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Comment by vy8vWJlco | Hacker News Reader

Are people who go outside and drink from a stream (through a filter/firewall, of course), stealing? What about people who take in the scenery, or people who breath? Is nature a starving artist? I'm not for dumping toxic waste in the river, or stealing property, but the Internet is my environment, and copying data is not only cheap, that's what I pay my ISP to be able to do. IMHO, that makes copying as moral as breathing. That said, I do support artists and research, etc, only I do it after I evaluate them and feel like I got something - similar to how I choose to upvote/downvote on HN, only there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like.

FWIW, I do think that "sharing is caring" is a higher level of intellectual honesty than "trust me - you'll like it," especially when the former does nothing to damage attribution.

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The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games. If this stuff is "free" it's the tragedy of the commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons - except in this case it's developer resources that are "common" and will be depleted as there wouldn't be money to pay for them.

I think at this point everyone understands that there's piracy out there and it's not going away. The thing that irks me is the moral argument like yours (provided it's not a troll, I can't be sure) - I just wish people would admit that they're taking something for free that they shouldn't - no one is saying "trust me - you'll like it," don't give me that "after I evaluate" stuff - you can read dozens of reviews and watch full play-through movies on Youtube. I wish people would just admit that they are scumbags.

Extremely tiny scumbags in the grand scheme of things - less than folks taking a candybar from a corner store as digital goods, as you noted, are freely copyable without cost, but scumbags nonetheless as you are the leeches that make things worse for folks willing to pay for stuff. If you're a student and have no cash but want to play every game that comes out, you're probably going to pirate, but don't create this entire moral structure of justification to compensate for your being a freeloader. Just accept a the tiniest twinge of moral responsibility as you play your free game and become a better person down the road.

As someone who enjoys playing large-scale single player games on PC - Skyrim and the like - I'm upset because more and more developer resources are going to switch to F2P and "always online" games because those are the only ones that "beat" piracy and there are going to be less titles out for the PC and more that just are on console the next generation of locked-down consoles.

Well, it doesn't necessarily have to kill the game industry - so long as enough people pay after they pirate, developers will still get paid.

Now, what would kill the game industry is if everyone followed eropple's suggestion and solved the problem of not being able to evaluate games before buying them by just not playing any games in the first place. If everyone both stopped pirating and buying them, there is zero chance they'd decide to pay up after playing for a while, zero chance their friends would recommend the game, zero sales, and shortly thereafer zero games. Unlike piracy, that's genuinely unsustainable.

"The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games."

> In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.

There would most certainly be games, IMHO. I am also not trolling. I have been trying to rationalize copyright for over a decade. I just can't justify it anymore (and don't think that should mean I should have to ignore what my peers are talking about, and what tools are current, either).

>The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games.

The parent comment stated that he supports artists (probably financially).

For further reading, I recommend a book called Against Intellectual Property. You can download that legally for free. It's also for sale.

> there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like

I'm not going to fisk your post, which is largely self-serving rationalization. But I am going to touch on this.

The choice is not "pirate it" or "pay for it". You can also--shocker incoming--not pirate it and not pay for it. Don't like that a publisher doesn't have a demo? Don't buy it. Don't like that the demo's not long enough? Don't buy it.

But that's hard, and you can just take it for free. So, under the guise of "evaluating", that's what you do. And, yeah, I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first.

Just to be 100% clear about the culture, people don't pirate because "not buying" is "hard" -- what an absurdity; not buying is like not eating, it's the easiest thing ever: just don't do something. (I mean, you can whine about biological urges for distraction and nutrition maybe, but on a case-by-case basis, it's really as simple as not going out of your way.)

People pirate because it's available. The advice of "don't buy it" (by which you really mean don't play it) is therefore pointless moralizing; it's not going to sway people who are looking for something available to play.

