Ask HN: Will software/media piracy ever be taboo? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will software/media piracy ever be taboo?

3 pointsbiznerd4 comments

My friends are professionals. They have enough disposable income to afford the occasional media product. Yet they still pirate software and media.

I can understand doing this in college when there is no money. But now?

Worse, some of them want to break into the same creative industries. So they're willing to steal from the industry they're trying to gain a living from.

What am I missing? I will say that I'm in the minority.

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No.

It makes no sense to pay for something that is not scarce, like software and content. The scarcity is in the service, and that is what we pay for.

I think that people are starting to realize that artificial scarcity is a net loss for society, and that we should strive to make what's abundant as widely available as possible. Once the information exists, the only work that's necessary is distribution. That's why distribution channels will likely be the ones investing in content creation.

This whole criticism of artificial scarcity probably explains why many don't like patents. It just makes no sense to prevent others from doing things in certain ways simply because someone claims to have discovered it first.

Now, how do we encourage people to create content if they can't use force to ensure that they get paid for its consumption? There are many ways:

- Pay up front (Kickstarter)

- Donations

- Recognition (content is proof of your ability to make things)

- Custom/personalized content creation

- Use of new media that are not yet easy to distribute (distribution channels pay content creators to produce this new media in order to have something to distribute on their channel)

- Getting "paid" in non-scarce appreciation/reputation/trust currency (likely to replace money in the future)

- Etc.

What I've found seems to follow with the analysis of many pundits on this topic. When there are affordable choices the people want, then it's more taboo to pirate. In recent years I've seen a trend amongst co-workers to be embarrassed about pirating music (vs years ago where there would have been no shame). And we're in the US where we have many online MP3 stores and various streaming options. But still very few people feel bad about pirating video... almost everyone seems up-to-date on Game of Thrones and very few have HBO.

As far as pirating software, amongst my developer friends, basically no one pirates because they're all proponents of open source.

Same reason people jaywalk when they're on foot but cuss out pedestrians when they're driving.

Do you think there's a way you can pirate-proof your creative product? Not in terms of DRM or some such... I mean, how would you create media/software that some non-trivial subset PREFERS to purchase rather than pirate? Most of the examples I can think of have to do with

1. rabid fans & exclusive events (e.g. midnight film/book release, tshirts for the first 500 funders on Kickstarter), or

2. social/organizational/convenience ecosystems (e.g. Steam, iTunes, Netflix/Hulu/etc).

People start pirating when they have no real way of paying for all of the software they want (or simply need for class/peer pressure), when they see the makers becoming rich from all the payers, and a very little chance of being on the other side of this. The moral has been set, it won't change much because we're older, it would only change if older people become a large minority in the culture. It could also change if there's a lot more creator/user interaction rather than creator/payer.

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