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Comment by milesf | Hacker News Reader

The movie has an unobtrusive crawl around the 23 minute mark:

"Decided to pirate our movie, eh? Now you'll have to deal with these scroll-y bits. If you like what you see, buy the drm-free version at www.storyofmojang.com so that we can afford to keep making movies. Thanks!"

Very clever.

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if the producers decided to upload this on a torrent, then they should not call me a pirate because I download it.

It's a pre-emptive leak. They know that people are going to pirate it, so they release a version with quick and easy links to pay.

I agree they shouldn't call you a pirate if they've invited you to download their torrent. But some people will be downloading without knowing they're allowed to, so the text is only for those people.

Why not? The producers shared that stuff on TPB because it'd end up there eventually, and because they understand that there are reasons for kind-of-sort-of-ethically-fine 'pirating'.

You grabbed the movie. You didn't got the payed version (otherwise you wouldn't complain) and got a reference to pirating. Because .. you pirated the movie.

They uploaded it to be in control on TPB. They explicitly ask for you to go ahead, check it and please support them by buying the movie. If you don't do that, you're pirating the movie with the help of the producers. At least in my world.

(Downloading it right now, net's slow. Will watch it with my wife and invest the USD 8 if it has a couple decent / funny / interesting scenes)

This is the first torrent I downloaded in probably 5 years, and I did so because the movie isn't released yet. I agree with the parent.

"Piracy" refers not to free downloads, but to copyright infringement. Do I "pirate" a Wikipedia article every time I visit the site? Do I "pirate" Ubuntu when I download an ISO?

You could not be less correct when you claim that downloading this torrent from the content creators is an act of piracy. This demonstrates a fundamentally perverse view of both the laws and ethics of intellectual property on the part of you and these content creators.

The moment the producer places the movie on pirate bay themselves and encourages you to download it, then it is no longer piracy, it is using torrents as a legitimate, distributed downloading service, like it was made to be.

If anything, they uploaded a shareware version of the movie to the pirate bay. Them saying you're pirating it is inaccurate. Instead it should be something like "Hey! I see you torrented our movie! Thanks for watching it; and if you feel like, please download the pay-for version of this movie to support us! (We'll even remove this ask for money from the official!)"

Piracy is, in the lazy short verison, acquiring without permission. Torrenting != Piracy when you have permission. e.g. every World of Warcraft update.

you assumed that putting their torrent on TPB is the same as giving you permission to download without paying.

How isn't it?

What is a valid situation where putting your video onto a website and then talking directly to the people you're marketing to in your video not giving them permission?

Is that what helps you sleep at night? Then go right and tell that to yourself. Do whatever it is you need to do to rationalize your behavior.

If you feel uncomfortable with the word, see it as they called the film the "pirated version", with fake legs, parrots, and a eye-patch.

Its just a word meaning "80-90% of the population that know how the internet works". Any connotation to ships has been lost to the ages.

If only they'd just put a wavy black bar with the text "aaargh, the pirate version be better anyway." Maybe a Mutiny! button that takes you to their site.

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