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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

So is piracy good or bad?

Personal consumption is vastly different than corporate ladder climbing.

In my experience, real pirates have a strong code of ethics. I've never seen a pirate site that didn't at least say "buy it if you like it". Leechers are a different story, but to be fair most of them just don't have the money to buy the stuff they download.

To cut a long story short, I'd personally say pirating is bad if you have the money to buy it and you don't just pirate to try first, whereas if you don't have the money it's okay (permissible) and doesn't take away any sales.

That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.

These people tend to outgrow that tho. I def would have pirated books as a youth as it’d save me a trip to the library. Now i’m old and have money, I would never pirate a book as I value both contributing to the author and owning the physical thing. Maybe some exceptions if it’s in some niche tech or something and don’t wanna commit yet..

Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where book piracy is rampant than one where many people just don’t read anything?

I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow", lol. For over a decade now adult (and now middle-aged) peers who are heavy readers were asking me to put books on their ebook readers, since they knew I had the hookup, but now since Anna's Archive is so convenient, they are just getting the books themselves. A surprisingly large number of normie bibliophiles knows AA now.

For the majority of literature, buying the book won't contribute to the author because the author is deceased. For that minority where the author is alive, many people won't see a need to make an exception to their policy of not paying. Indeed, your second paragraph gets to the heart of it.

> I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow",

Totally agree. Also, we're applying western ethics to the third world.

They don't share our values on IP, I assure you.

Textbook pricing is such a scam and often self serving at expense of poor students, I find the lack of support for buying them not at all surprising

I wasn't talking about textbooks, which were only a sideshow of the pre-AA academic pirate circles I was active in, but rather published research.

Well, ethics is weaker, when the other is unethical in their own way.

400 euro for a book is hardly ethical. If you must charge that much for a copy you shouldn't have written it because you simply couldn't afford ro write it. Passin your poor business judgement onto others is not ethical.

Prices for scholarly books are not set by the author but by the publisher. The author will often send you a PDF for free if you email and ask nicely.

That's the problem, though. One of my books costs more than $100 USD and that's even on the cheaper side, and as you rightly point out, I had zero choice or saying in the pricing. Some more established authors can influence it, either by publisher choice or by talking with the acquisition editor but that's rare.

The academic book publishing industry is very predatory, which is why so many authors nowadays support open textbook initiatives.

What I can say with certainty is that in many poorer countries scientific research would be impossible without piracy. Universities just don't have the budgets and libraries are often abysmal (unless you work in the capital and it has a prestige state library).

Sorry, I should have said "publish it" instead of "write it".

Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).

Ah yes, I heard about this ‘pirate code’.

Only I got the impression the Code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules

It's based on means testing.

Reverse means testing

Is cutting people with knives good or bad?

Does context matter, like if it’s OJ Simpson vs a surgeon?

That depends. Is it about cultural enrichment via the arts, or financial enrichment by selling a bootleg generator?

I personally am in the camp that capitalism just isn't a very good model for getting artists paid, but that isn't really the same thing as believing all creative work should be up for grabs by any arbitrary business and/or political campaign for any arbitrary purpose.

You know how talking about wage gaps doesn't necessarily mean that you're a full-blown Communist, or that you're literally saying everyone should be universally paid the same? It's sort of like that.

It depends on what’s being pirated and why. Someone who can’t afford a 200 euro textbook, or can’t buy it where they live, is in a different position from a company that downloads 200k books to build a commercial product. Individual piracy is a gray area. Doing it at scale for profit, with a legal team on standby and then deleting the evidence “due to all this litigation”, is much harder to defend. The ethics change a lot when the person doing it could easily have paid.

Look, don't die on a hill for billionaires. I think it's good if someone gets a Hollywood movie or Disney TV show for free. But it's better to support that one author who self-published a useful book.

Don’t watch it? Why do you feel it’s your right or a need to access these materials?

There's no right or need claimed, so your question is irrelevant. The person you're responding to said it's "good", not that there was a need or right.

People don't have a right or need of reading The Bible, but many think it's good if people do. It's to the degree that sometimes they're printed at cost and distributed for free. The point is, there can be benefits for humans who can't purchase media to be able to experience it anyway. Now, whether that extends to copyright infringement and piracy being some noble act is a separate bridge to negotiate.

If you say something is good you imply access to it is good.. nice intellectualizing but Disney ain’t no Bible.

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