If you just think abstractly about the problem as a bunch of kids who are bored and looking to play, and they come upon a ball which is not being used by anyone, that is a better mental model. Why are they playing with this ball that is not theirs? Because belonging is an abstract social relation which has far less cognitive importance to the kids than the immediacy of play, so who cares who the ball belongs to. Will having someone standing atop the ball forcing them to pay a fee to use it cause them to fairly pay for the ball? Probably not, because that's not the model that they're working under. Certainly it gets worse if they try to force every single kid to pay independently for a ball that they can share. "But surely someone made that ball, and made it available, and should be compensated for this!" Well, kind of. I think from the pirate's perspective that's already been taken care of, so to speak: the developers were paid for their creative works, while the pirate community has paid for the networking which made the content available, so if you're asking her to pay for anything, she is paying perhaps some investor, or perhaps she is paying for a future game title to be produced.

(Notice that none of this really "defends" any "side". In order to understand what's going on and try to work on a solution, I'm basically checking that sort of judgmentalism at the door.)

I agree.

I don't pay for anything unless I can try it or read a ton of reviews about it first. I've still gotten burned a few times but never felt any moral outrage over it. It's not some inalienable right to download stuff for free.

Some people would say freedom of speech, including digital communication, is a right. Copyright infringement does not constitute slander, lying, fraud, or anything of that sort. It's exactly and only copyright infringment. Also: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/internet-a-human-ri...

Your willingness to pay before you play says more about your income than anything; if nothing else, you probably have reliable income and can afford to make riskier bets.

"I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first."

In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism?

(Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)

"Taking shit for free because I can" is the nature of a certain audience, yes. Relying on attacks of moral conscience from people already willing to do this is not a workable business model, and because of this, we as a society have evolved a system of copyrights to incentivize content creation[1]. (Tchotchkes with a free game attached is, likewise, not particularly viable.)

[1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.

a system that makes absolutely no sense for data.

no sense.

none.

Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit. A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.

Whether it makes "no sense" to you is, to be honest, pretty much irrelevant. It is a societal construct and you are a member of society and you take the "bad" (it's not, but, whatever) with the good.

Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law.

But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?

I was with you a few comments back, and I think I agree with your overall direction, but in nitpick land, I think the details of your argument have gone off the rails a little, here.

I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear.

And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged.

And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.

nope. Restructuring society happens when enough of it rejects the way things are currently ordered. I don't want to live with the way things are, and neither should you.

Copyright exists because a majority of society currently thinks its the best way to produce, and that very well may be in the real world of limited supplies. In a world where the only value is novelty, copyright makes no sense. Once something is created, it's value drops because it's supply is infinite. Currently society thinks the way around that is to artificially restrict supply.

I hope one day we will realize that were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I would LOVE to pay for game of thrones... to be produced. Buying a copy of game of thrones is not worth its value, it has no value. It is in infinite supply. It is like air.

This is why we donate to blogs, subscribe to series, and fund kickstarters. Because that is the economy of the web. The true economy.

> running roughshod over the little guy

I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.

> the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first.

I've got quite a few games still in their shrink wrap on my shelf because I've never had to open them to get at their ROM/CD.

> there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like.

A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this. Then you can take a risk on a game, evaluate it to your heart's content, and if you didn't like it then request a refund. That would be a useful downvote indicator.

For the recent SimCity, a stream of refunds would show as the product not being fit for purpose at launch, and as the refunds taper off and the sales continue to grow, that's a confidence indicator that the game has reached an acceptable playable standard.

Though, it would be more useful for unsolicited/open-ended feedback as to why the refund, so a company could do something to improve their games.

Granted, that system can be initially gamed by serial refund-requestors - but those people are further along the spectrum of "will not pay" anyway, but at least they've taken the step of purchasing, that's one step closer to making inroads into the pirate instead of purchase segment.

By making the refund rates public, and some sort of identifier, it should be easier to target the non-regular refund-requestor with special offers and promotions. A company should have the ability to reward loyal customers too.

From the company's perspective, people will be less inclined to ask for a refund after they've purchased a game that works and provides a decent gaming experience. That's just the nature of people who believe that they have received value on their purchase. That is one improved step beyond the "need to evaluate before purchase" mindset.

I guess this will mostly prove that the "evaluate before buying" mindset is a self-rationalisation for piracy. The Radiohead "name your own price" album is unsurprising in that it was heavily slanted to as close to free as possible, rather than reflecting a demand versus supply equilibrium.

