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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me.

Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you. That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about, literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now.

Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive. We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some cases, but I personally believe people would still create all kinds of stuff, if not more.

Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a copyright violation. These words mean different things.

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The semantic details are a distraction.

Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome.

Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome.

In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it.

Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect.

Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.

> The semantic details are a distraction.

But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a small child "what's yours is not what's mine", and everyone learns that theft is bad.

So calling piracy theft means everyone has the gut reaction that it's bad.

Calling piracy an infringement of a monopoly has a very different flavour to it.

Before "copying" music or books was cheap, the situation was quite different (tunes and books were copied left and right, nobody cared, but you had to pay the musicians to perform a tune, and the scribes to copy a book), but theft still existed, and was punished.

I am not pirating games (not since 2012 and then back in 2008 anyway). I am also a programmer, not quite the gray neckbeard but I've seen my fair share of Windows MFC and Java Swing back in the day (since we're talking about desktop GUI programs as well as games).

And we all want to be paid for our work.

But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right?

I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO.

Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws.

One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy.

We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off.

Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.

I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse. Web services & cloud gaming are as close as you get to the end-game for piracy. Remotely delivering apps and games like that effectively hides your code and fundamentally closes the analog hole.

Even in the video space, the analog hole is slowly being patched with hardware attested DRM and HDCP, so pervasive now that they're baked into web standards. Dolby Vision has yet to be cracked IIRC, which means pirated movies/TV can be worse than the legitimate one.

There'll probably always be insider leaks though (ie. someone with inside access to a master copy leaks it).

>I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse.

That's why I said they lose eventually and only in retrospect. In the meantime (decades or centuries) they dominate indeed.

But entropy is always at work. The last 3 years we've seen a torrent of "X site has been breached" and I have no doubt that 80% of all breaches never make it to the news. Which means the vested interests' techniques (SaaS / hosted services like games) aren't fault-proof either. The pendulum is still swinging.

As for stuff like HDCP and Dolby Vision, yeah, those are worrisome. :|

> Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. > > Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome.

This is a very limited view of the of the effect of copyright. The goal is not to make sure any one specific person or organization has the funds to create but to encoourage the total sum of creations by anyone. As such, any analysis of the effectiveness of copyright will have to also consider the detrimental effects copyright has on other people creating things. And these detrimental effects are not at all theoretical. There is lots of imaginarity "property" that people are sitting on and doing nothing with the monopoly they have been granted as an incentive to produce more while still preventing anyone else from building on those works. Licensing something or heck, even figuring out who owns the rights, is prohibitive enough to outright kill many endeavours that would have enriched society. And that is before come to the hyper-inflated copyright lengths we have today where creators are incentivized to keep milking something they have made decades ago instead of being required to make something new if they want more profit.

I agree that DRM sucks, but that is not an argument for stronger copyright enforcement. DRM very much relies on copyright laws that make breaking it illegal in order to remain effective. And even then, it has only ever been effective in preventing the average user from circumventing it. If you could freely distribute DRM-defeating measures then publishers would be incentivized to remove it for everyone.

> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now.

It seems you haven't considered the point of view of, say, someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living. I hope you can imagine how it would sound to that person when you tell them that the world is "actually just a better more abundant place now" you have got their music without paying for it, and they're out of a livelihood.

I think that, at best, it would sound like you haven't thought much at all about what you're saying and how it applies to the real world and the people in it.

You're assuming the only possible world is one in which musicians selling music is a viable business model.

But the reality is that there are infinite business models that simply don't work, and it's perfectly fine. There was a time before you could copyright music and people still made music. That was perfectly fine, too.

It's likely that there'd be a much stronger market around live performances and experiences, remixes, and lots of other stuff that's hard to imagine. I think you're neglecting to consider the complexity and self-organizational nature of markets. We don't really need a higher power to artificially create and protect specific jobs, especially around the arts.

Thinking you could earn a living from music sales is like living in a dream land. As a musician you make your money with live shows and merch. 99% of music consumption is streaming and radio stations and both of those pay a fraction of a fraction of a cent per listen, buyers might as well pirate and you most likely wouldn't see a difference.

