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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

So, your boss will be happy he doesn't have to pay you. The question is how're you going to afford to live and how long will you work for someone who doesn't pay you anything?

Don't get me wrong I'm for communism and intentional communities; but are you really advocating that?

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Your argument makes no sense. If my boss doesn't pay me, I'm not working for him. Thus, he is no longer my boss. How is that relevant to the morality issue of piracy? Do you mean in the sense that if I pirate something, the creator of that something doesn't get paid and thus doesn't create the thing that I pirated? But that argument is backwards. If you mean that no more things will be produced in a world with piracy, that's demonstrably false. We've had rampant piracy since the first printing press, the world we live in now is not free from piracy, yet there's more creative work created every year.

I think you summed it up perfectly. If your boss is no longer paying you, he has no right to your time. Just like with the pirated content, if you don't pay for it, you have no right to it.

I think the piracy "analogies" are getting out of control here.

What you and most others miss is that people don't really care about the right of things when they pirate. It's a non-issue.

Pirating is immoral regardless of the pirate's opinion on the matter.

Merriam-Webster: "Definition of IMMORAL : not moral; broadly : conflicting with generally or traditionally held moral principles"

Based on this, whether piracy is moral or not depends on people's opinions. I would argue that society does not consider copyright infringement to be especially immoral.

Sing 'Happy Birthday' in public without paying the guy who bought the company holding the copyright to it. Is your audience disgusted by this immoral act?

Now the owner of the company holding the copyright sues you for your unauthorized use of 'his' song. Would more people think that you acted immorally, or that the copyright holder is acting immorally?

But with the pirated content, the pirate never entered into an agreement to pay for the content.

Also, the creator of the pirated product has only lost a potential sale (one that I would argue that they don't have a right to anyway), whereas the unpaid worker has experienced a 'theft' of their time and work.

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