In England, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas day? Why? Because centuries ago England was governed by a despotic, fundamentalist Christian regime that did not approve of Christmas celebrations.

Should I then refrain from eating the mince pie? No. I and millions of my fellow countrymen eat mince pies, and most are completely unaware of the existence of Cromwell's mean spirited law.

Why is this crime tolerated by the authorities? Because they do not go about like Robocop, enforcing laws as though they are some kind of computer program. Instead they understand that laws are a crude human attempt to model current social norms. Those social norms change over time and often the written laws don't keep up with the pace of that change.

The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. It's perfectly rational and normal for activists to hasten that process by defying the law, and encouraging others to do likewise. Obviously, the copyright lobby will react by trying to strengthen the laws, and step up enforcement. That's fair enough too.

Which side will win? Well opinions vary, but to suggest that breaking the law is in itself an immoral and irredeemable act, is naive.

Well, the Internet certainly has led to a generation of young people who are accustomed to downloading freely from various sources without regard to copyright restrictions and, in this sense, I would concur that social norms are changing.

Unfortunately, the law itself is far from changing and, while some of this has to do with corporate lobbyists, the greatest reason is that copyright is a key part of many forms of commercial activity whose nature is not changed by the Internet and whose deep-seated roots require the continuation of copyright.

Just as one example, Steve Jobs had funded Pixar when it was a fledgling company primarily trying to design a hardware solution while also supporting a team of animators who were doing primarily experimental things. In time, it became clear that the hardware piece was not going to be promising but that the animation team might just produce a breakthrough in animated films. The problem: it took someone with tons of money and a huge appetite for risk to carry this through. A whole team of creative people and their families suffered through that one and did not come out whole even as it was - but they stuck it out, as did Mr. Jobs, who invested countless millions in the venture at a time when that strained his personal resources. The outcome: Toy Story (and the whole Pixar legacy). The outcome without copyright: a big goose egg. Why? Because the participants in this venture underwent great hardship to get to the final result and the only hope of a financial payoff lay in being able to have a film that would be owned, controlled, and marketed by the Pixar venture and that might become a large commercial success. This is indeed what happened but only because of the protections afforded by copyright.

Now take the whole universe of startups as a larger example, where founders are today offering massive incentives to highly skilled developers in order to develop key functionality based on proprietary code whose value lies precisely in the fact that it is protected by copyright. If all this were simply public domain, then funding for these ventures would vanish or the business models radically restructured. Unless and until someone comes up with a model by which public domain code can be used to gain competitive advantage in the standard startup of this type, copyright will continue to play a huge and important role.

Such examples could be replicated many times over. My point, though, is that, insofar as the law is concerned, copyright law is hardly "outdated" and the reasons for its existence and its commercial value have not gone away. That body of existing law does indeed protect the interests of mega-corporations who are using lobbying efforts to gain special privileges at the expense of us all, and this is despicable. But it also protects countless other people who create things - writers, musicians, film makers, software developers, etc. - whose livelihood in the economy as currently structured depends on it. Unless and until the needs of such creative people to control their works change, copyright law will persist as before (I did a lengthy post on the reasons for this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959).

I am not saying that it is justified to mount a moral crusade against acts of infringement. But to suggest that a radical change in the law of copyright is imminent - or that it is about to be abolished - is, in my view, to misread the legal landscape in a serious way.

I think you're right that in a world of weaker IP, Pixar wouldn't have happened, for want of capital. However, Toy Story might still have happened - perhaps it would have taken a few years more, until the cost of making it would have dropped enough to make it worthwhile investing in even though you'd only get a few weeks of box-office revenue?

Perhaps, also, many movies would be closer to "Dogville" (shot on a bare film set) than to "The Wolfman" (last year's remake, costing ~150M dollars). But, as Boldrine and Levine argue in their book "Against Intellectual Monopoly", maybe actors would compensate for their lower income by making more films per year (they look to the adult film industry to back up this suggestion, arguing that that is a reasonable model for a world of weak copyright). That is, creative output would not necessarily drop.

> ... whose livelihood in the economy as currently structured depends on it.

Your careful wording here tells me that we don't really disagree: certainly a reform that brings weaker copyright laws would cause a lot of pain to many established trades. With a well-designed transitional period though, I suspect that in the long term they would adapt, rather than simply cease to be creative.

Big budget movies are expensive only because they can be. They are huge waste of resources enabled by copyright.

What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

And trying to produce it on a public basis produces problems in deciding what to fund. You run into this in public funding of science to, but there often are at least some public goals which helps guide this decision. It would be much more difficult to do with other forms of intellectual property (though we do in fact already do it to a limited degree, look at the National Endowment for the Arts).

Look at it this way: Does Ubuntu or OS X suffer from being pirated? Not really. Windows needs to figure this out for themselves.

Gates has said so himself: http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/23137-how-pira...

Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software... Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

All listings are free. With the exception of job postings and agent housing ads in NYC. The exceptions provide enough revenue for the small (~40) staff of CL to keep things rolling. The free postings zero out revenues for anyone else looking to compete in the same space, establishing a large marketplace with strong network effects and an effective monopoly.

Ubuntu (and open source in general) works because of inverse-free-riders, "free helpers" we might call them. That seems to be a sustainable model, but it likely won't work for annoying grunt programming - note the poor driver support in many Linux distros. For some tasks, someone needs to be paid.

If people were stealing iPads from Apple stores, would you suggest Apple should “figure [that] out for themselves”?

Secondly, stores actually do deal with shoplifting--they euphemistically call it "inventory shrinkage" and just chalk it up as an expense. "Unauthorized" copying isn't even an expense!

Windows may not be the best example since it’s so massively profitable, and sells a lot to enterprise customers and OEMs who won’t pirate it. That said, I suspect the business case for producing high-budget, non-mass-market consumer content (say, HBO shows) is starting to tip. How many people pirate Game of Thrones for every one that pays for it?

In the end, we live in a capitalist society — the people making software, movies, music, books, etc. have to get paid for the stuff be made.

And there it is, an artificial market created through technology and legislation, just like the copyright market. I'm sure plumbers would be eager to point out the virtues of having such a system.

Again, I know this analogy isn’t perfect, but what you’ve said is not all that different from telling a shop owner who was robbed that maybe he should do something else instead.

A more suitable analogy would be to a bookstore owner who's struggling because of (legal) Kindle downloads. Sucks for him, but time marches forwards. Perhaps he should partially convert to a coffee shop or similar.

LOL. Is that a threat?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-drops-to-no-3-ca...

This is not a new problem, nor is it without solutions.

* libraries have a limited amount of copies. So the amount of non-paying readers is not indefinate

* the readers have to return the copies of books or DVDs they have rented

These inconveniences makes buying a copy for personal use much more attractive for the consumer.

That would never happen unless MS charged an outrageous sum for it.

If any company finds itself in the position where nearly all of the users are pirating, then there's something wrong. They're charging too much or the DRM is too onerous, or something.

EDIT: if you charge a fair price and make something available, people will buy it rather than pirate it. Louis CK and lots of other people have shown this.

There are two problems with this assertion. The first is that people's current working definition of a "fair price" seems to be $0.00. Are we really to believe that paying $1.29 on iTunes, or $0.99 on Amazon, for a DRM-free music track is "unfair"? Or that the user experience on either of those services is horrendous and painful? Come on. People pirate, in large part, because they prefer not to have to pay for something if they can get it for free. Let's be honest about that fact. If there's an impulse to "stick it to the man," so be it. I'll be the first to admit that the targets of this mentality -- the entertainment and software industries -- could use a good sticking-to. But let's not pretend that the moral-crusade argument is the sole -- or even the primary -- motivation behind most people's piracy of content. The primary reason is the price, i.e., zero.

