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Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

>>> sharing of information

But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free.

Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine.

But video games are not information, so are TV shows, movies, etc. They are products which cost money to produce. It doesn't make economical sense to give it away for free hoping to get money from ads or whatever. Mobile games do that, and mostly they are unplayable without purchasing credits, etc. Even then, the quality is often very poor.

You can point to open source, but people producing open source software are minority of all engineers.

What you are saying might be morally 'right' but unfortunately being morally right doesn't pay the rent, bills and food.

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> It's like saying designer clothes should be free.

I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.

Well, yes, but you can't download clothes using torrents ;)

Similar idea would be that ideas of movies and video games should not be copyrighted. IANAL, but there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements unless you create a video game with almost identical name, etc.

>there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements //

That's because they're copying the ideas and not the implementation, copyright protects implementations ("works") and not the ideas behind them (at least that's the intention).

Similar names would be trademark law rather than copyright FWIW.

Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK). A strong argument speaking against it is the fact that there are many examples that say the contrary; Avatar is one of the most pirated movies and also one of the most successful ones, and earned a huge amount of money just on cinema tickets. You have e.g. Zynga, King and Rovio who have earned lots of money on free games.

I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.

Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK).

It's absolutely been demonstrated to be true, many many times. Do you think game studios, console makers, movie studios etc put money into DRM because none of them understand their own business?

There are lots of people who spoken either on or off the record who say the same things: the moment their copy protection fails, sales fall off a cliff and you can see it in the data. For video games it's even worse. The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.

Movie studio executives have graphs of sales and you can see the point at which high quality rips were uploaded to the internet.

Example:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/lgc-2013-sports-interacti...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

>The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.

Hang on a sec. If you pirate games, you can't get online on the official servers, that's the whole downside to pirating and the reason so many games now require always-online. Once the game is released through a torrent site, that's it, the developer has no more hand in it. The whole point of cracking a game is to cut the umbilical cord of DRM and online-based play.

You can limit the official servers to people who have a license key.

Plus, DRM is its own detriment. Some days ago I saw Child of Light on sale on Steam and was going to buy it, but then noticed it has uPlay DRM. And as we all know uplay means nobuy.

Personally, I'd rather have no DRM and less games, than more games that need to strongarm people into paying.

>>> I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK).

Might be. But the cost to produce Candy Crush Saga and a AAA title is, well, different. But if you try to find a non-digital analogy, e.g. food, it doesn't make it right for me to steel expensive whisky just because I don't agree with pricing model :)

>>> I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student)

Agree with this, I perfectly know what you mean. When I was a poor student, I would buy a video game once a year on my b-day and keep playing it for a year or two :) completely objective, but it felt really better than downloading a batch on games. But that's not the point :)

This is a different problem (pricing, not intellectual property). HumbleBundle sometimes has games by big publishers for $1, Steam has good weekend sales sometimes (grabbed a few relatively new good games for under $15). I think solution to provide poorer markets can be found in this direction.

> But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products.

It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.

We can quibble over the meaning of the word "distributed," but I don't think this has much to do with anything. At the end of the day, the primary function of TPB is to allow users to download TV shows and movies for free. Indeed, the world-changing consequence of TPB shutting down, according to Sunde himself, is that "[i]t tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else." (Though, granted, he imagines that this will cause people to perceive some sort of slippy slope. His argument here seems to depend, however, on conflating TPB with the BT protocol itself.)

Nor is it especially relevant that computers, cash, the Internet, etc. all facilitate crimes, in some sense. TPB is easily distinguishable because its express purpose, and dominant actual use, is to facilitate crime.

I do respect that Sunde was willing to go to jail for his cause. But given the dubious specific goals of TPB as it was actually operated (despite whatever ideology might have supported or motivated it) I can't say that I'm particularly cowed by his moral courage generally.

No, it was a lot different from Reddit or HN. Please stop trying to support the "pirating is okay". It's not. It's theft. You do not need or have to see those shows. You want to watch them and you fulfill that want by pirating. That pirating may cause purchases later is a horrible argument for theft.

>It's theft.

Stop repeating that. It isn't. Even the courts agree on this one.

And TPB did not engage in it either way.

Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.

As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?

Well, sure, you can sell it or give it away for free, that's up to you. But once you give it to someone you give someone a blob of information. Which is identical to the one you still have. That chunk of information is not intrinsically tied to you anymore.

So you can easily control initial distribution. But to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others. You have to limit their freedoms to do with that new copy of information.

Is there a good reason to limit their freedoms? Maybe. But it doesn't occur to me as a natural right. Once you handed over a copy to someone else each of you control an identical set of information. You severed your ties.

So if you want the rights of others restricted then - in my opinion - the burden of constructing a case why they should be is on you.

> "to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others."

... in a way that's not particularly different from the restrictions we place on physical books. JK Rowling doesn't give up her right to control sales/distribution of Harry Potter just because someone bought a hardback edition and owns a scanner or photocopier. Making a pdf or a photocopy of Harry Potter doesn't result in "stealing" any of her physical inventory, but if you resell it or even give it away (private personal use as a backup copy is OK) you can get in serious legal trouble (it would probably be termed "copyright infringement" rather than "theft", but IANAL TINLA.)

