Comment by elmer2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elmer2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Many small software companies have gone out of business due to piracy. I've seen this countless times in my career.

Before rampant piracy, independent musicians could tour small clubs and sell music. I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.

Nobody was willing to pay for music online, but sharing it for free was fine.

I have the same reaction now that many here and in the tech industry have had over the last decade or two:

Times change and you aren't owed a living. If you can't make money with the new AI landscape, I guess you should be going into a different industry.

FOSS licensing won't matter much anymore when you can use LLMs that make changes to a code base and it looks nothing like the original.

We needed protections 25 years ago, but too many in the industry didn't want to give up the free games, movies, music, and software.

Now that it's hitting their bottom line, there's talks of unions and protections from the government.

I'm pretty tired of the hypocrisy.

Why should I care now?

Have you ever heard the song “Everything is Free” by Gillian Welch? What you’re describing is not a new phenomenon. People also “pirated” music during the radio and cassette tape era. If you business model relies on giving away things for free and expecting the customer to have some sort of conscious, you are asking to go out of business.

I’m from rural no-where and we still have bands and acts pass through that town on the regular making money. I now live in Nyc where there are PLENTY of places that have indie bands playing gigs and charging a door fee. So what has changed? Anyone that’s a serious about their output isn’t going to quit because of “piracy”.

As far as unions go, that talk was always squashed by the high pay and early retirement trend in the software industry. I would like to see it happen a long time ago too but it didn’t not happen because of “piracy”.

If they were such good devs and musicians you should be willing to link to them as examples. That would go a long way to link to their software/music site/blog/bandcamp in promoting them and getting people interested in them rather than complaining no one knows these people except from what’s been stolen from them.

> Many small software companies have gone out of business due to piracy. I've seen this countless times in my career.

Surely you will be able to name some of them.

> I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.

So, you know many small companies and many musicians? Sounds honestly made up.

Probably not made up but the poster is definitely just as guilty for not supporting these people by not sharing links or at least name dropping some of them.

Name three.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com