies never go out of business without selling off their assets, and it's the extreme edge-case where people continue to distribute the works.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

This truly seldom happens.

Again, abandonware does not justify pirating Photoshop, a product that is constantly updated by a very active company.

See also abandonware or emulation of older systems. It's technically illegal for me to go download a copy of System Shock, but the company that made it is long gone, and the company that bought their assets isn't doing anything with it.

Illegal? Sort of. Immoral? Not really.

> There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement

The victim is the artist's heirs.

What'd they do to deserve anything?

Hey, it takes a lot of effort and sweat-of-the-brow to be born as the kid of some rich dude!

I've been trying for years and I still haven't managed it!

Regardless of you thinking the view is short-sighted, without a counterargument it will remain victimless.

Not necessarily. When you pirate something, you are hurting the owner's chances of selling it to you in the future. If you know that there is no chance that you will buy it, then it is victimless. If however things change and you are in a position where you would buy it, you are far less likely to, which does hurt the seller.

In some cases you're actually helping the owner's chances of selling it to you in the future. Sometimes I pirate something and it's so good that I just have to buy it.

Of course, in a lot of cases demos would work well for that, but they seem to have fallen out of favour recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com