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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

The beautifully written but not much known Rune Blades Of Celi ebooks no longer can be purchased, as the small publisher is just gone. Of course, the ones I purchased could no longer be downloaded. But want something bigger? Fine. The Wheel Of Time (is that large enough for you?) Complete Edition I bought for over a hundred dollars also can't be donwloaded any more. (And to be more on topic, one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases. And Bandcamp is better in this than others.)

You can download all these from torrent trackers.

Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

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> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.

But in your situation, you've already fucking bought it! It's as if you placed a pick-up order at the bookstore, showed up to pick up your books, and they told you to eat shit. In which case, acquiring it through other means is completely acceptable, morally and ethically.

> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available.

But this gets complicated. I wanted to post a song from a somewhat obscure '80s band on my website and so tracked them down and asked for permission.

One of them (the songwriter) responded to say that the band has never had the rights to the music on that album and, in fact, they don't even have a recording of it themselves. In his words "as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want with that stuff". I posted the song and sent him a high-quality copy of the album it came from.

That's not complicated, though. The artist is not the seller. The artist already sold their rights. Whoever bought the rights is the seller. You might choose to disregard that because the artist said they don't care, but their opinion is meaningless, so it should not be the basis of your argument.

I was responding to this: "People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available."

The use of the phrase "their creations" led to to think that the people being discussed here were the artists, not the rightsholders. Only the artists are the creators.

My argument is that this is complex because the system of legal rights is complex. The people that you think have them are often not the artists. I'm not actually seeing how you have argued against this -- have I misunderstood what you're saying?

I agree with your argument as stated here ("this is complex because the system of legal rights is complex"). I guess your example seemed to me to be an endorsement of relying on the creators opinion and not the rights-holder in cases where they are not the same, and I was arguing against that (assumed?) endorsement. The fact that the creators are not necessarily the sellers is at the heart of a lot of pro-piracy arguments and I've often seen it used as blanket justification for _any_ piracy, even in cases where the rights-holders and creators are the same entities, so I guess I'm a bit sensitive to it.

Side note: I used to co-run a small electronic record label, and almost all of the artists who we released music by were just ourselves (with a few exceptions made for close friends, who retained all rights to their music). Given our small size and low profile, it was shocking to see how quickly some of our releases were pirated. Sometimes albums would hit soulseek after we had only shipped out the first 30 or so CDs (and no MP3s). We weren't in it for the money... it was just a side-activity while we were still in school, and any money made was just funneled back into the label so we could release more music, so fortunately the piracy didn't affect us much as far as we cared. But it was still incredibly surprising.

> I guess your example seemed to me to be an endorsement of relying on the creators opinion and not the rights-holder in cases where they are not the same, and I was arguing against that (assumed?) endorsement.

I was not endorsing anything. My intent was to tell an interesting anecdote that illustrated the complexity of rights. Sorry for the confusion.

My personal attitude (not endorsing it, though!) is that the artists are the only people who really count. That's why I contacted them for permission. Beyond the artists, everything is just legalisms and how seriously to take their desires is a legal consideration, not an ethical one. My anecdote does indicate this in action pretty clearly, but it conflates that attitude with the main point I was making (that this stuff isn't simple).

I'm not sure what the difference is between one's personal attitude (voluntarily made public) and one's endorsement. IMO they are one in the same. I only bring this up because you've made the point to say you're not endorsing what you personally believe.

Why would the artists be the only people who really count, when they made an agreement to let the someone else handle the selling? Doesn't that by default mean that what the artist _wanted_ was to let someone else handle the selling?

> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.

I would say another key distinction is between "don't want to sell/can't sell" vs "don't want you to buy". In the former it may be because the owner does not want to go through the trouble of selling it or is no longer around to sell it. I know some people have given up because the effort to deal with "trolls" (particularly DMCA and fakes) has either turned their passion into a nightmare or it's not really their passion anymore and they don't want to deal with it.

> you've already fucking bought it!

To me, this is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the whole NFT debacle.

Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.

So you bought access to video X. Maybe on PlayStation (sorry). Maybe through a streaming service. Why does it matter how you get the bits that constitute video X? Why does it matter what software you use to consume those bits?

Unfortunately the answer is that IP rights treat the medium and the message as different things. You need that, to some extent, to encourage folks to package things well (eg 4k remaster an older movie). But what if we fixed that?

I want to live in a world where it’s obvious that I have a legal right to watch the Infinity Saga Supercut [0] when I have an active Disney+ subscription. And when I have the DVD of all the movies. And when I have a mix of BlueRay, dvd, digital purchases, movie channels, etc.

It should also be obviously ok for me to have the Infinity Saga stored locally, without DRM, and cached on a couple iPads. And if Infinity Saga is uploaded to YouTube, I should get to watch it with reduced or no ads.