> Thinking you could earn a living from music sales is like living in a dream land.

Ok great, that's where I live, I guess.

What type of music are you talking about there? Seems you have a very small range of musician in mind with those comments. Like, rock/pop music or whatever you call it. "merch"? Doesn't exist for most musicians, I guesstimate 99.999%

It seems in these music "pirating" discussions, for their mental image of a musician, a lot of people imagine millionaire rock/pop musicians, signed to huge record labels, and they feel fine about screwing them however they can. I suggest they are a tiny, numerically-insignificant minority of the musicians in the world. And it seems to me that when you say "As a musician you make your money" you are thinking of these people.

I buy most of my music on bandcamp when it's available there. The genres I'm buying range from indie-synthwave stuff to classic rock to death metal to jazz and folk. I love to give them my money if I enjoy the music enough, but honestly I consider it more of a symbolic gesture. The midnight had at some point a letter that their music sales are cool and all, but they can only make a living because people where coming to their shows. They made an exclusive deal with amazon to bridge some time during the pandemic, but things are going downhill for them currently. I heard the same from fiddlers green when I saw them live, telling us the live shows and the merch are the thing that keeps them running. So I've got two artists telling me the money is in performances and merch, in addition to the statistics about the payments from streaming companies.

> "merch"? Doesn't exist for most musicians, I guesstimate 99.999%

And that's a failure of those musicians. It does not mean that society should implement draconian measures to ensure that they have another specific way of being paid.

What? There's plenty of musicians that feel as the gp. Even solo full length animated movie makers.

Aside from the unhelpful "What?", that seems like DH4 Counterargument in pg's disagreement hierarchy[0], subtype "arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said".

Presumably "someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living", the people I was talking about, won't "feel as the gp". It doesn't seem like your criticism really touched on what I said.

(Maybe you are also assuming "No-one is entitled to make a living selling their music" or something like that.)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I'm assuming no one is entitled to make money off of anything in particular, so yeah, music falls in that bin.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Sorry, but I'm convinced this exchange is pointless.

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

You literally were triggered by "What?" in your previous response so maybe you should take this guideline to heart yourself.

That's no comfort for the people trying to make a living from their work.

And? People can adapt. [0] Creating laws to artificially restrict technological advancements in order to protect one specific class of jobs is insanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations

I'm not sure how you expect content creators to create content when they're not creating content anymore.

How do they "adapt" to putting food on the table when they're not getting paid for the work they do?

> If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now.

As a creator, there are many things I want people to copy, fork and share - all my open source stuff. Then there are things for which I expect to get paid for - my training videos. I'll be upset if someone started distributing or copying them for free.

As a creator I should be able to make that decision - not the consumer. Or you are claiming that digital goods are not goods at all.

Yes, this is why we have copyright law. But it's important to realize that the law is artificially creating a viable business model, and your expectation to get paid is based on that artificial creation.

There are theoretically infinitely many business models that don't work well in reality, so nobody has them as a career, that we could create laws to artificially protect.

People can give away stuff for free right now if they want, so I don’t see what you mean by the “if not more” comment. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, I joust wonder what you mean.

A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre software never took over the world the way many of its proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many applications take more than just coding chops to create, it takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers, market research and domain experts dependent on the market segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take a huge capital investment to put all that together and that money needs to be made back somehow.

Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It’s a serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can work wonders, but not all music and associated material can be produced in a bedroom.

The world we have today is built around the laws we have today. People sink many tens or hundreds of millions into copyable content in part because they know the laws guarantee they'll be able to make a profit doing that. But if those laws didn't exist, we'd simply have a world where resources are allocated differently, and it's really quite impossible to say that world would be a worse one.

You can imagine a world in which we have laws allowing broad recipes to be patented. For example, some restaurant chain might register the patent for spaghetti, and you could only ever eat spaghetti at their chain. 100 years from now, we'd likely have some MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains that spend ridiculous amounts of money on developing new and unique recipes they can monopolize. And someone from that era might say, "What if we stopped allowing this?" And someone could reply, "But tens of millions of dollars are spent on this. It's big business!"