Second, while I agree that Louis C.K.'s release shows promise, he seems to be an exception to the rule so far. Who are the "lots of other people" that have "shown" that charging a fair price leads to buying over pirating? Let's take the highly-touted example of Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of their album "In Rainbows" in 2007. According to the post-release data, 62% of all downloaders of the album paid $0.00.[1] The next-largest segment, 17% of users, paid somewhere between $0.01 and $4.00. If Radiohead were not Radiohead -- i.e., not enormously successful prior to the release of the album -- then they'd not have been able to bear the razor-thin margin on the sale. Essentially, Radiohead gave the album away because they could afford to do so.

When Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released an album online that same year, in the Radiohead model, they gave users the choice between paying $5 and paying nothing. Approximately 154,449 users downloaded the album, and 28,322 users (about 18%) paid for it. At $5 per unit, that's a grand total of $141,610 in revenue for the album, and more likely than not, the production costs met or exceeded that revenue.

And those were hardly releases by big, onerous, anti-consumerist conglomerates, either. Those were pro-consumer, digital-friendly artists willing to put themselves out there to test precisely your proposition: that, if given the choice, people will pay. It seems that, by and large, they won't.

[1]http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/study-free-...

Then the business model needs to change. $100K+ is way more than enough to produce an album with modern technology, and it's only going to get cheaper. Music doesn't make as much money as it used to, there isn't room for dozens of middlemen siphoning off the inefficiencies.

What's fascinating about "In Rainbows" is that roughly 8% of the users accounted for approximately 80% of revenues from the site. That speaks volumes, and it dovetails really well with recent blog posts (linked here and elsewhere) about the new metrics of success in digital distribution: i.e., monetizing loyalists. A small core of loyalists who are willing to follow you to the ends of the earth are worth more than fairweather fans.

I'm actually contemplating doing a more in-depth analysis on this, Louis C.K., Reznor, and others in this space. While I believe the jury is still out, and I believe that most people will pay nothing if offered the opportunity, there are clearly those who will pony up -- and even those who will pony up big. Piracy -- or free acquisition, in this case -- doesn't seem to matter too much if the loyalists are there, and you can differentiate the product for them. (In this case, the notion of a "fair price" actually seems to be relative).

It's interesting how Radiohead seemed to succeed by recognizing this fact, whereas Reznor's experiment failed to account for it. And Louis C.K. avoided the free option altogether, which is another way to go.

Lastly, I was a huge Radiohead fan until their "In Rainbows" release. I thought it was horrible. After previewing the songs, I didn't buy/download it. I wanted to very badly, because I wanted the experiment to work. I think they did the experiment on that collection of songs because they knew they sucked.

I wasn't the biggest fan of "The King of Limbs," however.

Copyright exists to solve a genuine problem. When it was conceived in the 18th Century, is was explicitly to encourage and reward the creation of new works (such as Windows 9) that would enrich the public domain.

Few people would argue that the problem has gone away. The current debate is whether the copyright mechanism is still a viable solution.

The PC gaming market is very healthy, probably healthier than ever, so I honestly do not know what you are talking about here.

Triple-A games aren't targeted to consoles because of pirates, they are targeted to consoles because consumer demand is higher for console games. Only a few genres are more popular on PC, like RTS, MOAB, and MMORPG.

The estimated PC install base for one of the console-led titles I've worked on is in the same ballpark as each of the consoles.* The actual sales on PC, however, were far, far less than the consoles.

* We know this due to, e.g. number of people pinging the multiplayer servers, checking for updates etc.

For multi-platform titles, typically 360 and PS3 titles are developed in parallel. Often the PC version comes later, after the console releases have finished and a small subset of the console devs have time to polish the PC port.

Usually two reasons are given. One is that it's not worth the extra management complexity and dev time to release at the same time as the PC. The other is that the piracy rate on PC is so high that launching all platforms at the same time actually cannibalizes both PC and console sales.

PC games generally cost less at retail, but manufacturing costs are lower and no subsidies go to console owners. Dev costs are slightly harder due to the challenges of developing for a wide range of hardware vs two fixed targets. I think that the profit per unit sale is slightly higher on PC than console (I could be wrong).

That doesn't take into account that many of the pirates wouldn't have purchased the game if piracy wasn't an option. If we consider that, then we'd need many more pirates, maybe twice as many (18 times as many pirates than purchasers in total), to account for the lower PC sales.

The free rider problem generally won't affect entities that are very large, rich, and established. Microsoft has a ton of profitable relationships that won't just go away. Besides, they have so much money in the bank that they could easily fund the development of Windows 9 even if they did not receive a penny of revenue from Windows 8. Likewise, Radiohead is not checking the latest rates of piracy before deciding whether to put out another album. They have a big enough fan base that it doesn't really matter.

But, if the free rider problem is bad enough it harms the ability of new entities--who do not have deep cash reserves or established relationships--to grow large enough to challenge the incumbents. To go from garage to professional success means making enough sales to either bootstrap or convince investors to buy in. If most customers are taking the product and not paying, that obviously is going to be a lot harder to do.

There may not be a windows 9, but you can bet there will be 200 flavors of Linux.

I think the business model needs to change a bit. That's all.

By the way, are GPL violations equally just anachronistic hippie pipe dreams or real crimes?

maybe adobe's creative suite.

There are so many things that are technically illegal. There are too many laws that aren't up to date with what people expect to be able to reasonably do.

Sir, what make you think our situation is historically unique? If you read the history of copyright, you would realize that our is not so special. Rather, the current situation is a continuation of debates that started centuries ago.

Consider, on average do you enjoy reading HN posts? In what ways are people compensated for creating them how is copyright relevant for that compensation?

PS: Imagine a clearing house where authors pay random people to read their works in the hope that they might simply up vote it and even paying those who down vote their content.

I think you need to look up the printing press and it's relation to the copyright law debate.

The internet (on that front) is not as new and amazing as you think.

btw 1/2 the people on the planet are not on the internet it's actually more like 1/3, and of that a smaller subset 'create content'.

PS: Many people use the internet without actually owning a computer. In this case language and cultural barriers are more important than internet access which says a lot about the world IMO.

I doubt that this is very recent. This has been going on for the last 150 years, if not 200 years. By the time the internet become widespread, we are already trapped in a deluge of information.

I don't buy it. If they're doing so publicly as a challenge... maybe, but that doesn't seem like the case for many people who are doing it.

I happen to agree with the overall conclusion that one should seek alternatives in these cases, but this is just an argument by shouting. It's foolish to simply declare, "it's not your choice". Clearly, people think it is their choice. If you want to convince them, you had better back it up with reasoning. The right to control is simply not an obvious, mostly-universally-held right like the right not to be murdered or the right to physical property.

The copyright debate is getting awfully stale. I wish the participants would come up with something new to say instead of just constantly declaring that piracy is not allowed on one side and that piracy doesn't hurt anybody on the other side.

On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced. The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate.

On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups. The first are libertarian-inclined utilitarians, which require people to prove actual harm before something should be outlawed or have tried to start a tech company and been threatened with a patent lawsuit. Every piece of evidence not created by the middle-man industry I've ever seen has supported their position. The second are people who oppose the idea of "intellectual property", starting from moral principles such as freedom of expression, utility maximization or historic precedent.

There is no need to come up with anything new to say: the conclusion one comes to depends on what principles one uses to derive ethical implications. Intellectual property is morally wrong, declares one side. Intellectual property is a moral imperative, declares the other. It is impossible for either to convince the other, since neither is basing their arguments on a rational basis where facts or evidence might play a role.

Anyone who might be convinced doesn't care, probably because they are just ignoring stupid laws anyway.

Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life.

Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did.

I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.

I like content and am greedy for it. Copyright helps me get more content by providing incentive. This is the benefit.

Whatever these are benefits of copyright, the practical collateral costs (to privacy, freedom, making everyone a criminal etc) of enforcing copyright law make it not a worthwhile.

