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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Ok, thought experiment: at what point in the past 1000 years do you think the balance of collective versus individual benefit from creative works was at its most fair?

> getting things were free was part of sending a message, not monetary gain.

As an old who lived through phone phreaking (calling cards, not 2660hz, I'm not THAT old), cracking software, Naptser, torrents, etc... I can assure you that the message was more often than not a justification that transformed "getting it for free" from theft to a righteous moral stand.

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We’re about the same age, probably. On this side of the pond, all of this stuff was rooted in inability to get something legally first, and if it was possible to get, it was prohibitively expensive to buy for us. So we got it for “free”. The thing is we were not using the software to earn money, so companies don’t care (this what I heard from a couple of companies directly). Music was in a similar position.

It was a righteous moral stand because we wanted to get things relatively affordable for us.

I for one prefer to buy my software and music nowadays, because it’s affordable and I can get it at the quality I want.

For your other question, the answer is probably 1800s, because the current model was not entrenched everywhere and creators had sane rights for what they created. So creators had to get what they made out to masses to show it, but lost their rights in relatively shorter times, so things were free to use for everyone. So you can’t excessively milk something till proverbial eternity.

On this side of the pond, wow were the college kids excited when they discovered they could reframe piracy as a political and countercultural statement, despite things being available paid.

At the time I pirated a lot of stuff. If we're of the same age, you may well have played video games I cracked in your teens. And, TBH, for me it was mostly collector mentality (I have have all the games!) and a bit of poverty (I can have the games I'd like to buy but can't afford), and about zero politics.

That said, I'm generally with you on 1800's. It's astounding how fast things changed. IIRC it wasn't until 1890 or so that international copyright was even a thing; you published in your home country and publishers in other countries just copied and published without permission or payment.

And then just 100 years later, copyright was essentially perpetual and global.

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