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Comment by sauercrowd | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure I understand what's being proposed instead.

I agree with the premise that that comparison between Tiffany's and piracy doesn't hold, but

> It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.

That doesn't make sense. Pirating something means you gained the whole value of the product. In Tiffany's case that's not remotely the case. In fact, they will pay large sums of money to marketing companies to make sure you get a photo.

If the entire value of a product can be taken, there's no incentive for it to be created in the first place other than intellectual curiosity - as another commentator said: effectively academia.

Our society has never found a way to deal with digital products in a way that doesn't skew incentives

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> If the entire value of a product can be taken.

But this is not really possible . People switch to identical products made by more ethical or value aligned distributors all the time.

Switching out music streaming services based on artist payouts, or banks based on their climate commitments, buying a game after pirating it to support development. I’m sure someone can think of even better examples.

I'd argue it is possible. If a person pirates an album of an artist, that person now owns the album as if they would have paid money for it (from back in the itunes times). Same for an ebook, a game, a movie, ...

You are describing mostly services, where the intellectual property of the product is of no interest to the buyer (e.g. the average Spotify user has no desire to access their codebase or recommendation engine).

Buying a game after pirating has no impact on the product you have today, you already own the intellectual property as is.

> I agree with the premise that that comparison between Tiffany's and piracy doesn't hold

The Tiffany’s example is naive.

1. Tiffany in that case equivalent to a reseller that get stolen activation codes.

2. Pirating is more like stealing something that has infinite stock. But once pirated there’s also similar product (with infinite stock) at 0$ so the value of the product could end up being lower due and result decrease in sales.

I’m all in gain-gain but the example in his post is also incomplete.

His comparison is certainly better, but it is still very wrong. I wish there were better and less biased comparisons in the debate.

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