Since copyright can be used to prevent content creation (for example, cover performances, sequel novels written by other people or derivative works) it isn't at all obvious that copyright leads to more content. The internet has led to more music and better music being made, according to the recent study I saw comparing radio play of new music over time. Webcomics make most of their money selling books of comics available for free on the web. For most of human history we functioned under a deliver-first, pay-later or -indirectly method of exchange; the internet has allowed this model to scale almost without limit for goods with zero marginal cost.

[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/argumentum_ad_nauseam

The simple fact is that copyright infringement is not a universally-agreed wrong the way e.g. murder is. If you want to convince people that it should be, that's fine, but if you argue from the assumption that it already is, that's circular reasoning and won't convince anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

It's not perfect; indeed, it's a 'messy compromise'. Currently, one that's tilted too far in favor of producers. However, consumers should also realize that producers can't just create stuff for free: it takes time to write books, lots of money to do movies, and selling music helps bands do what they do full-time, rather than as a hobby, and thus create more music that you, a fan, presumably are happy with.

I'm not sure what the 'right' answer is, but I have a feeling that it won't be simple and 'easy', but rather a bit messy. I think that easy access to 'legit' stuff is definitely part of the solution though. By making the legal route the easiest one, it takes away a big excuse.

Something more people need to think about is life "at the margin", in the economics sense of the term. Don't think about Lady Gaga and Windows and stuff like that: think about people who are on the edge between making a living with some form of IP and having to pursue it only as a hobby.

There are psychology researchers doing work in this area: http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php

Is it moral to wear shoes into a Indian temple? How do you argue that without going circular?

If you ask me, the only moral arguments that aren't going to be circular are those that are based on Utilitarianism (or some similar form of Consequentialism). Of course, the parties debating then have to agree on this basic premise, or they are going to get nowhere fast. But, if you ask me, those who reject all forms of Utilitarianism are just profoundly kidding themselves. This fact is shown quite clearly by the fact that no one would accept a moral theory that results in the most miserable of all possible worlds, even if it seemed at the start that the premises of the moral theory were reasonable ones. E.g., property rights being amongst the most important rights, or what have you.

The whole "you don't have a choice" bit rests on the assumption that piracy is immoral, and the posts themselves serve simply to remind people of that. It's rather condescending, and entirely pointless if they don't accept the assumption that piracy is immoral, which they almost certainly do not.

I don't believe many serious people would ascribe to this 'GR' moral logic: "I don't care if someone appropriates my creations" (because I give mine away, or I have none) ergo "I am morally sound in appropriating others creations."

I agree with you that it may be pointless to argue piracy is immoral with someone who thinks it is moral. However, I don't think it is actually condescending to have that as a base assumption.

I think it's very much condescending if you treat the immorality of piracy as a base assumption held by both parties. If you treat it simply as your own base assumption, that's fine. But treating it as a base assumption of the other side and then arguing against their behavior based on that qualifies in my book.

That is my basis for calling people wrong. People who pirate argue that they disagree with the creators choice for how a work should be distributed. Thus because they disagree with it, they will just take it anyway. That is why it is wrong.

Imho the economics of scarcity that is behind copyright is morally problematic. Thus breaking copyright laws could be right under some circumstances.

Also see the following for some more reasons, and some alternatives: http://wybowiersma.net/pub/papers/Wiersma,Wybo,Enclosures_of...

The reality is that copyright law evolved over the course of three centuries during which the ability to duplicate and distribute was exceedingly capital-intensive, and therefor, practiced only on an industrial scale, by well capitalized industrialists. Not surprisingly, the law became industrial law, with all the trappings (like expensive corporate lawyers) that are par for the course at that level, but entirely out of reach for independent citizens.

Regardless of your position, we can all agree that if the power to duplicate and widely distribute HAD been available to independent citizens for the last 300 years, then the contours of copyright law (if there even were such a thing) would look VERY different today.

In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost. Trying to make it work would be like trying to impose a law that only permits domestic imports via rail on the state of Hawaii.

So now that we have the internet, the law needs to change - a lot. And under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it's pure insanity to think that the people won't have a major say in deciding exactly how far property right should be allowed to go in the intellectual realm.

We already place very firm boundaries on their scope by way of Fair Use, limited terms, support for the Public Domain, and so on. And it's high time we placed a few more.

Copyright originally was created as a legal concept shortly after the invention of the printing press* because individual small printers were making and selling copies of other people's books. At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists." The industrial revolution had not even happened yet, and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them.

In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies. That is how it was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for instance, although at that point in time it was already an old concept. The idea that it has always been (or is even today) a matter of industrial law is not accurate.

> In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost.

This is the exact opposite of how public policy works. It is the very ease of copying that creates the need for a legal framework to regulate it. Before the printing press existed, copyright did not exist either--because it was not needed.

In a free society where copying is free, the most precious thing is original throught, original opinion, original content. That is the last true scarcity, and must be protected. Otherwise how are we to distinguish one citizen from another?

* BTW it is worth spending some time reviewing the history of the printing press and the impact it had on the world. I would argue that it was much more of a revolution than the Internet has been so far, although of course the Internet is still in its early stages of development.

I mean, here you are calling people "uninformed" while asserting that the printing press was invented "about 400 years ago", which would be around 1612. In reality Gutenberg's press went into operation around 1450. That's 562 years ago, meaning you're off by more than a century and a half.

You do a bit better with copyright law. The first appearance of law that grants the right to copy to the author was, of course, the Statue of Anne (1709/10, depending on whether you're referring to the Julian calendar that was in effect in England at the time, or the Gregorian calendar which has since become the international standard). Here, you're only off by a century.

Unfortunately for your theory, it's a century in the wrong direction. In reality, there were a solid 260 years between the appearance of the press, and the emergence of individual copyright, and that's not "shortly after" by any definition.

Even if you start the clock in 1493, which is when the publishing business as such really came into its own with Anton Koberger, you're still off by a factor of more than 200 years. So any idea that individual copyright appeared as an immediate and necessary consequence of the press's invention is unsupported by the facts, as is the idea that there's never been a significant amount of time in which one existed without the other.

For the record, the rest of your theory is as sketchy as your grasp of history - especially the bit about protecting "thought and opinion". Those are two things that Copyright absolutely DOES NOT protect. Nor has it ever. So clearly you've still got a lot of work to do, but that's all the time we have today.

Class dismissed.

"At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists...and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them."

Again, not so! Indeed, 400 years ago is when some of the fierest and best capitalized industrialists known to man emerged. Specifically, I'm talking about the Dutch East India Company - a private corporation which commanded a heavily armed fleet several times larger than those of the competing French and British Crowns combined. And it was wind-powered industrialization that supported the assembly-line techniques that made their ship yards so incredibly productive.

Obviously, theirs was a relatively limited enterprise - certainly nothing compared to what we now refer to as the Industrial Revolution. But that difference is a function of having wind rather than coal to run their mills, not the application of the techniques, or the systematic accumulation and pooling of capital needed to apply them. In terms of the capital-intensive industrial operations needed to run them, and a chartered corporation to manage it, the VOC (as it was known) was a force unlike any the world had seen, utterly dominating both the global trade routes to the East Indies, and the flow of commerce moving through their ports. Phillip II of Spain waged a furious fight to maintain his colonies in the Netherlands, but the idea that he did so successfully is the opposite of reality. When the Dutch finally sued for peace, they did so as a republic.

Getting back to the press - while I mentioned that the business aspect of if got off the ground in 1493, Anton Koberger's family didn't continue it when he died. Though it was profitable, it remained baffling to his relatives, who had - and continued - to trade in gold. In terms of the flow of ideas, the most influential presses emerged in Venice. This was a city that had it's own long history with industrialization. Specifically, the Arsenal, which is where it pioneered the heavy industrial techniques needed to build the fleets with which it dominated the Mediterranean throughout the Crusades.