This is actually a technique that retail stores discovered a while ago.

They used to make it very difficult to return products, and rarely would you get your money back. But then they realized that if you make returns simple and painless people stop second guessing their purchase since there's less risk if the product doesn't work out later.

So more people are buying the product and those that do return it are not left feeling burned, making them more likely to purchase again from the same store.

Nobody wants to feel ripped off, and taking that risk away from customers helps remove that mental hurdle they face thinking "but what if it sucks?"

Game developers on the other hand have a bad track record. Returns are basically impossible, even with everyone's favourite Steam.

With paid reviews, gaming social media and relentless hyping. People are tricked into buying a game that's not as good as its made out to be and are left feeling scammed. Not a great way to treat your customers.

Retail moves in cycles over how easy to make returns.

They make returns easy, and their customers are happy, but so are scam artists, ranging from people who "bought" the TV for the super bowl or the dress for the party and now are returning it, to people who bought the item somewhere else and are trying to return it to your store where they insist they bought it.

So then stores start making returns harder, dissatisfying the scam artists and their real customers. And then someone starts the cycle again, thinking they have a better handle on it.

"A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this."

That sounds a lot like the "copy-first, pay later - or receive a public shaming" de facto standard used by cautious patrons today (only ATM people receive their shame from other pro-copyright HN readers).

That said, I do support artists and research, etc, only I do it after I evaluate them and feel like I got something - similar to how I choose to upvote/downvote on HN, only there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like.

And luckily, a lot of games (this one included) come with a free demo, so that you can try them before buying them. So fortunately for all of us as customers, we don't need to download a cracked copy. We can play through the demo, see if welike it, and buy it if we do.

The demo for Linux said something like ‘coming soon’ earlier (the page seems a little slow at the moment) and I was unable to find any information whatsoever regarding hardware and software requirements before being asked for my credit card details.

Problem is , for everyone who will happily compensate the artist if they feel they got value there are probably ~100 people who will just keep it for free even if they feel they had value.

That's not really a problem, unless you have some server costs or something.

The question game developers should be asking is not "How many people will illegally copy it?" but "How many people will buy it?"

It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers.

This doesn't factor in the number of people who have illegally copied it but would have paid something for it had an illegal free copy not been available.

It isn't equal to total illegal downloads, but it isn't equal to zero either. It's probably also not uniform across different game genres.

There isn't really such a thing as "enough" customers either. The more you sell the more budget you have to produce the next game and the more confidence you have that it could be successful.

It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers.

I cannot put into words how profoundly this line of thinking upsets me. It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society.

Well, the "antithesis of western culture" is also how US drug policy works too.

US companies make drugs. They patent them wherever they can. Places that don't acknologe the patent get the benefit anyways. And the drug users in the US bear the brunt of the costs.

I like being on the other end, too. If there's more than enough to go around, I state that it should.

>> It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers. > It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society.

Can you explain this to me? It looks like trolling, but I'm trying to extend the benefit of the doubt.

What does "Western society" mean? I'm both curious what countries or cultures qualify as Western for this purpose, and also what aspects of those countries/cultures you see as being the essential ones.

How do you equate the "accepting some free riders as long as some people pay" idea with the antithesis of Western society? Are you claiming that the fundamental premise of "Western society" is "don't let anyone have anything without paying for it"?

What does "quite literally" mean in that sentence? Is there some non-literal sense that you wanted to disambiguate, or is just an intensifier?

It looks like trolling, but I'm trying to extend the benefit of the doubt.

What a wonderful way of completely deriding any meaningful discussion possible.

That's only a problem if you consider a copy as damage. (I haven't seen a convincing argument.)

There are also lots of factors in a financial proposition. Some people give away free samples, others invest in an education.

It's interesting that iTunes is doing so well, without mandatory DRM, while copying has only gotten easier...

