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Comment by Zirro | Hacker News Reader

As long as it is illegal, it is technically correct for them to be punished. Some laws, however, are too absurd to remain.

Piracy, for me is certainly not about not wanting to pay. It's about the feeling that the money I pay mostly doesn't go to creators, but to the companies in-between who doesn't deserve it. I don't want to support such an industry.

It also the fact that I want to push for legal alternatives which are as easy-to-use as piracy today. I want to press a link and have a 1080p DRM-free film download in minutes. The cost is not the issue.

I hope that, within 20 years, sharing will be legal. Just because it's written as illegal in the law today, it's not set in stone. Things can change, and for the sake of the creative people, I hope it does.

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Isn't it up to the creators to fight for more compensation? We, as consumers, shouldn't be justifying our actions by picking up a fight we were never asked to join. We've provided the technology to circumvent the middlemen, proven its preference among users. However, as it stands now, less money goes to the creators when you pirate than when you play by their game. Don't claim to be fighting in their name.

I agree, though, that this industry is rotten... A pirated copy of any game, music, or video is not only cheaper and more convenient, but its of better quality (DRM-free). You can't win a fight where you attack both pirates and consumers.

Whats interesting is that they have the funds to still fight.

This, to me, sounds like an inefficient business model.

When you have the funds to fight both your customers and pirates, lobby the government, and constantly man a PR machine, while losing market share, I have to wonder - how much cash are they sitting on?

Well, personally I choose not to consume such content at all in most cases, but I sympathize with those who do pirate. If the artist get 5% of what I paid, and the rest of the money goes to those who promote SOPA, I'd rather torrent it. This is better in the long run, and I hope future creators will agree.

Those who lose are the current artists who remain with the big companies. Hopefully, they'll find a way out of that system.

Let's say I ran a startup and secured $20M in VC funding but had to give up 80% of the company to get that, then later had several additional large rounds of financing which diluted my ownership to 5%. Would you rip off my company's products/services because you feel I'm not getting most of the profit?

I'm curious to know how the two situations differ. In both cases, parties have entered into contractual agreements to give up a large portion of ownership in exchange for money and other benefits they wouldn't otherwise receive if they tried to bootstrap things on their own. Would you rather people get 5 cents on the dollar from your purchase so that they could save up enough profit to not have to give up so much ownership the next time? Or 0 cents on the dollar from your piracy and not be able to save anything such that they're forced into the same arrangement the next time?

I believe that record companies essentially scam their artists (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcwgdB0NltY for example). I wouldn't think the same way about your company, since you've made a larger part of the decision yourself.

The issue also remains, that by buying a product from one of the large companies would mean I'm indirectly sponsoring SOPA. This would not be the case, I hope, when I buy a product from your company.

piracy != lost sale.

If you get 0 cents with piracy, you will get the same 0 cents without it.

In case you missed this paragraph:

  "Piracy, for me is certainly not about not wanting to pay.
   It's about the feeling that the money I pay mostly doesn't
   go to creators, but to the companies in-between who doesn't
   deserve it. I don't want to support such an industry."

Paraphrased:

  "I want to pay, but the creators don't get most of the money.
   So rather than paying, I pirate instead."

This invalidates your argument.

It should be self-evident that not all people are like the author of the paragraph you cited.

It's also self-evident that I was replying to the person who wrote it, thus I made no claims about what "all people" do.

Besides which, your statement that "piracy != lost sale" is demonstrably false. You could have qualified your statement with "in some cases" or "for some people", but such a trivially true claim wouldn't add much to the discussion since the discussion is about what one person does.

Just because it's not a lost sale, that makes it right? It's right that some people have to pay for it and some don't (just because one would buy it and one wouldn't)?

I sort of agree with you, and I sort of don't. The reason for me is not because I don't feel the money goes to the creators (because I think the creators of movies and musical pieces are very well compensated), it's because here in Australia there is often not a very good way to acquire content quickly and easily (no Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc).

When I was in the U.K. I was a subscriber of Spotify and I didn't once pirate a song, as it was easily available in high quality.

Yet I still think piracy should be illegal, it has to be! Why should it be legal in 20 years? Shouldn't we just have a way to 'press a link and have a 1080p DRM free film downloaded in minutes' instead of having to resort to an illegal method?

I used to have a Spotify Premium account and just like you, I never pirated a song. This lasted until I started listening exclusively to music which artists choose to distribute for free.

Spotify is exactly what I mean by good legal alternative, except for that I still don't believe the artists are compensated very well. If there are enough reasonably priced legal alternatives available everywhere, piracy will shrink in importance. I say, if there's a last 2 or 3 percent of the population who don't feel like paying for themselves - let them. It's better than this hunt for file-sharers that's been launched by media-companies.

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