Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Saying that "when you pirate something the creator loses zero money" is an even worse argument.

You actually missed my point though (but I concede I used a rather simplified argument).

I was actually taking the "it's not available in my area" or "it's to expensive" argument of the OP to justify piracy to its logical conclusion.

I was pointing out that you can't circumvent the creator/owner's choices or restrictions on distribution, availability and pricing (i.e. "the food is too expensive here") just because you don't agree with them. It's not a level playing field.

If you don't like the creator's choices, don't participate in his creation. There really is no other choice.

While digital media creates the illusion of the "victimless crime" because you aren't taking something physical, it doesn't remove the fact that you are benefiting from someone else's hard work without agreeing to their terms of use, whatever those may be.

View on HN

If it is your belief that the creator's terms of use should reign supreme, that is legitimate, but if you want to argue for it then you need to actually argue for it.

I wouldn't say that I missed your point, merely that I objected to a particular argument you used it making it. I realize this is a lower level of discourse than addressing your main point entirely, but I'm hoping that it would raise the level of discourse overall.

For reasons I've never understood, copyright advocates love comparing copyright infringement with physical theft. If copyright infringement is bad then it should be possible, nay preferable, to argue this on its own merits, not through bad analogies.

They argue that way because their inflated claims have no merit. The only justification for copyright that doesn't amount to arrogant and unjustifiable claims of "creator privilege" (my phrase, but that is what their wordy arguments amount to) is that given in the US Constitution, as a practical matter "to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".

You might notice in "useful arts" that an argument could be made right now, that fiction, music, movies, and video games never should have been covered. And, in fact, music wasn't covered for decades afterward.

I'm hopelessly biased here, because I make video games. But do you not feel that the world would be worse off--culturally and technologically--without a commercial video games industry? And do you not think that the utility of games--faster and more ubiquitous computers--is self-evident when you compare it to a world without a commercial video games industry, but extremely difficult or impossible to anticipate in advance?

Maybe I'm making assumptions that you don't agree with--perhaps you think that a thriving video games industry could exist as strongly in the absence of copyright, or that the video games industry hasn't encouraged advances in computers--but both my claims seem fairly uncontroversial to me.

MMORPGS, or any game where the community counts, don't need copyright to be profitable.

This is appealing but not actually true. In the absence of copyright, no contract exists for downloading the game client, which means no EULA can be enforced. In the absence of a EULA, there are zero legal barriers[0] to people setting up private servers, which are protocol-compatible with the free game client, and hosting their own game, which destroys the business model of the MMO creator.

This is more-or-less an impossible problem to solve technologically at the moment: MMO servers are (by definition) too contended to do more than act as more than glorified packet switches for authoritative clients. The only lever to pull is to put more functionality on the server and off the client, but for a variety of reasons this leads to a less satisfactory user experience.

[0] http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/06/07/the-lawbringer-the-history... -- a quick history of the action by Blizzard against the maker of an in-game bot, legally identical to running a private server. Note the claims were all either copyright-related, won by the bot-maker, or involved "tortious interference"--i.e. incentivizing the buyer of Glider to break their EULA with Blizzard, which would no longer exist.

Also, as far as lack of copyright crippling music, I am sure that would be astounding news to Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, among many others.

At least two of those composers died in poverty so they might have actually thought that copyright is a good thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com