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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of those people who would pirate just because I could. It was almost a game, trying to amass as much warez as I could, to the point that 90% of the stuff I got I either never used, or used only once.

That changed over time. As my time became more valuable, I couldn't spend all day fiddling with software anymore. I became more focused, downloading only stuff I used a lot. And then it hit me: It would be far easier to just buy the damn thing for $10, $20, $50, whatever and not have to hunt shit down, find a keygen, or in the worst case crack it myself.

So now I don't pirate anymore. It's not out of a feeling of moral obligation, but rather because I appreciate the convenience. And, realizing that pirates are people at various points on the price/effort spectrum, I don't even worry about my own software being pirated. Why should I, when I get income aplenty from it even with pirates in the equation?

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It probably depends on the business, but I know several developers of music production software that can correlate huge drops in sales with the release of new cracks of their software to the exact day.

I think we are a little too quick to assume that a pirated copy is not a lost sale.

I'd be curious to know who they are and what they're selling.

Audio software is a quite unusual field for all sorts of reasons, largely related to the huge divide between professional users and amateurs. The old school of pro-audio people can remember when a studio cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip and will pay pretty much any price you ask, even for quite trivial software. Your typical teenage dance-music producer is buying many of the same applications and will usually baulk at paying $99 for a cut-down version, let alone several hundred dollars for a full license.

It's interesting that really intrusive DRM techniques are broadly accepted - iLok is probably the most popular system, which requires you to buy a $50 USB dongle in addition to a very expensive piece of software. Again, experienced professionals who can remember tape see an iLok as a trivial inconvenience, but to a lot of younger people it's a total deal-breaker.

The music technology industry is part way through a weird economic transition. The traditional high-value professional market is dwindling away to nothing, but business has never been better because of the boom in amateur production. Firms like Native Instruments who have figured out how to sell to wannabe DJs and bedroom producers are shaking the money tree; A lot of very old and established names are struggling to keep the doors open.

That would make sense, considering that music production software tends to be viciously expensive, and music producers tend to not have much money.

and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism.

Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.

The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.

Well, some people seem to manage with these tools! And if more people were introduced to them, perhaps the feedback and number of interested coders would increase.

I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.

Until there is a open-source program that replicates what Ableton Live offers (seamless and easy-to-use integration of audio recording and nonlinear editing with MIDI production), no one will consider using an open-source tool.

The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.

Easy to use? I've played with some of these tools, including Ableton Live and I've never found any that is actually easy to use.

They are all too stuck in the sliders/knobs metaphor. I'm not sure it's an adequate metaphor for people who has not produced in the physical world before.

If cageface's data is accurate, the expense of the software would not explain the sudden drop. Do music producers suddenly get poorer after a crack is released?

The pressure to buy at a painful price is suddenly removed.

I suppose times have changed, but back in the 90's music software companies used to leak their software to groups to get cracked (this was back when Radium was the defacto group). In fact, #audiowarez used to be a 50/50 split between devs and users iirc. Memory is a little dusty.

Even if that was a real effect I'd imagine it would be hard to spot. The alternative, that they're seeing what they expect to see seems just as likely, if not more.

Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.

I don't think it's just about the game. I believe many people involved in distribution of illegal content do it out of a genuine desire to share. For every released movie, every song, a book or a piece of software there exists a group of people with no means of accessing it in a legal way (and probably another, much larger, of people who can't afford it).

Maybe SOME people involved in doing it was for a genuine desire to share.

Let me tell you, though, there are a lot of rewards from being "first". Either the first person to get your hands on a pre-release item, or the first one to rip it, or the first group to release it, or the first racer to move it the fastest to the top.

It is beautiful in its simplicity - but there are many incentives to get people to be 'the first'.

Just like the price mechanism in modern day capitalist economies is beautiful in its simplicity to get people to move into a market were demand is high.

So I think the vast majority of the people involved in "the scene" are doing it for the incentives/rewards that come with being first. If everybody tries to be first and is racing against everyone else, the entire system gets efficient at moving pre-release stuff very quickly.

It's impossible to fight - which is why it still thrives today.

What sort of rewards other than being known in the warez scene (not even under your real name). You can't buy anything with it or boast about it in public.

Well....one such reward is getting leech access to a very "l33t" top FTP site. i.e. you get access to 0-sec (brand, spanking new) stuff before everyone else - to do as you please.