You have this product which has high fixed costs to produce but zero marginal costs to produce an extra one. If everyone chose to pay zero then the product would not be made and everyone would be worse off. By choosing to pay zero you are free-riding on other people who choose to pay non-zero. It is possible that piracy could bring about:

a) higher prices to other consumers who have to pay a larger share of the fixed costs because other people are choosing to pay zero. this is not really a cost more a fairness problem.

b) some products not being produced because not enough people are willing to pay the higher price to pay off the fixed costs. even though there might be a price point X that is lower than what it is worth to some of the zero payers which would result in the fixed costs being paid. this is a real economic cost

I see it as a cart-before-the-horse problem. Before the printing press things were more horse-before-cart (no copyright). After the press and the statute of Anne, to today, we have been very cart-first. We paid for physical CDs without knowing if we would like most of what they had on them (we may have heard one song on the radio for free, as advertisement - ie, the pirate bay is a modern radio business - but the rest were a mystery, and distributors exploited our eagerness by adding on a dozen unknowns). We still felt like we were buying something tangible (the medium was tangible), so it was relatively easy to accept trading money in advance for something we couldn't see into first.

I think following that approach further requires an untenable "enforcement" culture on private and social thinking and collaborative efforts. I'd rather put the cart back behind the horse (fund the work itself, to create the first copy, rather than pay mandatory royalties for all future copies - and endure the social unrest of preventing what boil down to thought-crimes, IMHO).

In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.

It is damage in the sense that you are consuming a product without "voting" for it in the marketplace.

This can lead to products that are in fact popular being less economically feasible to produce under certain business models if the piracy rate is too high.

At the same time, popular copies - paid or otherwise - become more well known and potentially much more profitable. One may not be voting with money, but one is voting with time (and "time is money") by accepting it, using it, and sharing/promoting it to others. Microsoft used this strategy in China (Gates said something like: if they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours...). They have done less well recently.

If you are a game developer, the fact that several hundred thousand hours have been spent playing your game isn't helpful to eating or financing your next game if you have no way to monetize those hours.

There are of course business models that are aided by copying (such as those based on open source software).

The difficulty is how the video games industry can adapt to this. The route they seem to be increasingly taking is to sell games as a service rather than a product but then this is decried as "always on DRM".

A college degree is also not guaranteed to lead to a job immediately either, particularly if there are alternative sources of the expertise. (There is no equivalent to copyright, in that sense, guaranteeing a student the right to be the sole provider of their expertise because they paid to receive it...)

Every sale is still a negotiation. I've said in the past that I think the economics of copies boils down to begging, but that seems a much harder sell when I say it first, so I like to argue a bit first... :)

FWIW, I think people are also decrying the service-model appearing in games (similar to the Kindle model, where Amazon can delete your books) - recall the recent Microsoftie who was fired after some bad PR - so it looks to me like people are moving towards the same limiting equilibrium, with or without copyright: easy copying, and paying only when they feel an obligation. IMHO, we can get there the hard way (increasingly jack-booted copyright) or the easy way (accepting human nature and negotiating differently in light of it).

(Note: I have edited the first paragraph a few times trying to be clearer, for lack of a perfect analogy.)

Getting a college degree will likely get you a job if there is demand in the area in which you did your degree.

Imagine the situation where you get your CS degree but find that few people are willing to pay for programmers or software and the people who are willing to pay will still not pay very much yet the demand for software is still very high. Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market.

Problem with piracy is that it isn't a "negotiation", a negotiation would imply that there are 2 sides attempting to reach a compromise. With piracy you can simply hit up TPB and download whatever you like without the consent of the author.

"Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market." Tell that to philosophy majors. :)

I can also turn on the radio and receive music for free, with ads. TPB has plenty of those (but isn't distributing anything themselves, so arguably isn't infringing... Perhaps they are facilitating, but if so they are largely facilitating non-commercial infringement; I can't imagine anyone downloading a movie and selling it would be common). Radio stations usually pay royalties, otherwise they would be commercially infringing copyright. I mention elsewhere that I can sympathize with commercial copyright enforcement.

Non-commercial copyright infringement is harder to value IMHO. In the case of commercial copyright infringement, there is positive income, and the profit can be fought over. Now that we have dropped boxed distribution media and gone digital only for most types of content (and, importantly, I pay for my ISP), the "profit" to the infringer, and the cost to the originator, from any given copy is at best very ambiguous. The profit to argue over could be positive, non-existent, or negative (heck, they might be wasting their life, watching Game of Thrones, when they could be creating value). There is nothing obvious to fight over in the case of non-commercial copyright infringement, except the copy itself (whether the copier had the right to copy). But preventing copies needs a system similar to a cable TV network, not an amoebae-like Internet.