If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you. Why should Rowling be entitled to sell Harry Potter in dead tree format and be able to treat scans as infringement, but not entitled to sell Harry Potter in digital format while treating unauthorized copies as infringement?

>If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you.

I do not. And those restrictions are exactly the same, they are about information. It's not about the dead trees with some pigment sprinkled onto them. It's about the particular arrangement of ink.

And I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it.

If my freedom to do anything with it what I want should be restricted - as above, there may be good reasons to do so - then one would have to explain to me why that is, because I see no natural right that the author have over things they passed on to others.

> "I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it."

In US law, you are free to resell the book, but you are not free to produce a copy to resell (or to keep the copy and resell the original). You bought a copy of the book, not the rights to redistribute the content as you see fit; those still reside with the author. Others have made the argument about incentivizing content producers by granting those rights, so I will not rehash them.

(I reject your treatment of "natural law" as the only relevant system; I recognize the additional value of "common law" and "positive law".)

Hmm...

You place me in a tricky position, as I am generally against the limitation of freedom.

Yet, it seems that some basic limitation on freedom is an essential part of society.

In general, the most agreeable limitations involve restricting a person's freedom to harm others.

Have content producers been harmed by piracy? I would argue that they have.

Since piracy harms content producers, the rights of others to infringe on their content should be limited.

But that harm is only financial. It's a harm relative to potential profits they could have made if other people's rights to make copies were restricted in the first place.

If you do not assume such a right then no harm is done.

You trivialize our economic system when you describe it as "only financial." People die over money.

I don't want to defend the actions of the copy-write robber-barons. I do not know what the appropriate response for infringement should be. I ignore violations of my own content. Yet I believe that I have a right to the content that I produce. And I respect the rights of others' content. Do you believe that content producers should not have these rights?

You missed half of my point. It's not only "just financial". It's also "just financial harm only if we are pre-supposing the the rights whose natural existence you're trying to prove in the first place"

I do not argue that the rights are natural. They are a legal and economic construct.

There is nothing natural about them. But that does not mean that these rights do not exist.

The question I ask you is, to whom should these rights belong?

The entity that has labored to produce the content? Or the entity that has obtained a copy of that content?

I'm not sure if we're even talking about the same thing then.

In a previous post you said

>"As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?"

Which seemed to me like an argument for an intrinsic, natural right that a content creator should have, irrespective of current law.

So either we are arguing over current law, in which case the questions you ask are already settled by courts and we should be discussing whether current law is acceptable.

Or you are arguing about rights that people ought to have, but then you cannot say

>"But that does not mean that these rights do not exist."

If we are arguing about rights that one ought to have then they do no exist a priori, they have to be constructed first.

The point is that copyright infringement isn't the same as theft. Just because they're both illegal doesn't mean they are the same thing.

I dunno. At a low level, piracy is just copying bits. It just so happens that certain bits contain some people's "intellectual property". If we concede that this makes sense and want to fight a losing battle anyway, it becomes a philosophical line-drawing fiesta about the bits you're copying. I propose instead that it's futile for people to try and monetize a certain sequence of bits given a certain interpretation. Then the natural conclusion is to move toward services, like free-to-play games or streaming products where the actual "bits on sale" are free, but the "action of using those bits to bring in the bits you want" is what costs money, rather than whatever the actual bits are.

You could say that about almost any activity in today's digital age. Sending abusive emails, making harassing phone calls, stealing money from people's bank accounts - these are also activities that essentially are also just copying bits.

Describing these in such a way doesn't imply anything about the moral implications.

First, I never said "pirating is okay". Please stop putting words in my mouth. I support the idea that content creators paid for their work. Sometimes, in the context of F/OSS for instance, the creators choose to forgo that directly and often indirectly (e.g. donations).

Secondly, downloading a work under a non-permissive copyright is not theft, and may not even be illegal. Content shifting is a legal thing to do. If I own a DVD one could argue that I could download an already ripped version of the DVD (CSS issues aside).

Third, not everything linked to on TPB was covered under a non-permissive copyright.

Please stop assuming everyone is an idiot and immoral.

>Content shifting is a legal thing to do

Small point, but it actually depends on the country's laws. In New Zealand, it's illegal to do that. It's even illegal to rip a CD you own. It's stupid and would never be enforecd, but it is the law.

What about content that you cannot legally obtain? For instance, TV shows that haven't aired in your country yet (or won't ever) due to greed or a whole load of other reasons?

It's absurd that there are people there are people waiting cash in hand to get content, and they are denied because of some sort of broken mentality on how content should be distributed.

Calling it theft is using a legal concept that is outmoded for the digital world. Theft implies that an object is removed from someone's possession in order to be taken.

You can argue all you like that it deprives content creators of income (although even that is complex, in many contexts), but it is not, and never will be theft.

Fair enough. I can see how someone would not think they are information.

In this case we can use the word "culture" instead of "information", and the original point still stands. And I am sure we can all agree that TV and movies are culture.

One important difference between giving designer clothes free and your favorite video game free is that that former is a constant sum game while the latter is not. Sharing software products does not prevent anyone else to access it. It does not even cost money for the producer as the distribution is handled by seeders.

All in all it's a terrible analogy.

EDIT: By all means go ahead and downvote, but don't forget to explain why the analogy doesn't fail.

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