Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that "No" is winning. If we had run this poll in 1990 I'm sure it would have been about 99% in the Yes camp.

Guessing about reasons... what do you all think?

- Software moved to the web and is funded by subscriptions, advertising, corporate behemoths, donations, or mere hope.

- Free software answers a lot of people's needs, especially on HN.

- Operating systems are good enough that we don't need a lot of random utilities.

- Shareware and $10 utility programs just aren't being written these days, because they'd be instantly pirated.

(By the way, when you guys say you don't pirate software, does that include fonts?)

View on HN

I think one factor is that the piracy scene isn't as closely connected to the hacker/maker scene as it used to be. In the 70s/80s, copy-protection cracking attracted a lot of curious hacker types as a sort of challenge problem, and lots of hackers got their start in low-level programming by stepping through a game or an app in a debugger. I think at one point all the best freely available x86 asm tutorials were written by cracking groups, so even people not really into that sort of thing would come across it as just part of the culture; it wasn't at all unusual for even legit educational textfiles to be signed with a fancy ASCII signature and 'greetz' to various handles and groups.

The demoscene came from there as well: demos were originally graphical eyecandy inserted into cracked software, and for years, cracking groups and demo groups were either the same, or had huge overlap in membership. So if you were to hang out at a HackerNews BBS in 1980 or 1990, I think there'd be a lot more rubbing shoulders with people who spent their free time cracking software and operating pirate BBSs, because they were the same people building cool things and writing the BBS equivalent of tech blog posts.

Yes to all of your reasons, but I think you missed the biggest one:

- Many of us produce and sell software and we understand that pirating makes it harder for people like us to make a living at it.

I actually voted both yes and no, since I do pirate software, but only software I own. I don't consider it piracy, because it doesn't impact anyone's ability to make a living off of it (it usually just saves support costs) but the law sees it differently.

Also I did pirate a game from the early 90's because I couldn't figure out where to send a check.

http://downloadgameonline.blogspot.com/2008/08/enchantasy-qu...

Actually can't even find the game itself anymore, I'm sure I have it on my hard disk somewhere. Think it was by Eric G. Abel or somesuch. I would very much like to send the guy a check and get a legit key.

"Pirate your own software"? I don't think that would count as piracy. If you own the copyright on it, or own the company that owns the copyright, or run the company that owns the copyright, then surely you can copy it as many times as you want. How could it be possible to view any copying of that as 'piracy'.

I think he means installing software he's purchased on multiple computers.

One example I’d make is getting dongle-free or CD-free copies of software. This is especially handy for laptop users to get a cracked copy so they wouldn’t risk losing something and getting left high and dry while traveling. This is considered illegal in some jurisdictions. (The DMCA here in the States is somewhat vague, since there’s an accessibility exemption, but it’s never been tested in court for this use case, AFAIK.)

I do that with books--- I generally will buy a hardcover, then pirate a searchable PDF, if I can find one.

Wasn't that true in 1990 also? Lots of hackers worked for or owned software companies, yet lots swapped disks or downloaded from BBSs as well.

There's a weird convergence going on here. I'm an old fogey now (34) and it seems that everyone younger than me has little to no respect for intellectual property rights. From their perspective, downloading a movie using Bittorrent is not ethically any different than renting it from Blockbuster.

At the same time, so many good things are either free or bundled with the hardware so you don't feel the marginal cost of them. You don't "need" to pirate MS Office to have a usable computer, OO and Google Docs are pretty damn good these days.

A lot of gaming has moved to consoles (much harder to pirate) or online subscriptions like WOW or Steam, which also make piracy more difficult.

And yes, when I say I don't pirate software, I include fonts in that list. There are plenty of good free fonts, and many great fonts are pretty affordable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com