This unmatched foundation in assembly-line work was easily transferred to publishing operations, which the Venetians also turned into an industry. It would be some time before work of equal quality and sophistication was produced North of the Alps. And Venice, of course, was a republic. Kings (and Popes, and Princes) were dominated by the Venetians, not vice versa.

Incidentally, nobody who actually knows what they're talking about refers to Kings as "sovereigns" until after 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia, which is what established the concept of the sovereign state as such; one (theoretically) secure in its borders and (again, theoretically) free from the external authority of the Pope. Ergo, the sovereignty.

Given the general magnitude of your historical ignorance, this must seem like a minor point, but still. I actually do know about this stuff, and hearing references to "sovereigns" operating in the early 17th century is like nails on a chalkboard. It's a bit like hearing people discus life in the "American States" circa 1720.

"In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."

Assuming that you mean "from the beginning of printing" this is the EXACT opposite of reality. In England, where the Statue of Anne was passed, the privilege to copy accrued to guilds, not individuals.

Admittedly, I'm stretching definitions a bit since the guilds didn't have a 'right' either - it really was a privilege, and one granted by Royal Charter. Moreover, they weren't companies in the sense that we use that word today. But they were certainly incorporated entities seen as separate and distinct from any persons in particular. And they dominated the publishing trade for the better part of two centuries. The notion that lawful control of the ability to copy has "always" accrued to the individual is just so spectacularly wrong.

I'm sorry to go on like this, but I really can't remember a time when I came across another human who managed to pack so many layers of historical ignorance into such a small space. To cap if off by referring to others as "uninformed" just ices the cake. If you want to avoid looking like a complete idiot, avoid the use of history to ground your ideas about copyright. Seriously, it's like watching Kim Kardashian trying to play Scrabble in French and not understanding why "nobody lets me win".

The Statute of Anne vested the copy monopoly explicitly in the author. Prior to that, guild members had the exclusive "right" to "copy" a manuscript, yes--but first they had to individually purchase the license to do so, from the author.

This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted. Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology.

To return to my broader point, try this thought experiment. Take snapshots of copying technology and IP law at 50 year intervals up to today. It doesn't matter if you start at 1450 or 1709. What you will find is that over time the marginal cost of copying has declined, and the legal protection of an author's IP has strengthened. Yet you're trying to argue that for some reason that trend will suddenly reverse. I don't see why it would.

Understatement of the week.

"but I think you're mistaking precision for accuracy."

Those are synonyms, making this a distinction without a difference. You either fail to grasp logic, or basic English. I'm not sure which. Regardless, neither of these words refer to your grasp of history, nor your ability to ground theory within it. I'm not "mistaking" anything for anything, as your concept is demonstrably devoid of both.

"This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. "

Stop lying. You meant no such thing and you know it. Indeed, you very clearly said the opposite. Specifically. "In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."

And again "copyright (in the modern, IP sense)" means the legal ability duplicate, distribute, and creative derivatives from. Those were activities that the guild system specifically BARRED authors from doing. To say their need to buy manuscripts means that, effectively, these privileges "accrue" to the author is not true. And about "buying licences"; there were no licences to buy. You just made that up.

Let's remember the whole point of your original argument; that copyright - as an individual right - has "always" been the authors, and that our legal tradition has recognized "since the very beginning of printing." As noted, this is completely counter to reality. And now you're saying this isn't really what you meant, but sort of is because of these imaginary "licences"? Aside from the guild's charters, there were no licences. Only physical ownership and control of the manuscripts themselves, which was exchanged for money on unfavorable terms from the only legal buyers in town. Yes, that was a crappy system. No, it didn't give authors their due. And it ended in 1709, which is about two and a half centuries after the advent of movable type. Moving on.

"There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted."

True, but that had everything to do with censorship by the Church, and not respect for the rights of authors. Indeed, those two interests have tended to be at sharp odds. See my point above about authors and rights and who could do what "at the very beginning".

"Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology."

If a custom pertaining to simple credit is your example of early copyright (i.e. what prevailed for the first 260 years), then you simply have no idea what copyright even covers. Just...none.

Also, who are you to say "very soon" about anything? Haven't we already established that your grasp of actual history is a confused and distorted mess of near bottomless error? Given your hilariously awful track record, you have no business making assertions about specific timeframes without clear citations.

"To return to my (now demolished) broader point, try this thought experiment..."

I've got a better idea. Instead of acting like a person who is quite literally moronic, why don't you take a moment to realize that you have been completely and totally schooled. Everything, from your grasp of history, to your understanding of words, to the honesty of your arguments, to the clarity of your theoretical understanding has just been handed back to you in shit covered shreds, and now there is a smoking crater where your credibility used to be.

This is where the normal, decent, reasonably self-respecting human would think "Wow, I really put my foot in it. I actually have no idea about any of this stuff. The worst part is that I didn't even realize how clueless I was. And there I was, starting of my remarks to others with snide personal insults about who belongs "in the uninformed camp". Instead of continuing to behave like an idiot, I'm going to spend some time actually learning about all this, and then, perhaps, I can save myself some embarrassment, and maybe even answer my own questions."

Questions like "Why would a major paradigm change in the economics and distribution of a particular kind of technology upset the related body of law that developed over the course of three centuries under an entirely different paradigm?"

You'll be pleased to know that this is exactly what my original remark covered. Provided that you're clever enough to realize that you were under some very serious illusions when reading those remarks, and not understanding them at all as a result, try going back and reading them again, and see if you can figure out the answer to your own question.

If you can't, then study harder. You'll know that you've got a passable grasp of history, politics, economics, and publishing when the answer to your question about trends in the marginal costs of publication and the extent of authorial control appears to be the opposite of your present understanding, for reasons that should be self-evident.

Good luck.

Accuracy and precision are not synonyms. Accuracy refers to how close you are to the true value. Precision refers to how narrow your claimed value is.

As applied to history, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 9:33:12AM Mountain Time on July 4th, 1953 is extremely precise, but horribly inaccurate. Meanwhile, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor in 1941 is accurate, but not very precise.

Fact 1: Pirating is possible and fairly easy across the board.

Fact 2: Some content creators try to limit access to maintain "exclusivity" or to keep margins high. These guys get destroyed by piracy.

Fact 3: Other services strive to make it as easy as possible to get their products legally - Steam, iTunes, the Louis CK experiment. Their stuff is pirated a lot less and they generate a bunch of goodwill on the side.

These are facts, and no appeal to morality is going to change that. You can't just tell someone to suck it up and say it's not their "decision". Of course it's their decision - everyone decides whether or not to pirate! It is ABSOLUTELY their decision. The way to curb piracy is not to appeal to people's morality and tell people they SHOULD or SHOULDN'T do something. It's never going to work.

Curb piracy by making it easier, safer, and more reliable to purchase legally rather than pirate. Articles like this do nothing but reinforce the author's sense of moral superiority.

To put it another way, it seems we need a "carrot" (legally purchasing) approach to the 'good guys' creators/developers and "stick" (illegally downloading) approach to the arseholes who put rootkits on music CD's etc.

...thats my humble opinion anyway

I'm not trying to make the argument that this is ethical or anything, but purely from the perspective of solving the "piracy problem", I believe it would be the most effective.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/my-software-is-bein...

Does this count as piracy? Probably. I think they even have platform-free redownloads. I can't be arsed. I've paid for it. When I want it in a different version, I'll get it from the most convenient distribution channel that happens to be the pirate bay.

I also own like 4 Windows 7 licenses. But my Windows 7 computer is running a pirated version because: 1. I lost 2 of the license keys (the sticker at the bottom of the laptops burned out from heat). So much for that. I liked my home-premium install, too. But that's a non starter because the keys can't be recovered. I'm supposed to write down keys in case of this problem? What is this? 1999?

