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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.

If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.

Whether or not you deprive the person of money is a side issue, the idea of ownership matters more, to me at least. If I own something through purchase, creation or inheritance it's still mine and you have no right to take it, whether or not it deprives me of it, it's still immoral.

summary: my content, my terms.

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In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70!

The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."

$10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.

If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00.

That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.

Bullshit.

Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances.

Think of a film as a performance caught in time. The actors, directors, grips, etc. were all fronted money by the studios for their performances. In doing so, the studio has assumed all of the risk for putting on the performance. Therefore, when you copy a movie you are essentially sneaking into a concert without a ticket. You are stealing services.

In a traditional theft of services, the service is only performed because of the promise of a thief. I.e., a taxi will not drive across town unless I promise to pay them - thus, the driver is deprived of that time/effort. In contrast, both movie pirates and people who choose not to view the movie made no promise to a movie studio.

Sneaking into a concert without a ticket is trespassing.

People who choose not to view the movie are irrelevant to the discussion. Don't try and attach pirates to that group. One group is moral, the other not so much.

Taxis say "I will drive you across town if you promise to pay".

Movie studios say "I will show you this performance if you promise to pay".

The promise is implicit in the act of watching/riding. You don't get in a taxi and explicitly say "I will pay you to drive me around". No, you get in a taxi and say "Take me over there". The promise of payment is implicit.

Bob is in the business of making blickits. Bob has given his time and money in order to produce blickits in the street. Bob is entitled to recompense from people for them seeing his blickits.

Really? "Entitled"? You want to have that generalization around? Everything from blickit=crazy rant to blickit=fart? This seems like the opposite of a clear foundation for morality or legality with known and known good implications.

In Bob's case, he's now busking. He's doing something in the public space. He's essentially forcing his performance on others or gifting it to passerbys with his actions.

Movies do shoot on location, and people do watch when movies are shooting in their area, and the studio doesn't charge for that.

Now, if Bob were to either record his performance and sell it on the street or build a box around himself and charged people to enter to see him blickit, the situation becomes analogous. You're trying to essentially paint me as saying that a baker can force you to buy a loaf of bread by shoving it in your hands. I'm not.

> $10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.

He has lost something of value only if he was going to sell that loaf of bread to a paying customer. How can you be sure that anyone was going to buy it? If no-one bought it before the end of the day then it would just be waste anyway, right?

You'ce still robbed him of the right of disposing of it as he sees fit.

Here in the UK we have a chain of sandwich stores called Pret, at the end of the day they give their food away to the homeless - so by stealing something even if it was due to be given away, you're harming someone.

> You've still robbed him of the right of disposing of it as he sees fit.

Sure, but do you not see the parallel with copyright here? You are assuming a priori that the baker has a right to dispose of his goods as he sees fit, and that taking that right from him is a bad thing even if the disposal would have made him no profit anyway. I see no ethical problem with such a position, but you can apply much the same argument to intellectual property as to the physical kind.

Yes of course he has that right - it's his property!

Do you not see the implicit assumption you are making here? Why should anyone have an automatic right to control something just because it is in their possession at that particular time?

The entire concept of property is an artificial convention, which most societies have decided is beneficial and therefore worthy of respect/legal protection. But physical property is no more "natural" an idea than intellectual property. Both are just social agreements that we choose to value.

As a relevant aside, many societies/cultures throughout history have chosen not to recognise the concept of personal property and instead to hold that everything belongs to the group. In most cases, this has not worked very well on a large scale, which is perhaps why most modern societies have collectively taken the other view.

I don't think this is really a common pro-piracy argument. Most of the arguments I see stop at "it costs them nothing for me to copy it" and completely ignore the lost sale side of things. Those that address the lost sale aspect just say that they wouldn't have payed for it either way.

Personally, I sit somewhere in between. I consider piracy immoral but not as bad as actual theft.

I wouldn't pay for it. Most Hollywood content is so bad IMHO that I feel that they should owe me for my time having watched it. I never rent movies and very rarely will go to them and get ripped off for the popcorn.

On the other hand, if movies were plain files on my computer and as accessible as, say, the anime available on bittorrent, I would be happy to pay a small amount to obtain it initially. Maybe even a monthly fee for getting new stuff. But only if it were in an open standard format with no DRM.

I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.

So if you work harder at stealing something than the previous owner did at making it, it's not wrong? That actually meshes pretty well with the popularity of heist movies. :)

If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.

I don't think most pirates would disagree, properly defined. It's just that if Tony gives Uhuru an mp3 copy of his latest single for $10, and then Uhuru makes her own copies and sends them to her best friends, the pirate would say that the copies Uhuru made were hers, and she wanted to share them for free.

[edit: subject object agreement]

You're not insane. I think the near-victimless nature of this crime makes it easy to compartmentalize away. Arguments such as "zero distribution costs," "it's just numbers," and "don't call it stealing!" tend to oversimplify the discussion in the hopes of avoiding the vast moral chasm that exists between enjoying media, compensating creators, and being part of a sometimes exploitative system.

Contrast the easy-going attitudes exhibited towards major IP rights holders ("it doesn't matter if I copy this movie...") toward the furor incited when a company is found using modified GPL code, but they didn't release the source modifications. The exact same infraction is occurring in both directions. Yet, in the first scenario, the "companies had it coming" and the media is "too expensive." In the second scenario, "each offender must be punished severely in order to prevent widespread neglect of the GPL."

Sometimes, the tone of each post says more than the post itself.

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