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Comment by roryokane | Hacker News Reader

This article has a similar argument to “The Teleporter Library: A Copyright Thought Experiment”: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/07/11/the-teleporter-libra.... The comments on that blog post contain useful discussion of the argument.

I especially agree with comment 18 on that blog post, http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/07/11/the-teleporter-libra.... It argues that the only reason we find public libraries morally okay in the first place was because we couldn’t copy their work. So perhaps if hard drives were invented before physical books, public libraries would have radically different restrictions, or not exist at all.

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I agree copying is a difference, but for >90% of my own usage, at least for books and films, it's not one that makes a practical difference. I don't typically watch a movie hundreds of times: I watch it once, maybe twice. So really I only need to loan it, whether from a library or TPB. In theory TPB would let me not only "loan" it, but actually keep a permanent copy for myself, which the library doesn't. But I have no desire to archive hundreds of gigabytes of films I've already watched, so I typically delete them.

Another approach I sometimes take is to buy a used copy and then resell it. This ends up costing the price of shipping + Amazon/eBay/etc. transaction costs. It doesn't really benefit the artist/studio/etc. any more than torrenting it, though, since they don't get a cut of used sales.

With music it's a bit different because I do actually listen to the same album multiple times over an extended period of time, so prefer a permanent copy of music I like.

It may benefit them a bit. In order to get that used copy there had to be an original sale at some point.

So if there is a big market for people to temporarily buy and resell something then there will need be be a fair number of original sales unless people are prepared to wait a long time to get their "turn".

With TBP in theory you can give the entire planet parallel access to something by seeding only one original sale.

If the ability to sell the content on the second hand market makes the original purchaser more likely to buy the content first hand, then it may be said to help the rights holder.

On the other hand, by selling on the second hand market the original purchaser may make others less likely to buy the content first hand, harming the rights holder.

The latter effect is almost certainly more significant than the former, so the net result is negative as far as the rights holders are concerned.

True, but it's still miles better (for the rights holder) than torrents.

There's also times when I've bought a game or something with the intention of playing it and then re-selling it, but I just never got around to the reselling part.

By what measure is second is miles better than torrents for the rights holder? It's been shown, at least in some cases, that having a free download of something increases the sales of that thing. It can be good publicity. The myth that free distribution is always harmful to sells is one of the things we need to kill if we want to have a reasonable argument of what's the best way to get content from creators to consumers.

Well my argument was based more on the basis of an individual transaction. For example, I want this game should I buy it new , used or pirate it? In such a situation it is clear the order in which they will directly benefit the rights owner.

Of course there may be other indirect benefits, like pirating a game and then recommending it to a friend who buys it at full price and alternative business models.

When you say free distribution it is not quite clear whether you mean piracy or the IP owner providing some free content as a kind of "loss leader".

I have always had a feeling that piracy benefits certain types of goods more than others. For example an obscure indie band with fans exchanging mixtapes or torrents reducing their obscuring somewhat.

OTOH something huge and mainstream being pirated by people who just didn't want to pay for it is probably more harmful.

I see, I misunderstood what you meant then. Obviously if you are going to get the product by some means, it's best for the producer if you pay for it.

However, it's important to note that a lot of the content that is consumed for free wouldn't be consumed otherwise. Just because you are not going to pirate something, it doesn't mean you are going to pay for it. And from the producer's side, it's better if his product is consumed than if it isn't, if the distribution and duplication is free.

As far as free distribution goes, I don't think it makes a large difference whether or not it's through official or illegal means (though it certainly merits studying and testing). Having your product for free on your website and having it on a torrent site probably both make you a sort of "loss leader" in a very similar way. You may have different costs and the visibility to some demographics may vary, but I doubt it matters much.

I just think the benefits of free distribution need to be better weighted. We just have no idea how much companies are losing or winning by having their content pirated.

It is certainly true that some content that has been pirated would not have been bought anyway.

Although I do feel that this might insentivise draconian DRM. If you are going to buy $50 worth of content per month and then pirate everything else you are probably going to pirate the stuff that is most easy to pirate.

For example I know people who pirate just about every PC game because it is as simple as downloading the torrent, installing and sometimes cracking. OTOH they don't pirate iOS games because they don't want to jailbreak their iPhones.

The result is that iOS game developers get more money from them not because they like iOS games more but because iOS is the more locked down platform.

If you're downloading the movies with an internet connection, there isn't really a good reason to delete them any more, unless you're more worried about copyright police raids than archival preservation; http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October... shows that the cost to buy a new disk was only 20% of the cost of paying for the bandwidth. Now it's probably more like 8%, and that's here in Argentina.

I don't pay for bandwidth, I pay for an Internet connection, and since disks can't replace most of its functionality (like reading HN every day), I'll still pay it regardless of whether I download the movie or not. Therefore, downloading a file is effectively free as far as bandwidth costs are concerned.

This would be different if bandwidth was metered, of course, but at least here in Portugal it isn't.

Sure, downloading a file is effectively free; there's no marginal cost. But buying a new disk instead of deleting the file is almost free. If you stored every byte that came down the pipe on a disk forever, it would only increase the cost of your internet connection slightly.

We find public libraries morally OK as they allow people who would not otherwise have access to knowledge and literature to access it.

If the poor could copy without restriction and without the prospect of losing the ability to do so, public libraries would be redundant.

But projecting DRM fantasies onto the economics of this distorts the very real moral case for libraries.

Libraries are still beholden to the laws of scarcity. If you go to the library wanting to pick up the hot new release, there's a strong chance you'll be put on a several months waiting list.

I'm not only morally okay with the concept of all human knowledge being accessible by all humans freely, I'm morally not okay with restricting access to any human knowledge. It comes down to the arguments of privilege, class, race, and regional issues. But at the end of the day, no one will ever convince me that they have ownership of an idea, it's simply an abstraction gone too far.

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