2. There are numerous version incompatibilities. 2 of my Windows 7 licenses are "academic versions" of Windows 7 unlimited because they ran some promo when it first launched that I bought. Apparently, despite being Unlimited, if you get the ISO off the pirate bay for the unlimited version, it doesn't work unless you have the academic version of the ISO. I have no idea how to get the academic version of the ISO, because the ISO downloader on MSDN academic is a Windows-only program. (At the time I had no Windows computers --- I was trying to get my first Windows 7 install up!). SO I got the same ISO from the pirate bay (the only place to get hassle-free ISOs). It's important to note that I have Unlimited-edition licenses. It's not failing because I paid for Home-premium and am trying to run Unlimited. This is different versions of Unlimited. It makes my ears bleed just how many different incompatible versions there are.

It's just a confusing mess. I'm sure I count under the piracy statistics as a pirate user. But in reality, I have 3 computers, two of which have Windows 7 installs, both "pirated". The fact that I own 4 licenses, none of which I could manage to get activated, won't come up on the statistics, will it?

It'll be interesting to watch the evolution of game distribution. Xbox and iOS are massively growing platforms that also bring built-in DRM that's significantly harder to circumvent.

I'm making numbers up, but let's say 10% paid as usual, 1% converted to payment because piracy wasn't available, and 89% didn't want to pay and didn't play. The publisher gets 10% more revenue if piracy wasn't there.

Nobody knows what the actual percentage is.

Notably, that's not an actual calculated number. Even so, the unanswerable question is whether it'd have been 91 or 99% without easy distribution.

Why do the common people pirate? Because they want something without having to pay for it which is done primarily out of selfishness, laziness and wanting to pretend our actions have no consequences. On my Facebook feed, in conversations, etc they'll speak of BitTorrent or whatever and smile with an evil glint in their eyes and think they're awesome because they're getting all this content without paying for it.

The other funny thing is, you and others speak of needing to make it easier but for the common people pirating is so usually much harder—they have to keep their computers safe from malicious people and files, they need to figure out how Kazaa and BitTorrent works, they need to have the right codecs for Windows Media Player or Quicktime to play whatever the latest favourite container is, know which crack for Windows is reliable, etc. I know someone who proclaimed to be able to download torrents and she spoke of it as some great achievement and the people around her clamoured for her to download TV show x and music y.

Going down and hiring out a movie is easier for them, the majority. Going to a cinema is easier. Buying software which comes with a license is easier. Buying a CD is easier than them trying to download the whole album (Why is it do you think these people usually never download a full album and instead end up with a poor copy of popular song x and all these unnamed .mp3s?). There is the majority. Sure, the amount of people who use Steam and that is certainly relatively large but in comparison is still small.

It's nothing new to man to want something without having to earn it. Why else are 'get rich quick' or 'get amazing abs now' successful, or rather, even exist?

The post may reinforce the author's sense of moral superiority (And maybe he does have a superior sense of morals) but many of the counter-posts are simply doing the same thing for themselves.

And you know what, as time goes by it's actually less and less of an actual problem; heck, I was even able to buy games for my box this year, thank you Humble Bundle! OK, this isn't free software, but at least you don't feel like you've been anally raped with barbed wire.

And music? Well, I still buy CDs, mostly; the time when CDs came with DRM apparently faded away, so I don't even need to screen for this anymore (yes, I've actively boycotted some artists because of this for a while). From time to time, for music I don't actually care about, I buy mp3s from Amazon.

I don't write this to emphasize my moral superiority but to emphasize that it isn't that hard. You don't agree with their policy? don't buy the frigging stuff.

What about software that phones home and require some physical gizmo like a CD or dongle to use, after you've already spent a nice sum of money to acquire it? You're simply treated not like an amiable customer, but a thief, while actual thieves simply use it.

I still don't think this warrants comparison to rape.

If people really wanted to take a stand they wouldn't buy OR pirate and would simply not consume. If everyone stopped consuming then changes would happen quickly.

Frankly, when I first migrated I spent a long time making Wine to work properly with various pieces of software, and I finally never actually used it because there are alternatives to about everything. Maybe they're not always as good as their counterparts, but in the end they get the job done. I've shared word documents with OpenOffice, I've drawn billboards and websites with Inkscape and GIMP, and it's good enough.

I'll still have to have Windows for things I can't do in Linux, but other than Games, that's a pretty small list.

"since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?"

Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.

Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality.

I have created worthwhile things on which my livelihood depended, and those things have been cheerfully and rampantly pirated (piracy rates of video games estimated at +90%). And the company I worked for made great profits and paid me a nice bonus. Would it have made as much of a profit if those 90%+ of people who played the game, liked it, talked about it, reviewed it without paying for it, had never played it at all? I don't know. Would it have made more profit? I can't say. I doubt you can either.

More realistically the worst you will feel is a denied promotion, or lost a job because your company can't realize it's investment in you.

Unless you are directly culpable for the creation and distribution of a product and lose money on it because people won't honor your effort, you don't have a basis for passing judgment based on your personal experience (in other words, you're no expert :) ).

In my role as copyright superhero have I not only worked as an employee at companies producing copyrighted works, I have also, personally, produced and sold copyrighted works that have, to some extent, been pirated. I have yet to feel any self-righteous anger. The only anger I might feel is a certain frustration where some of these copyrighted works have not been as successful as I would have wished them to be, but I would be foolish to lay the blame on piracy. More likely, the timing was not right and the quality was not high enough to ensure success.

Any business endeavor entails risk. I would hope that my employer has factored in piracy rates and other non-specific factors in the business plan before hiring me to create a video game for him. Sometimes, things don't work out as hoped and the result is a flop. That can happen for many reasons. I have yet to see a convincing argument where piracy was the reason something did not succeed. On the other hand, I can point to numerous examples were piracy was the deciding factor that let something become a success to begin with. The currently popular example is Minecraft, which spread entirely through word of mouth. How successful would that game have been if there had been no way to send it to a friend while telling them to check it out because it's awesome? I really doubt anyone would have known about it at all.

Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts aren't in the ringer."

I don't think piracy ruins businesses. However, I don't think that anyone can make the argument that they ethically have the right to disregard the producer's terms for consuming their product, regardless of the form the product is in or how unreasonable those terms are. The creator of the product has the right to define their terms and if you violate his/her terms, it's a transgression. It's not a favor, a lesson, or a statement, you're taking without honoring their work in the way they've decided. Maybe it will turn out great for them in the end, maybe not- it doesn't matter, they set the terms and you violated them.

Piracy is parasitic, not productive, and everyone loses. We get these stupid censorship bills rolling through and resources are spent in trying to control the phenomena instead of innovating and addressing real issues.

Regarding Minecraft-- I did not realize that it was successful because it was pirated. I know that it got some good reviews on popular sites and I believe they sold a cheap development version and were successful because of this accessible model (versus a Microsoft approach). Wikipedia says that the developers decided to start their video game company and focus exclusively on it with the money they earned from their sales. To me, this does not sound like a pirate success story. It actually reinforces my belief that it absolutely requires resources to back any serious effort and this is something that piracy never provides.

I see you brought it back to a question of ethics, which is something that I think is ultimately not very interesting. Ask any horse-cart driver during the infancy of the car industry, and they would probably curse cars for being noisy and dangerous, and car drivers for being unethical and immoral for supporting this metal abomination. These days no one cares. In the same way, hopefully, we'll one day look back at the era of government anti-freedom bills and shake our heads in disbelief.

Because short of actually going into the heads of all the people who, unlike you, don't see piracy as a parasitic activity, what can you actually do about it?

It's so easy to copy works digitally that many people are no doubt doing it without realizing it. If you have a blog, and someone links to a youtube music video, and you like it and want to share the experience of seeing it with a friend.. you put a link to the video on your blog. But! Unbeknownst to you, that video was put there without the permission of the original creator, and you just committed a crime (by proxy, in this case, but a moral crime nontheless).

