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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

You might have an argument if all uploads to TPB were purchased (or otherwise legally licensed) copies and people sharing materials in this peer to peer library could only share as many simultaneous copies as were purchased. There are a few companies who are trying to adopt such a legal peer-to-peer lending network.

However, there's a great example of a modern library where you can find works produced by small and big media alike, and monetization is effortless for the consumer via nominal, one-time fees: Apple's App Store. Yet still people find ways to circumvent the new guard just to avoid paying 99 cents for apps.

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I wasn't aware that the pirate accepted any uploads other than torrent-files, which do not contain copyrighted information.

This is a good semantic distinction for legal considerations, but in this primarily philosophical discussion on the implications of filesharing, I think "donating" a torrent which serves as a proxy to the actual content to TPB and "donating" an actual copyrighted work to a library are decent analogs.

Isn't seeding the equivalent of the donation to the library, and torrenting just filling out the catalog index card?

Didn't the "original" seeder, pay for the copy?

Seems to be that rather than pay taxes to buy content for the library, one can just contribute directly to that library.

Not necessarily, though no doubt some have paid. Leaked copies of movies and software are sometimes uploaded prior to the media being made available for sale. Theater employees have been caught camming movies and uploading them without having paid for a license. Others upload rentals or media captured from broadcast TV, not purchases.

Public libraries welcome donations of books. And as I mentioned in my parent comment, startups are trying to work within copyright law to allow people to upload their movies/music and loan it out to others with the caveat that the number of simultaneous consumers of the media cannot exceed the number of licensed copies. I'd like to see such services take off, though they face an uphill battle to prove that loaning format shifted media isn't a copyright violation.

The uphill battle of libraries trying to deal with the technicalities of copyright law and its whimsical interpretation by the courts (format-shifting, etc.) is a minor battle, I think.

The real uphill battle is convincing content creators and distributors to focus on new and interesting ways to persuade people to pay for content, rather than trying to mandate that everyone pay for the content and mandating punishment for those who don't and are caught.

You're basically arguing against digitization of media. The whole point of digital stuff is that we can make nearly-instantaneous, perfect replicas with negligent overhead. That's why we convert and encode stuff as strings of repeatable digits. Attempting to limit the number of copies of mass-produced, digitized media in circulation is not only silly but totally futile. They simply must accept that the old monetization model based on artificially controlled scarcity is no longer tenable. As Bruce Schneier says, trying to make digital bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet. It's an inextricable property of the medium.

Your example of the app store is actually good, and shows a good monetization path that actually benefits from the inherent properties of the digital medium. You're right that some people still try to pirate 99 cent apps, but in my experience those people aren't part of the audience in the first place, because they don't have the 99 cents to spend, or they wouldn't be wasting hours and days to save themselves a few dollars. The time of anyone with a job is significantly more valuable than that. While there are always going to be a few penny wise and pound foolish irrational actors in the mix, you can't cripple your business based on that kind of rabid obsession. You have to let it go at some point.

It's time to give up the archaic, draconian copyright regime that demands total control of a PC before it allows it to display a movie and reasonably embrace our digitized future, including building monetization models that aren't "sue filesharers".

My philosophy on this is simple: I ask myself what the right thing to do is. I saw Prometheus in the theater and liked it enough that I wanted to have it at home. When it was released on Bluray, I could have found a torrent and easily downloaded a ripped copy. Instead, in my mind the right thing to do was to vote with my wallet and reward those who made it by paying the asking price. I do this for digital bits delivered via Netflix, iTunes, and physical media whether purchased or rented via Redbox and such. I guess that makes me archaic.

The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?

Src: Eben Moglen

Even if I did buy a blu-ray of it, I would torrent it because: a) I don't want to muck about with disks to watch things on my computer b) I don't know how to rip it myself (and doing so is no less illegal than torrenting afaik)

I purchase the media I consume too. That's not the part that's archaic, necessarily. It is no longer possible to artificially constrain supply of desired intellectual property, and business plans that refuse to consider this are archaic. It doesn't necessarily mean that no one will be paying money for intellectual property anymore.

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