Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get.

Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the informational sense, only free is hard to monetize in a world of Pirate Bay self-righteousness, where mass piracy is accepted and even praised. I'm told that Sirius XM already has a mathematical key revocation technique that's uncrackable, though I'm also told they haven't used it because a general crack to their radios isn't around yet.

We're approaching the world of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"[1]. A world in which piracy is acceptable isn't a world of free stuff for everyone--it's a world where content is locked down, or never made at all. A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time. Then it will be so long to fair use, to reasonable sharing, to grey-market cultural exports.

This world will happen because people want to buy the best, latest, greatest, biggest budget music, movies, apps, and so on. Confronted with this, piracy advocates theorize a Marxian post-scarcity paradise where all content creators do it for the love of content creation, where people have woken up and thrown off the shackles of capitalist big content. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Are trying to imply that deep down everyone inherently would choose theft over remuneration? Or that we all would prefer a world where everything is free?

Piracy exists sorely due to bad business models, where it is distribution of expected value of a product; Teens aren't going to pay $300 for Microsoft Office to use for 3 hours the night before a paper is due, I don't want to have DRM on my music.

If your opinion was the case we'd see businesses burning to the ground, which we aren't. We're seeing business like Spotify, BandCamp, Steam, Kickstarter, HumbleIndieBundle all flourishing.

No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

Piracy exists because easily replicable goods are not available to some people, price is just one of many possible reasons for this unavailability -- look at tv, shows from free-to-air channels are being pirated in millions(!) of copies every week.

I have to disagree, piracy does not only exist due to bad business models. Back in the day, it was generally more convenient to buy a tape instead of copying it from a mate. While convenience/"bad" business models is a big part of the reason for piracy it is by no means the sole reason for it. E.g. people love collecting stuff, but could not rationalise to pay for it. There are people with multiple TB's of music/films/books/pictures that they never consumed, just because collecting it is their only interest.

Also, the Microsoft office Student example is obviously flawed. Office costs $300, if the student cannot/does not want to pay, he CANNOT USE it. There is absolutely NO business flaw on Microsoft's side there, except that their pricing might be a little to high for students. Maybe students are not their target group then. (I only use MS Office in this example because it is a response, students however can of course use the >FREE< MS Office (with ads) for their 3h-late-night-project).

> A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean by a 'content lockdown', but as I read it, I couldn't disagree more with this statement - how could we ever have a perfect content lockdown?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com