A short history of Minecraft, as told by me (guaranteed to be inaccurate in many ways):

Minecraft rose to fame by being heavily shared while in the alpha/beta stage at various indie game forums, 4chan, something awful and other places like these, from where the word of mouth spread wider and wider. From the start, it was for sale (I think for $10), it has never been a free game as far as I know. It was pirated like crazy from the beginning. By the time notch formed mojang, he was already a millionare from the sales of minecraft.

Of course he didn't become a millionare from the piracy directly. The piracy didn't stop him from becoming one, though. In fact, I don't think it's possible to say definitively what impact piracy really had, other than that it helped spread the word. Given the graphics of Minecraft, would millions of people buy it without trying it? Maybe. You say that piracy doesn't provide resources, but in this case it did provide that one elusive thing that every independent developer desperately needs: exposure.

Don't get me wrong, I don't support these asinine bills, however I do see people who pirate as directly supporting them. Which is upsetting because they're creating a demand and a rationale for censorship, which affects everyone.

On the same note, I see bandied around that the bills creators don't understand the fundamental architecture of the Internet and the damage it would cause. I see, "pirates," as not understanding the fundamental architecture of capitalism and ignoring the damage it causes.

Specifically, the exchange of resources where both parties benefit.

If a provider wants exposure and wants to give away their product for exposure, that's up to them, not anyone else. And for digital products it's a hell of a lot easier to provide them public domain or open source than it is to sell them.

However, exposure doesn't pay the bills. I am self employed and I see similar sentiments expressed on a regular basis. Product or service provider, if what I provide is valuable enough for you to ask for or steal, I obviously don't need the exposure that bad. There was a $6,000 photograph post up earlier that expressed the same idea.

If you liked Minecraft, there is nothing to prevent you from paying for it and touting it. Minecraft is an especially relevant example because the developers set the bar so low in regards to price and people still pirated something they claimed to love? That's so bizarre to me- I want to support independent developers much more so than the big guys and they weren't asking for much.

Plenty of people payed for and touted Minecraft, obviously. A huge category of people didn't pay, but still touted it.

Would that category of people have paid if piracy was impossible? Well, I've argued against that reality since making piracy impossible would most likely also make Minecraft impossible (since you'd have to distribute through government-approved channels). I don't see how someone could possibly create an independent product and be able to self-distribute if piracy is technically impossible. And arguably the environment that spawned and formed the successful indie game maker is heavily dependent on free and easy peer-to-peer sharing of information, code and software.

Secondly, clearly these people didn't have any moral issue with pirating the game while at the same time loving it. It may be bizarre to you, but a huge number of people will happily break the law if it's to their benefit, without feeling bad over lost sales. Most likely, these people wouldn't have paid even if they couldn't have had the game. They would just have gone without the game.

I'd even go so far as to say that generally acting in their own self interest with little regard to people outside their closest circle is a fundamental human behavioral constant, and it's shocking to me that this is so shocking to other people. You do know that children are starving to death in poor areas of the world? You certainly have the means to save at least one of them. Yet you don't, why? Because their plight is too remotely removed from you. You have no emotional connection to them.

Closing the emotional gap is key to exploiting the modern economy: see the success of pay-what-you-want schemes, where people end up paying more than they would have with a set price. I'd argue that this demonstrates another interesting detail: the humble bundle, which was available as pay-what-you-want, was heavily pirated! Why? It was essentially free already! Perhaps because people like to share, and the distribution model and the economic profit margins of the creator are both lesser forces than the innate emotional desires to have and to share.

Censorship is as morally baseless as piracy, but I do not like it either, and like piracy it has a negative effect on everyone.

Maybe sales would increase if something prevented piracy, maybe they wouldn't. I expect that they would increase a significant percentage, but probably not even close to 100%.

People everywhere act out of self interest all the time, not just some of the time, all the time. It's just that for some people self interest involves having the perception to see beyond the immediate benefit of an act. Others do not, and eat donuts until they have diabetes, sleep with their best friend's spouse, steal cars, and act on each impulse as soon as it arises.

That people act in ways that are short sighted and then try to explain away their shortsightedness is only human, but it's not admirable, and it does no public service.

I have nothing against anyone saying, "I breach the contract between provider and consumer. I'm a leech off of others labor. I inhibit growth that would otherwise occur. I take and give nothing back and then lie and say I would do otherwise if only X business did Y. I will only act fairly when forced to by a parent figure, which will probably be the government if I can get others to take on this attitude."

The same as I would have no problem with someone saying, "I'm a habitual liar and a cheat," versus someone saying, "I help people to be more careful and to investigate what it is told to them. I help people to be more cautious. I'm a Highwayman, a Bandit!"

I have long addressed the question of whether I'm going to live my life righting every wrong and looking for people to save. That I do not save kids in Africa, does not mean I haven't considered it. I live my life with integrity to what I value and I don't have to make elaborate arguments as to why, I just do the part that is mine.

The reason I'm shocked that Minecraft was pirated as you say, is that I see "pirates" complain that they would buy this product if it didn't have DRM or that product if the cost was reasonable. Here we have a project in its early stages that is valuable and made easy to attain. Will they support it. Will they help make it better? No, the lousy excuse is now exposure. And then, "Why isn't this thing finished yet!?" Ha, ha.

There is research showing that pirates, on average, spend more money on the things they pirate than non-pirates. While this may sound counter-intuitive, on reflection it makes sense. There are those who pirate for the sake of pirating, lets call them hoarders. They download everything they can, with no intention to ever pay for any of it. These are not potential customers. The other category of pirates are people who, lets take music for example, who really love music. They spend a lot of money on music each month, but they also have an active network trading music with other enthusiasts. In fact, this trading network is what provides feedback and drives their interest in music to begin with. So the piracy, the downloading of music that they engage in, is the fuel that drives their consumption up beyond that of a regular, law-abiding consumer.

I'm not saying that this is the only truth, but the statistical evidence from several studies done on musical piracy (I recall one in particular done in Holland) supports this view.

So in this case, your characterisation of the pirate as a leech is not an accurate account. In fact, this pirate is the perfect customer, and it is the piracy that made him.

Ignoring the condescending tone of this comment, there are many 'creators' in the world who have no desire to personally profit from their work. That is not the issue being raised.

But if you choose to publicly distribute your work—accept inevitable risks. Don't like that—go get a real job. You can do contract work writing music, or doing illustration / design.

Even in something like retail, your product can be stolen and there's no guarantee you'll get recompense. Yet laws regarding shoplifting have remained rather constant and non-draconian in all that time. The problem with the internet is that it's all too easy to get something without paying for it, but people all-too-often forget that the benefit of the internet is that nobody can deprive you of your goods (bandwidth notwithstanding).

Yeah, piracy sucks, but look at what other sectors of the economy have to deal with. Risk's everywhere; deal with it.

> "We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

> This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

> In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491678

Don't get me wrong I'm for communism and intentional communities; but are you really advocating that?

Based on this, whether piracy is moral or not depends on people's opinions. I would argue that society does not consider copyright infringement to be especially immoral.

Sing 'Happy Birthday' in public without paying the guy who bought the company holding the copyright to it. Is your audience disgusted by this immoral act?

Now the owner of the company holding the copyright sues you for your unauthorized use of 'his' song. Would more people think that you acted immorally, or that the copyright holder is acting immorally?

Also, the creator of the pirated product has only lost a potential sale (one that I would argue that they don't have a right to anyway), whereas the unpaid worker has experienced a 'theft' of their time and work.

A technicality, but if you commit copyright infringement you are not legally obliged to pay for it, you either have commited a crime or you are liable to be sued. You can't just download and then owe the person money. This isn't like when you go into a hair dresser, sit down, get your hair cut and now legally have to pay them.