I like the Internet and the ability to speak freely, and to mix what I find, too much to enforce copyright (even my own) anymore. It's taken a long time for me to get here, and I used to want to be a professional artist.

TPB do make money from advertising and I'm pretty sure they aren't cutting cheques from that to the artists/developers.

The issue isn't so much the copies themselves, I could download every torrent on TPB and archive them on a stack of HDDs somewhere and it wouldn't hurt anybody.

The issue is that there is no longer a requirement to pay to consume something where the business model requires that the consumer pay.

Perhaps this is no longer a viable model, but the question is how to replace it?

Does popular content simply move to locked down platforms? Do we deliver games under a SaaS model (WoW etc)?

Both of these models have disadvantages to consumers, arguably it would be better if people simply refused to consume pirated goods and always paid the asking price but this seems unrealistic.

Please don't think I'm not taking your question seriously, but I do think the future model is a donate button (I also say above, I think it boils down to begging). I do also consider this model sustainable since, even ignoring all the other ways fame can be monetized, the potential audience is 7 billion people and a gift of even $1 from even 0.001% is $100,000 - enough to justify most indie projects. But if that's too risky, I am encouraging people to put the horse back in front of the cart and to hit up people through kickstarter... (It still amounts to begging/patronage, but it's more predictable by being up-front.) The main difference between that and the old publisher-oriented model, is that creators have all the control over the terms.

I would also love to see people release commercial stuff more under CC-SA and similar (even if they still charge for distribution), or the FOSS licenses - assuming they need one. There's no reason they can't generate income, even while being shown through a subscription. The license doesn't change the distribution model. (Ubuntu is asking for donations. I would love to see some stats.) I think people just need to get used to flying without a net (copyright).

Take Netflix for example: they are producing their own shows. Like iTunes, all the content on Netflix can be torrented, but Netflix is easier for non-technical people. I don't even think copyright is necessary for either of Netflix's or iTunes' success. Netflix is a subscription, but I think they could make a similar amount if their shows were CC-SA licensed. People pay for both Netflix and iTunes because downloading is simply harder and more likely to give their computer an STD, even if the quality can be better ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5621119 ). Copyright still affects the food chain today, but Netflix has convinced me that they don't need copyright to keep the game going.

What's more likely however, I think, is that we will see something like the 6.4/93.6 ratio continue into the future, painfully and in spite of copyright, and with much resentment, until that hostility turns to acceptance (though, by then we'll probably have other generational gaps to deal with) - assuming we can get through the next 10-20 years without a censorship/copyright-centric police state. 6.4% of 7 billion, for something priced as low as $1, is still revenue of 448 million, even without budging that ratio, so I have no doubt creators will do well.

Edit: I don't feel like waiting 40 minutes for the reply button to appear on your comment, but I suppose only time will tell. In the mean time, the pro-copyright-ons and anti-copyright-ons will likely have to learn to live with each other, if for no other reason then so they don't collide and annihilate, sending us all back to the stone age (or industrial age).

I'm not quite so optimistic, or at least my optimism is more measured at least in terms of the games market.

Most kickstarter projects I see (games at least) are not proposing "If this gets funded the game will be free" they are proposing "If this gets funded the game will be $20, but you can get it for $15 if you fund us". So they are still relying on copyright to some extent.

Of course there are some games that appear to be sustainable as donationware (dwarf fortress for example) but I would be amazed if we saw a COD/Skyrim scale game on a "pay what you want model" simply because the up front development costs are so high that it would be too large a risk.

I suspect in the AAA areas you will see a move towards support for closed platforms where piracy is more easily controlled and IAP type models.

So probably two divergent markets , with starving artist auteurs in one corner and AAA publicly traded behemoths in another.

Music is the absolute easiest thing to pirate, yet iTunes is huge. People are willing to pay for the simplicity of iTunes. It's still slightly easier than searching for a decent torrent.

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