That type of access is rare and people usually get credits to allow them to download what they want. The best people get unlimited access.

So, just like any community, there are some perks that bring prestige and status within the community.

Don't underestimate how valuable that is.

The foolish people would take that access and try to sell it - that's how you get busted and get into trouble.

Sometimes pre-release sources are rewarded financially. I have no idea where the money comes from[1], though. This was the case for the Academy member that was busted a while back. IIRC, he was just selling his DVD screeners to pirate groups.

[1]: I get that the group pays for it, but what the source of the money is, I don't know. Are people just sinking money into for the 'props' of being first? Is there a greater financial reward for being first (if so, where does it come from)?

Being first, or otherwise an interesting group means that FTP administrators want you to fill their servers with your releases. As a return, the group gets a bunch of unlimited use "leech accounts" to these FTP servers.

A lot of money enters the scene via people who directly or indirectly buy "leech accounts" from these groups. These unlimited use FTP accounts give the buyer a very convenient way to acquire everything that has ever been released by anyone.

Also, interestingly enough, while release groups selling FTP access is a common practice and done by basically everyone, FTP administrators can't sell accounts directly, as it is extremely taboo for people other than the members of groups to profit from the scene.

So the FTP administrators are some sort of neutral ground, in that they distribute releases from a variety of groups. They are sort of the Warez Scene hosting providers?

What are the incentives? Are these just people that have cheap access to fat connections, so the cost of running the FTP site is minimal? The ability to create 'leech accounts' for friends/family so long as they aren't sold (or is this also taboo)? Is unlimited personal access enough of an incentive?

Giving out some accounts for free is generally accepted. So yeah, one of the main incentives for FTP admins is personal & friend access. Beyond that, it's about the prestige, I think.

Additionally, some of the content (music) is actually completely or almost completely unavailable (even legally) outside of these sites. For example, old rare/obscure records - people rip them because they want to share, and people download because there is literally no other way to get a copy without potentially spending $100+ (not to mention the costs of a decent vinyl setup).

Oh of course. I just think it is interesting how the game aspect is used for leverage.

All that stuff existed with TOPSITES, ftp, etc. before the torrent sites. The torrent sites are just the "retail" level of the game; the real players are getting prereleases, ripping, potentially cracking, and doing stuff on topsites.

Oh I know that it all existed before, I am just commenting on how prevalent it is and how much it is built in by design.

To be honest I think you are slightly out of date in thinking torrent sites are just the 'retail' level. The majority of pre retail releases of movies (CAM/R5/Screener/HDTV etc) these days are done by p2p groups. A huge amount of pre release leaks of bluray disks come from Chinese bittorrent sites. A huge proportion of games get uploaded to p2p sites before getting pred and many games are cracked by p2p groups before the scene groups get to them (with several notable cases of scene groups 'stealing' p2p releases).

The one area where I feel like the scene could be said to be in a different league is in preing TV, but even that is slipping with p2p groups uploading full .ts streams and itunes rips.

Ah, that makes sense. I'm pretty out of date for anything post DoD/RZR, which was 2001.

Yeah, the scene is where it's at. I explained the scene in detail in a comment 2.5 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636785

Especially appropriate considering the language used by the FTPd scripts to announce releases on the sites -- upping a new release was known as "starting a race."

Interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

More info in my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636785

One change from 2.5 years ago, now the scene does FLAC releases (finally): http://i.imgur.com/YZjUw.png

That's a good comment. I am personally most amused at the amount of bureaucracy involved.

I remember the proud moment I first accumulated 10 gigs of porn (mostly 5 minute clips at about 320x240).

I think the problem is that now it's just so easy it's not fun anymore.

I also eventually realised that I had only a finate amount of time on this planet and I don't need every discography in the world.

That's exactly why I subscribe to Netflix. Sure, I could spend time looking for the latest movies, especially the latest ones that are hard to come by in more legit forms. But it's just not worth it, and if the fun of mischief is not there anymore, I'd rather just wait 3 months till Netflix carries it.

It is easier to pirate, and pirated versions of software generally restrict calling home so IMO some pirated software is better than the non-pirated version.

Only if whoever cracked it remembered to rip that part of the code out. I'm sure there's a few companies out there compiling lists of IP addresses.

If you are worried about your software doing shit you don't want, open source or bust.

Or turn of your internet connection while playing.

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