Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

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Listen, I agree with you in spirit, but it's not practical. Here's what I have no problem with:

Let's say foo is 15 and he wants to download Super Expensive Program 9000. He spends all day looking for a torrent. Then, once he's downloaded it, the next day it takes him another full day to figure out how to install it and get the various cracks working and everything configured.

Right, that's fine. Here's the problem:

Time passes, foo's grown up. He's 25, and a software engineer, making $75k a year. He goes to thepiratebay.org and finds Super Expensive Program 9000 immediately. He downloads it in about an hour. It installs immediately with no requirement to apply a crack or any other technical detail. It just installs and works.

Okay, I have a problem with the second one, because once piracy becomes a one-click solution it starts to hurt those that make the program. The first isn't a problem because 15 year olds don't buy programs anyway, but they might buy it when they grow up (Like I did with Visual Assist).

If there's a way to make it artificially hard to get something for free, I say let them get it, because only the committed will be able to. If it's easy (Napster, ThePirateBay, etc) it needs to be made harder.

Also, making money by giving away people's work for free in a one-click solution is just evil. If you're going to give it away for free, make it hard, and don't make any money from it.

Piracy HAS become one-click easy because information is not scarce anymore. The fifteen your old of today that you think should be able to pirate software has no choice but to download it in a ridiculously easy manner.

There's no turning back now, unless there's an international movement to start policing the internet which involves cutting off countries that have been declared piracy havens from the rest of the internet. This, of course, contradicts the principles of the internet.

I'm too much of a moral relativist to think the Pirate Bay is evil. Stalin was evil. George W. Bush is evil. Making something people want (one click access to free information) is not evil. Laws are not inherently good and violating laws is not inherently evil.

I'll admit that it's not practical for all information to suddenly be free, but in the long run, information will be free. In the meanwhile, people like you and me get to argue about how free our information should be. This debate is part of the process of freeing our information.

Okay. So for someone like me, in a position where I have very little money and I want to get out of that situation, to hear "Whatever people make should be free" is just silly. Yes, open source is wonderful, and I really want to contribute to it. But needing to feed myself everyday and to pay for my car and a place to live takes precedence.

Would you tell PG that Viaweb should've been free? Why? Because it's a service? There's no fundamental difference between a service and a piece of desktop software, except you can't steal it.

You summed it up yourself. The fundamental difference between a service and a piece of desktop software is that you can't steal it.

In a society where everyone has access to free software and an internal moral compass is the only thing that deters us from piracy, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to release desktop software with no service component.

You summed it up yourself. Stealing desktop software is just that: stealing. Continue to steal other people's work (obviously nothing will change your mind), but don't lie to yourself by thinking it's not stealing. It is.

Copying music or a movie or software in violation of its license terms is not really stealing. When you steal something, the other person doesn't have it anymore. E.g. if someone steals my watch, I don't have a watch. But the owner of IP doesn't have an actual loss when you copy it without permission. At most they forego some revenue they feel they're entitled to.

People in the music industry have been doing their best to stretch the despised word "stealing" over onto this new behavior they want to discourage, but that doesn't make it so.

At best it's a metaphor to call illicit copying "stealing," but really more of a lie.

Darn, now I'm going to be downmodded into oblivion ;)

But I don't understand. Let's say Wal-Mart is selling a chair. Some guy comes in and steals the chair. Wal-Mart "forgoes some revenue they feel their entitled to" because of the missing chair. Except wait, they were legally entitled to that revenue, same with music's licensing agreements. The only difference is you can't prove that someone that stole music would've bought it if he didn't have the option to steal it.

..So because it's a gray area it's not stealing? Making up a new word to call the behavior just to make everyone feel better seems like a bad idea.

The difference is that the instance of the chair cost Wal-Mart money.

Imagine if you had a machine that could reproduce something from a photograph of it. You could then go to a shop and take a photo of a chair, and reproduce yourself a chair from it. But the shop wouldn't take an actual loss in that case.

There's nothing gray about that difference. If you steal a chair, the value of their inventory decreases by one chair, and if you merely reproduce one from a photo, it remains the same.

Nor do we need to make up a new word for the behavior. The English word is "copying." It's centuries old at least, and the behavior, in the case of manuscripts, goes back millennia.

So I'm not proposing we use a new word to make everyone feel better. I'm proposing we continue to use the existing word, instead of the one the music industry is trying to get us to switch to to make everyone feel worse.

The word "copying" works if it's not illegal, but it is. You have to say "illegal copying" for accuracy.

Let's look at it from another angle. Let's say someone paints a nice painting of a hand scrunching up a piece of cloth. If you think about it, an original painting is a form of artificial DRM. It's artificially more valuable than a copy, which causes implicit DRM.