And they would be right ofc. It's a factually true statement. But… so what? I don't mind living in a world where everyone can remix everyone else's recipes, even if it means we don't end up with MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains.

Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences. Not necessarily worse imo.

> Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences.

Or even towards patronage. Crowdfunding is already a thing. Government grants are already a thing.

If I had a basic income and it'd be risk free to create arts, sure. If agree with you in that case.

But games, music, visual art, after a certain degree require so much time and effort that it's not viable or fun to do as a hobby of you need to earn a living elsewhere.

I would've out out my debut album out years ago if I didn't need to worry and stress about rent.

I agree that UBI would be a greate complement to a post-copyright world. That does not mean that it is required though, selling bits is not the only way to fund the creation of those bits.

You can define theft as taking what was not given. Piracy is theft in this case.

If you show me a cool wood car you built and I go home and make one for myself, did I steal it from you?

In what way is copying "taking something"?

Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.

> Theft is taking something without paying for it.

According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial.

For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.

> According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft.

In many jurisdictions, it legally is. Morally, I agree that's bullshit.

> Theft is taking something without paying for it

But taking something without paying for it is not always theft; and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft.

Most importantly, copyright infringement, unlicensed use, and piracy usually fall into the category of "IP theft," which differs from real theft of physical property in important ways such as the harm caused to the owner (e.g. potential lost sales or licensing revenue vs. losing a physical item) as well as associated penalties and remedies.

> In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.

You're paying for the file and the rights to use it.

>and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft.

A lot of countries already have this. There's an additional tax on media storage devices such as CDs, HDDs etc. The money is then given to some copyright association that supposedly hands some of it out to the content creators.

A lot of countries have copyright levies. In most of them this does unfortunately not give you the right to copy things freely. It really should though.

In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a world where the act of creating copies itself takes work.

You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games.

Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not.

I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.

You're not stealing an object, you're stealing the use value of a product.

As a rule, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. So effectively you're stealing that license and the income it would generate for the creator.

Music and other media are the same. You don't pay for the bits, you pay for a license to access and enjoy those bits.

Which is why it doesn't matter if the delivery system is paper tape, carrier pigeon, optical media, or instant download from a server.

Meh, that's a weak argument. The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object.

In the world if matter, things have copies and we can count them. In the world of knowledge there's no such concept and it lives by different rules. RIAA and other luddites try to turn ideas into stones to sell them.

>The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object.

so things that have low cost of materials / low cost of delivery, but high cost of skills required shouldn't be expensive? or what?

I don't understand how is this even relevant that software can be distributed very cheaply.

Creating software, or even better - the game requires significant investment and risk, so I don't understand how anyone would want to act as if that pirating was OK.

I was trying to say that the reason we have this paradox of "pirated bytes" that simultaneously causes losses and doesn't cause losses is that we try to impose rules of the material world onto the world of ideas.

I'd argue that software isn't built, but discovered and selling the same knowledge of how to sail the discovered island is a challenge, as we know. SaaS is essentially hiding that knowledge and selling bits of derived knowledge specific to each customer. SaaS doesn't attempt to sell the same knowledge twice. Otoh, the movies and music industry hasn't figured out this derived knowledge trick, so it struggles.

All of this has been (until quite recently) purely a social construct, though. In the days of buying CDs, you were buying bits etched onto a plastic circle and you had physical possession of those bits. On Steam, you're literally buying bits, because you pay and then you download bits onto your PC (in this case, hypothetically Steam could decide to revoke future access to those bits, but you'd still have local copies of them).

Imagine if someone told you "Oh, that physical book you bought, with the pages and the words in it? Yeah, actually what we sold you was a license to a book." It's nonsense. We only played along in the digital realm because it was the only way for commercial digital artifacts to exist given the greater ease of making perfect copies of digital artifacts compared to physical artifacts like books.

That said, XaaS is now making that social construct physically real. It's still hamstringing one of the best things about digital artifacts, but at least it's honest now.

IIRC, when you set up an Apple device you agree that you're basically leasing out the hardware or something like that, which is IMO a big wad of baloney.

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