I assume, therefore, that you invite those with an interest in sadomasochism to inflict pain on you?

(No, I don't think sadomasochism and piracy are alike, but the idea of making and breaking laws based on what one person is happy to have done to them is IMO ridiculous.)

Regarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change.

(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)

Not to mention that software piracy is on a completely other level than slavery.

Cultural relativism is certainly a valid school of ethical thought — one with which I happen to disagree. On matters like piracy, which is certainly less detrimental to society than slavery was, the consequences for believing what is popular and what is right are relatively low. But to suggest that you can apply this principle across the board, in all situations, is, in my view, absurd.

You're suggesting there that we cannot judge anything that has happened in the past because our views on the matter are now different. But that means we cannot judge ANYTHING that has happened EVER because, by definition, now is different from then.

> You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one.

I'm not. I'm just not convinced that, because a certain activity is widespread, it is therefore morally correct.

What I try to say is that you can't judge both piracy and slavery from your present point of view. I feel that because in the past slavery was commonly accepted, that it was morally justified then. In the same way, given the huge proliferation of piracy, I feel that copyright infringement is somewhat morally justified now. This view might change and in the same way, the morality of piracy might change too. I would take the common views of society as the definition of what is morally justified and what isn't. It is possible you see this in another way and that is fine (and not absurd).

Also, this change in zeitgeist is continuous, not as discrete as you overstate it is. We are perfectly justified to judge what has happened yesterday. Judging what happened during World War II is murkier and judging what happened when slavery was still extant is an almost meaningless activity.

(Note: I believe morals are natural laws. They are just not as easy to discern as physical laws because it is harder for us to be morally neutral observers.)

Of course it does, for two reasons: first, there is still a difference between the morality of an individual and of society as a group. Secondly, the fact that society fells something is wrong doesn't mean it has to feel OK with giving the State power to crush it. A good example is Free Speech.

Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority?

That would depend on a more pure and direct democracy. But generally they do; when the difference between them becomes too great, people tend to revolt.

But you should remember what I said above: people might feel its wrong to legally punish wrong actions. There's no contradictions in this.

How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral?

Assuming morality is relative, there's no such thing as an immoral law, because morality is not a property of a thing, but a relationship between a person (or a group of them) and that thing.

So I can say Proposition 8 is immoral, if I find it immoral. Which doesn't mean it's immoral for another person or society in general.

Note: I believe morals are natural laws.

I always found that interesting, because I never found any evidence for that. In what do you base your belief? Or is it pure faith?

If you want to make a change and win then you have to think like your opponent. This is how the greedy suits think:

"Our product has sold X copies, but Y people downloaded it. That means there are X+Y people interested in my product! We must make it so X+Y people buy it and 0 download it!"

NO! Stop! Bad pirates! By downloading the product you're telling the company you want their offerings but are too lazy or greedy or whatever. Vote with your wallet and avoid the product! That way when the suit looks at his charts he can figure out why no one wanted the product in the first place. If his inbox is chock full of "drop the DRM" then maybe he'll consider it.

You are not making a stance by stealing it. You're reaffirming their decision to put on DRM and pass anti-piracy laws. You're giving them the excuse to invade your rights/privacy. Stop it.

If everyone keeps playing this stupid "there can be only 2 positions in any argument" game, we end up with posts like this - completely ignorant of a multitude of other options. Stop it and consider that this may not be binary.

Each side on the issue is drawing their line in the sand but that line is too far from one another to ever reach a form of compromise or conclusion. There's this large valley between what the piracy community wants and what the industry is willing to give. Which side is willing to crack first? While pirates get their jollies there's still too much of a community of people that are paying for the products that keep industries afloat. Are we going to try and convert enough consumers to finally "hurt" the industry? Will that even be enough once the government tacks a law onto consumer products that goes towards the industry companies?

What about the "legal" approach. Is boycotting going to work? Is telling the companies the exact message you wrote going to change anything? Actions definitely speak louder than words but is pirating something going to send that message or will it send the message "we want what you offer"?

I agree with your statement that its not binary. Nothing is black and white in this situations. But the people vocally advocating piracy are doing no better where they say "my way or the highway".

I maybe shouldn't offer up too much opinion on the matter because there's evidence on both sides of the matter that show both progress and regression. On one hand we're seeing more services like netflix offering things on terms "pirates" want: convenient, accessible and quality. But on the other end we're seeing things like worse DRM and new bills. Have we really made progress or not?

Whereas if you chose from alternatives that conducted business on better terms than they would be forced to infer other reasons for losing money, such as, "we are losing money because we are assholes," and would not have the platform of lost sales to fool themselves or lobby politicians.

While we may agree with you about the real reasons and motivations of the pirate, that isn't how corporations and governments look at things. I agree with TheCapn in how Big Media interprets it: theft, lost revenue.

There can be only 2 positions in a political argument, and yes, that breeds ignorance.

Stop using theft as synonym for copyright violation. When someone copies a movie, they create a new copy. They don't take someone else's copy away.

Stop spreading confusion.

Good to know.

In most cases it says, "I want your content, but you are failing to provide it to me."

Look at Napster. People used it not because it was free, it was because there was no other choice. Once the music industry finally got around to approving iTunes, it became a huge and successful business for not only Apple, but the music industry too. If iTunes was available from day one, Napster would have never rose to fame.

Now look at the movie industry. I know of a lot of people who happily pay for Netflix and pirate content that is not on Netflix. If that content was on Netflix in the first place, the content owner would have received their money no questions asked.

There are some pirates who are plain cheap. But in most cases, it is just a power struggle. If you do not respect others, they will not respect you.

It originated in the 20s and 30s in the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer was one of the more prominent supporters, designing typefaces that contained no uppercase letterforms at all. He even experimented with designing entirely new alphabets that were phonetically based.

Jan Tschichold was another Bauhaus guy experimenting in the same realm. From Wikipedia: "Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. ... The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters."

It's interesting that it was born out of choices made to German, where they have many more capital letters in each sentence than we do in English. Regardless, it's clearly a stylistic choice, and one that the OP might even have to work harder to maintain, if he is accustomed to writing in sentence case.

There's that old saying that you must first learn the rules and then you can break them. That is exactly what is going on here, and the OP isn't unique in this. Throughout my time at design school many of my teachers, who had been educated by Bauhaus instructors, would email in only lowercase—they adopted the style. And others have adopted it from them (here's one of my design school friends' site: http://traceychan.net/ where she has).

I quite like the style myself.

To a fast reader, without visual cues it is a jumbled mess. I gave up after forcing myself to read three sentences.

You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.

I guess we all have our little pet peeves :-)

I'm not exactly willing to die on this hill, though -- the article is not very good in any case.

edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.

Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.

Most of the confusion of 'piracy' (such a strong word, btw) stems from people misusing concepts related to physical objects and translating them equally to ephemeral things like 'intellectual-property' and 'digital-property'. The later things should be treated differently (in this person's opinion).

'Stealing' is a bad word. It's an age-old word that causes physical reaction in many. We learn very early on not to 'steal'. But, downloading a digitally compressed song is not the same thing as taking a toy from another kid.

At some point, power has shifted from owning physical objects to these new sorts of things that aren't physical. We need new laws and new social norms. We need fair reasonable treatment, for these things.

Sadly, the power-holders are writing the laws that grant themselves the most privileges. Instead, the society should write the laws that beget the best society.

Are you high? Once upon a time I pirated content, he's an approximate recap of what my expierience looked like:

* Search pirate bay

* Look at 2000 results, none of which look right.

* Ok, found one.

* Crap it's French with Arabic subtitles.

* Ok this one looks good.

* Shit, no seeders.

* Ok, this one has seeders and is english.

* Go get a bagel because it's going to take an hour to download.

Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio, or hulu:

* Search.

* Press play.

In my time using Netflix, rdio, hulu, and last.fm for my media needs there has been one title I couldn't find.

EDIT: I'll be clear, my comments on these services apply exclusively to the US, I know nothing about the status of these services elsewhere.

* Search

* Whoops, this movie isn't available on streaming.

On Hulu:

* Search

* Only the last four episodes are available.

The content distributors are strangling themselves because they're trying to protect their existing means of distribution and refuse to adopt new ones that people actually want to use and pay for.

In 2008 Starz and Netflix entered into an agreement where Netflix would be able to license and distribute Starz media for $30 million. Said contract expired, Netflix offers $300 million to renew, and Starz rejects the offer under the premise that their content is worth more.

Now Starz, like HBO (eg. HBO Go), is planning to roll out their own streaming service--which I would say is both an attempt to protect their means of distribution as well as an effort to adopt to new models.

As an aside, I tried to use HBO Go a few weeks ago...and was prompted to enter the details of my cable tv service in order to gain access. I didn't have the time/patience to proceed and decided to read instead.

All I can say is if every content distribution company expects users to pay a separate fee, etc, for streaming content they're SOL. Evidence of Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and the like show that people prefer one-stop shopping.

Edit: typo

Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio or hulu for me:

* content not available in your area

Total time consumed maybe a minute.

They gimp the offerings on the foreign netflix due to licensing issues and it really hurts the service. I tried netflix but cancelled because the catalog of things aren't worth it.

If you break a law you believe to be unjust and expect to suffer no consequences, that's silly, but not immoral.

If you break a law you believe is just, then you're kinda evil.

Piracy in the name of protesting against DRM is borderline hypocrisy. As others already said, morality is subjective, but here are two other ways I'd personally support :

- don't use the product,

- pay for the license, pirate the product, get it touch with the company to explain your problem to them.

On music, I could not disagree more : there is a lack of a solution to pay artists directly. 90% of the artists I know today, I know from friends or web radio. I would like to repay them directly. I have no way of doing that. The alternative is just not there. Some artists accept direct donations but majors try to prevent that. This anti-competitive behavior makes it totally OK in my opinion to pirate music.

Oh, and don't tell me I am rationalising. I stopped being part of this game several years ago. I don't buy music, I don't download tunes (unless it is authorised by the band like Partition 36). I decided this whole show was stupid when I got my first DRMed CD and that I didn't want to fight on it or break any law. Nowadays the situation is such that this conflict can't be ignored anymore. "Piracy" is used as a pretext to put forward net filtering, restrictive laws, and tools of censorship.

I don't give a fuck about music and musicians. I can do without. I respect them and they deserve a pay, but the current system is completely FUBAR and its insanity is creeping in other domains. It should be stopped before it is too late.

Where copyright seems objectionable to me, is where the initial cost of development was non-existent or large profits have been made for years. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Royalty_a...

For some copyright to last 95 years seems more like profiteering than protection of the creative industries considering creation is often based on the work of others.

I don't condone piracy, but I think piracy would be far less socially acceptable if: - the creator can be seen to benefit from their work - copyright better resembled its original intent of protecting investment in the creation of something new and not staking ownership over the work of others.

Pirating last weeks blockbuster isn't.

I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way:

  Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.

Legal means of acquiring music is pretty simple. Legal DRM Free MP3 downloads are built into my music player and I'm a linux user.

This style of argumentation is starting to tire me. Obviously, this author thinks piracy is morally wrong. Other people have no such moral qualms about piracy. Both points of view are fine!

But implicitly or explicitly using morality as an argument for or against piracy is a bad style of argumentation and is almost an ad hominem. If I were to say that I am for piracy and someone told me that this was morally wrong, I would pay no attention to this person. But if he were to say that he personally feels piracy is morally wrong AND if he were to give me an argument as to why he feels that way, I would listen to this argument and at least think about it.

It's that simple.

What I'm not okay with is when industry groups distort facts by trying to get one crime confused as a completely separate crime.

Make no mistake.. both are crimes, but the attempt is to bring the loaded meanings of one term to a completely different word.

It's factually incorrect, and it needs to stop.

It's that simple.

Of course, I've come to believe that intellectual honesty is a cognitive luxury for most people; especially politicians.

Besides, more often than not these terms are not set by the author of the work, but by for example a music label. Most artists of popular contemporary music don't hold the copyright to their own work any more.

Fact: People will pay for your software if you make it easy to pay for.

Windows has proven this with their DRM.

Apple has proven this with their app stores and itunes.

In a slightly unrelated note:

This is why I wish there was an app store for web apps. The web needs easy way to sell access to web apps like in the app store. If all I had to do was click 'purchase' and enter my password to get access to web apps like turntable.fm for a reasonable price, I would gladly pay. This would open up a whole new revenue model for web apps. There is a whole class of web apps that are trying to rely on ads now but don't have the millions of visitors a month to make that feasible. A web app store could provide a place for these lower traffic but still very useful and relevant products. I envy mobile developers since they have this avenue as an option. Anyone else feel this way?

You invested a lot of time into creating an object everybody likes. People can get it in a online shop and it will be send to there address.

Now a clever guy scans the object with a 3D scanner and is putting the model online. Everybody can now downloading the model on The Pirate Bay and print it at home. And they all say: "fuck that online store, it is way too much hassle and costs too much".

It's a difficult discussion. Therefore I think it's way to easy to just call making a copy not stealing.

Edit: the post by randomdata: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479581

However, it's erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to pirate because the industry created barriers to their own content. It's counterproductive to the anti-censorship movement.

Instead, we should focus on the fact that the music industry has been anti-effective and is now using censorship to compensate for their reluctance to change.

Competing interests will often be in conflict, and that's what we're seeing in this debate. You can safely translate "a right to piracy" to "no moral obligation to respect copyright". Once the moral argument is dismissed, all that remains is pragmatic conflict resolution.

One side could be destroyed, a compromise could be found, or a protracted conflict could ensue. In any case, moral arguments from either side are mostly useless.

The one fault I see with this argument (mainly related to music) is this: There is no way to simply boycott the the recording companies' products without boycotting the artists as well. Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover. While US contract law supports this arrangement, the model is broken in today's world of digital distribution.

And that's the artist's choice. The artist could choose to distribute their work in some other fashion. So, if you want the artist's product, you have to buy it via the means chosen by that artist.

The next best thing may be to only buy used CDs. Then you legally get the music AND annoy them at the same time.

Of course, you COULD actually boycott the artists. There are tons of independent musicians on the internet you can support. If you think that only the big label ones are worth your time and money, then clearly your opinions on the big labels themselves are unfounded.

(Just to be clear, all of the above "you"s refer not to the parent, but to everyone in general)

Now, his publishers have finally realized the connection, so he doesn't need the anonymous pirate blog anymore. Instead, he links to the torrents from his own offical blog. He is also an avid SOPA protester: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

If we go to the core of copyright law the original intention as I understand it was to encourage creation of stuff and my assumption is that the point of having such created is to have it distributed in an easily accessible manner. Yet we have no issue under the law with companies only selling to one distributor or just crippling it with DRM. Why?

Why don't we expect companies to make their content accessible to everyone and not just a in the ways they choose. I completely understand this when it comes to small resource limited companies. But I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the huge companies that feel they should be able to pick and choose who gets their content. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing that I should get their content for free. But I should be able to get it from various sources at a comparable price.

In what way do exclusivity agreements help us? They give large businesses huge advantage over small businesses. How can someone compete with Hulu when the content owners won't license their content to anyone else at a comparable rate? (Yes I know Hulu is owned by the content creators but isn't that a conflict of interest when you only let your own properties distribute it over the web?)

I'm not sure what the answer is. But I don't see how allowing companies to have a monopoly over the distribution of their content helps individuals or businesses in the long term.