But let's say it wasn't. For whatever reason, people just didn't feel like the originals were worth paying for. What do the artists do who want to make a living that way, if they're not good at other skills yet? Maybe they've devoted their whole life to painting. It puts a lot of creative people out of business for no good reason. It's not because their work isn't valuable, it's just because people can copy it.

Do you think they should be protected?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_M...

A little post-modernist theory, just to add fuel to the fire. People have been struggling with the issues surrounding cheap and easy reproduction since the 30s - but art has survived. It just changes.

So we agree that copying isn't stealing because stealing involves an actual loss for the victim, right?

It's fine with me if people want to use the phrase "illegal copying," but they should understand that they're on swampy semanic ground, because the meaning of "illegal" fluctuates depending what laws the music and movie industries have most recently bribed their pet congressmen to pass.

How to encourage young artists is a totally separate question. However, I will say (having been one) that most social-engineering type approaches go badly wrong.

The word is "infringement."

When you take a photograph of someone, you are stealing their soul. Photography would be more accurately termed "soul piracy". It's the same way with music.

:)

Stealing is taking the control of property from someone, not just the physical property itself. Because taking control of something is usually done by physically taking it, this aspect seems to define stealing, when really it's secondary to what stealing really is.

This argument is circular, because it assumes that a digital copy is property in the same way something physical is.

Did a monk making a copy of a manuscript "take control" of it? Not as most people use the word "control."

The information is the property, it doesn't matter what the format is. iTunes will still charge you .99c even though what you're buying is only a digital copy.

By "control" of something, I mean the ability to decide what happens to it. A monk copying a manuscript doesn't take control of the original, but he is able to then decide what happens to that information. That's what's being taken.

In the case of a monk I would guess spreading a religious text wouldn't be a problem for the person who gave it to him. But when someone copies the latest Harry Potter manuscript the author/publishers do have a problem, because they are losing something. As they can no longer control what happens to that content their ownership is diminished. And when someone's ownership is taken from them against their wishes, what else would you call that, other than "stealing"?

Yes! Thank you. Perfect description.

You would take someone's ownership of a recording if you took the only copy of the master tape. That would be stealing. Merely making a copy of a digital song on your friend's computer changes the copyright owner's ability to control what happens to their content not one iota. So by your own standard it's not stealing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

It's not that "whatever people make should be free". It's that buying something should not automatically restrict your rights to what you already own. If you can figure out how to make a non-easily-copied copy, then you won't need to forcefully (with law) restrict people from using their own computers after purchasing your copy. But the ease of copying (and thus competition) doesn't justify using force.

Web applications are one way to solve the problem of "how do I sell use of software without making the copy they're using easily copied". Other ways include, for example, DRM, but web applications are a far more robust solution than DRM, for the class of applications they can provide solutions for.

How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being able to steal it? You can't. It's not a panacea. People have to be moral. If you're 15, fine, steal it, because you can't buy it anyway, and it's not hurting anyone. If you're 25 and you have money, don't be selfish. It is stealing. And if it's stealing, then laws apply. They protect ownership rights.

"How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being able to steal it? You can't."

No, web applications are not a panacea. But some business model will work, and finding that business model is far more profitable than attempting to legislate a hold on digital copying. If there's some particular type of thing for which there is no profitable method of distribution, then that thing won't be produced for profit. Law can distort this to a degree, but such distortions always produce more problems than they solve. The market always wins. :)

Well, okay, I totally agree with that. I just feel bad about it because there is intrinsic value in a piece of music, as there is in a book. It's creative, and as such it's a thousand times more valuable than being able to do backflips or other specialized skills.

..But because it's so easily copied, it's not really worth anything unless the laws enforce it, which can be heavy-handed. So I don't know the right balance.

I think the first copy of a book or other creative product (that will sell well) is incredibly valuable, and I have some ideas for ways to get a large chunk of that value for the author/artist, but they require micropayments to be widespread, and that's what I'm working on right now. :)

Cool. Good luck! :) I'd like to hear more about it.

You've talked about the consequence (programmers make less money), but you haven't defended your status quo. Another way to phrase your statement is "Barring market manipulation, Super Expensive Program 9000 isn't worth writing." Which should explain everything.

Er.. What? The developer can price it at whatever he wants. If no competition exists, that price can be very high. That's not manipulation, that's capitalism.

The Pirate Bay is competition, once he's given away or sold the first copy.

Taking someone's work and repackaging it as free without paying the owner is stealing, not competition.

I agree, sort of. (Surprised?)

If someone broke into the owner's house or office and copied their work, then clearly a crime has taken place. However, in the vast majority of cases, the owner gives or sells a copy to someone, and a descendant of that copy is what ends up being repackaged or copied for free. In this case, the problem was not that someone "took someone's work and repackaged it as free", but that the owner already sold the work.

The idea that the owner can sell something and still own it is simply at odds with digital copying. No law will change this, but it's apparently harder to communicate than King Canute's point about the tide was. :)

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