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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

Many people doesn't realize the value provided by pirate bay. Without sites like piratebay, scihub or libgen only rich privileged people would be able to enjoy the fruits. But thanks to sites like them poor people living in any places can enjoy the privilege.

I understand there are some downsides like small creators getting destroyed. But as with any technology we know digital piracy has various advantage. Also music, movies etc offered by torrents can be far reliable because Netflix etc can remove content at any minute according to their wish.

DRM is the main issue in piracy and I hope we can bypass this easily. And I also think many piracy doesn't have any dent on so called big producers. They are just mad that they can't suck few bucks from poor people.

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Small creators aren't destroyed by piracy, because people who have money generally want to support artists that they like when they feel like that support will actually make a difference to that artist's livelihood, and will allow the artist to keep creating. A perfect example of this is Stardew Valley. I know people who pirate the vast majority of the things they consume, but have purchased multiple copies of that game so they could give it to friends.

Why are small creators inherently more entitled to 'support' than larger creators though? Why do we just decide that at a certain threshold, it's fine to take things for free?

The value of the money made is relative to how much money the person has. A person going from $0 -> $5 gets more value than a person going from $1,000,000 -> $1,000,005.

By that logic small scam game devs would be on par with other small creators.

I don't think it's because of relative value of money.

That's the same logic a thief uses when they shoplift from Walmart. As an indie myself, the biggest threat to my livelihood is actually piracy.

But i guess we agree on one thing: Shoplifting a poor's shop is far more egregious than wall mart? Relative value of money does make sense. Its not just here but in crime too. Can you punish people who steals 1$ and 1 million dollar in same way? Bad behavior, stealing is not a binary to my eyes.

Your error is in comparing a single theft between small and large business. In reality, big business will face much more theft due to their high volume. The difference is marginal when you account for relative value. Your second example does not follow.

Once a creator reaches a (likely fuzzy, undefined, needs more study) threshold, they gain the ability to negatively influence the laws in their favor, against the laws' original intent. Regulatory capture and all. Look at all the lobbying that happened by the Walt Disney Corporation, among others, to extend the copyright term to the insanity we see today. Some people/corporations also want perpetual copyright that never expires, and they tend to be the larger ones (although not all, so that is sort of almost orthogonal).

Small creators don't lobby the government in order to extend copyright duration for the nth time.

disney was once a small creator.

The thing with double standards is that there's just so many to choose from!

Maybe we're thinking about different things when we're saying "small creator" but Disney had contracts with Hollywood studios[1] almost from the start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company#1923%E...

If people are thinking that small creators bring universally better value than big creators then they're in the right to give them money.

I, for example, dislike Take Two's way of intimidating modders so I'm trying to avoid giving them money.

This is a great question. The answer imho is that large creators can use crowd sourcing and leverage their reputation.

All they have to do is ask the public for money to make the next [say] Mad Max, Riddick, Startrek, Batman, etc etc

If the public doesn't want a new Startrek movie funding will be insufficient. It might have to happen on a smaller budget, not at all or simply have to wait until funds are sufficient.

New things (not sequels) can be done/advertised on the reputation of the studio, director, actors etc etc

I pay for production, I pay in advance for a cinema ticket, I get a digital download some months later.

Whatever copying happens after that is pure promotion.

I watched a YouTube video on the creation of Stardew valley. He did everything himself, including music and graphics. He also didn’t compromise on anything. Took him years to finish.

I don’t play games, I still spent 5$ (I think) on the game, just because he is an impressive individual and I wanted to do my part so he stays that way.

Companies underestimate how much love fans have for creators, when they’re sincere and their work is very good. The only way companies know to make money is treat their users like shit, use lawyers all the time etc etc

> I don’t play games, ...

Stardew Valley is a load of fun and very much built with non-gamers in mind. It's pretty accessible (though you may want to keep the wiki handy). It's also really relaxing. You should try it out, you might really enjoy it.

It's a little different with video games, since platforms like Steam have changed the face of video game piracy. Gabe Newell himself said that piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. Steam removed any barrier to publishers to put their game on the platforms and players to buy the games, and game piracy is pretty much dead in the water and Valve is worth billions of dollars.

Whereas the music industry and even worse, the movie industry, still have their heads up their arses and are losing hundreds of billions of dollars if they just provided a single platform where everything is available to stream, everywhere in the world, with no restriction but a single monthly fee.

DRM is a problem, but the need to subscribe to a dozen different services to have access to most, but not all, media, is the biggest issue.

I haven't downloaded a video game since the early 2010s, I have given Valve thousands of dollars since, and I will keep paying for my torrenting VPN for music and movies for the foreseeable future. Long live The Pirate Bay.

There are a lot of independent labels and artists that you can support on Bandcamp (which takes at most 10%). Give it a look before you pirate music next time.

I do buy on Bandcamp, and I've got YouTube Music for streaming.

Streaming and buying music is _mostly_ OK nowadays, I've included it for sake of argument, the real problem lies with the movie industry.

> "small creators getting destroyed", "piracy doesn't have any dent on so called big producers"

Quite the opposite, one of the very few scientific articles on the topic piracy has been found to help small-mid level artists (but hurt big artists), explanation here:

https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-help-music-sales-of-many...

For instance and as said in the article artists like Ed Sheeran became popular thanks to piracy among college students.

But of a dodgy source. Anyway, Microsoft word and photoshop are only standard because people pirated them.

What dodgy source? The torrentfreak article is just a rehash of the peer reviewed one, not the source.

The European Commission ordered a study on piracy, and not liking the conclusion hid its results for two years. It was only discovered when a part that did show that some piracy hurts sales was quoted, allowing people to dig into the full report and finding that piracy helped games, was neutral on books and music, and was bad for movies:

https://www.newsweek.com/secret-piracy-study-european-union-...

> I understand there are some downsides like small creators getting destroyed

Do they? I was vaguely under the impression that the overwhelming majority of people pirating stuff wouldn't have paid, and that whenever actual studies are run they show piracy benefiting the original creators.

Indeed, to my knowledge, nobody ever managed to prove in a proper study that the creators actually lose money with piracy.

To provide a single data point, here[0] is an article about one such study. "EU study finds piracy doesn’t hurt game sales, may actually help. Results suggest a positive effect, but there's a huge margin of error."

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...

For me the breaking point was when Netflix removed the entire stargate series. That was a real wake up call for me personally and I canceled my subscription. 100+ TB later…

Yeah, “show I finally have time to watch, isn’t available any more” is really irritating; every time it happens is one more push back to TPB

Content preservation is a seriously underrated aspect of piracy. Prior to getting shut down in 2016, what.cd was practically the modern-day Library of Alexandria of music. Literally anything you could ever want to listen to was available in lossless FLAC format, made available by anonymous volunteers purely out of a love of music.

Now it's gone, and who knows how much music has been lost to time as a result.

Shutting down what.cd should be considered a crime against humanity. I will never forgive copyright holders for that.

I only downloaded a few albums off what.cd since I only had a laptop and bad internet back then and couldn't maintain the ratio their standards demanded.

However I gotta say, their content and organization was better than any music library (legal included) that I've ever seen. It is truly a shame that we lost it so the labels thought they could make more money. I would guess that humanity might have lost some rare lossless records.

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