[0] https://www.firstshowing.net/2021/the-infinity-saga-a-50-hou...

> Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.

Sure. But who enforces that receipt? Who still hosts the data? The people who purchased those things on Playstation have the receipts, there's no confusion about that - it's just that a different agreement made prior to purchase between two other parties means you can't watch that stuff anymore.

Putting the receipts on the blockchain or whatever doesn't solve this problem at all.

I agree (or at least see the argument) if it's like the original creator who decided they want to keep their hands on the work (or maybe like if a company wants to withdraw one edition of a book to sell a new edition), but in cases where works are orphaned, or the rights are in limbo, or a huge corporation merges with another huge corporation and permanently deletes creators' works for a tax break, I don't think there's any real argument.

If I Johnny writer am like "Ok when I was 15 I thought that many consecutive slurs was funny, but now the alt-right is rallying around what was supposed to be satire, so I want it off the market" that's kind of reasonable. If James Writerson has classics that are kind of out of fashion and got converted to ebooks by Big Publisher™ which was then bought by Bigger Publisher™ who decides it's not worth the money to keep the classics on the market (but also refuses to release them back to the estate of James Writerson or to the general public), that's less reasonable.

Basing something like this on someone else's motive doesn't seem like the best idea to me because in most situations you can only guess the motive. So it ultimately just boils down to your assumptions.

If someone incidentally acquires a license to a product, quietly removes the product from the market, makes no announcement about some moral justification or about a new version coming out, and makes no movement for several years, I consider it acceptable to label that product "abandonware" and pirate it. If the license holder later comes out with a new version of the product, the right thing to do would probably be to buy it, if the pricing is reasonable. If they later come out and say "actually this product is (somehow, don't ask me how) unethical", I'll consider deleting it.

There's no way to get these things perfectly, but I also want to add that I don't consider it ethical to pirate things made by indie creators, or books (with the exception of textbooks), and that I'm probably unusually prone to outright buying new books or indie games or legal first-party mp3s of music, because I consider it a bit of a duty to support media that I appreciate or want to see more of.

At the end of the day, I think I do more to contribute to creators I appreciate than the average consumer, but I don't lose much sleep when I literally cannot access an old classic at a reasonable price and I flip a coin between "stealing it" or just doing something else. Nobody was going to get my money either way, and I only have so much patience and willingness to try to do things "the right way" before I decide they've made it unreasonably expensive or complicated on purpose and screw 'em.

Your reasoning begs the question: Why do you believe you have a right to access something that you can't (or aren't willing to) pay to access?

Reminder to archive all bandcamp purchases

https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader

I have a windows oriented “get past setup pain points” tutorial here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21

For generating a cookie file, I suggest just using https://github.com/hrdl-github/cookies-txt I should really write up a full Linux and windows setup guide and submit it.

Likewise, people who use bandcamp are likely to use GOG, which also has purchase archiving tools available on GitHub. I’ve used https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc for a long time, but there are actually multiple projects now.

> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.

> the ones I purchased

This is were you went wrong.

Incorrect. They actually purchased them and could download them, DRM-free. (At least if the other services listed are like Bandcamp.) You should archive them yourself after downloading. The fact that you can download them again from the server, or maybe stream them, is an additional service, it's not the thing itself.

That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload it wherever.

I disagree with the latter notion. If you hold the rights to something, it should be you who gets to make the shots on how - or whether or not at all - you would like to monetize said thing.

Perhaps you plan on taking a break for a couple of years and then sell the item again?

Just because someone else really wants your item, does not automatically give them the right to access it or make it available to others, if you as the rights holder disagree with that.

True, strictly speaking, and it's also what the law says. But I'd wager that >90% of the time that is not the case, and that often the rights holder is not even aware that they hold those rights.

Well, who knows? Even if that is the case, I would argue that the correct way to go about is to first talk to the rights holder and ask. One cannot just assume or wager.

There's little I can imagine that would warrant a third party to just go ahead and access/use the item of the rights holder the way they would like, just based on some assumption.

The largest part of the problem is figuring out who the rights holder is.

All of my Wheel of Time volumes are still there; I checked. Granted, barring fire or a really thorough or oddly specific burglar, they're not likely to go anywhere (although I suspect my son will devour them once he's mastered reading English and can reach that top shelf).

> one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases.

Always download the flac of the music you purchase on Bandcamp. Then your purchases won't ever go away.

Where did you purchase The Wheel of Time complete edition from? I just checked and my downloads still work.

I got a free download of one of the more forgetful Terminator movies on....Universal? Can't get that back.

RCA Lyra protected music? Gone.

Paid $10 to Harvey Danger for 'Little by Little' and hey, I can still get it. That's a surprise.

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