That changed over time. As my time became more valuable, I couldn't spend all day fiddling with software anymore. I became more focused, downloading only stuff I used a lot. And then it hit me: It would be far easier to just buy the damn thing for $10, $20, $50, whatever and not have to hunt shit down, find a keygen, or in the worst case crack it myself.

So now I don't pirate anymore. It's not out of a feeling of moral obligation, but rather because I appreciate the convenience. And, realizing that pirates are people at various points on the price/effort spectrum, I don't even worry about my own software being pirated. Why should I, when I get income aplenty from it even with pirates in the equation?

I think we are a little too quick to assume that a pirated copy is not a lost sale.

Audio software is a quite unusual field for all sorts of reasons, largely related to the huge divide between professional users and amateurs. The old school of pro-audio people can remember when a studio cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip and will pay pretty much any price you ask, even for quite trivial software. Your typical teenage dance-music producer is buying many of the same applications and will usually baulk at paying $99 for a cut-down version, let alone several hundred dollars for a full license.

It's interesting that really intrusive DRM techniques are broadly accepted - iLok is probably the most popular system, which requires you to buy a $50 USB dongle in addition to a very expensive piece of software. Again, experienced professionals who can remember tape see an iLok as a trivial inconvenience, but to a lot of younger people it's a total deal-breaker.

The music technology industry is part way through a weird economic transition. The traditional high-value professional market is dwindling away to nothing, but business has never been better because of the boom in amateur production. Firms like Native Instruments who have figured out how to sell to wannabe DJs and bedroom producers are shaking the money tree; A lot of very old and established names are struggling to keep the doors open.

Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.

I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.

The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.

They are all too stuck in the sliders/knobs metaphor. I'm not sure it's an adequate metaphor for people who has not produced in the physical world before.

Let me tell you, though, there are a lot of rewards from being "first". Either the first person to get your hands on a pre-release item, or the first one to rip it, or the first group to release it, or the first racer to move it the fastest to the top.

It is beautiful in its simplicity - but there are many incentives to get people to be 'the first'.

Just like the price mechanism in modern day capitalist economies is beautiful in its simplicity to get people to move into a market were demand is high.

So I think the vast majority of the people involved in "the scene" are doing it for the incentives/rewards that come with being first. If everybody tries to be first and is racing against everyone else, the entire system gets efficient at moving pre-release stuff very quickly.

It's impossible to fight - which is why it still thrives today.

That type of access is rare and people usually get credits to allow them to download what they want. The best people get unlimited access.

So, just like any community, there are some perks that bring prestige and status within the community.

Don't underestimate how valuable that is.

The foolish people would take that access and try to sell it - that's how you get busted and get into trouble.

[1]: I get that the group pays for it, but what the source of the money is, I don't know. Are people just sinking money into for the 'props' of being first? Is there a greater financial reward for being first (if so, where does it come from)?

A lot of money enters the scene via people who directly or indirectly buy "leech accounts" from these groups. These unlimited use FTP accounts give the buyer a very convenient way to acquire everything that has ever been released by anyone.

Also, interestingly enough, while release groups selling FTP access is a common practice and done by basically everyone, FTP administrators can't sell accounts directly, as it is extremely taboo for people other than the members of groups to profit from the scene.

What are the incentives? Are these just people that have cheap access to fat connections, so the cost of running the FTP site is minimal? The ability to create 'leech accounts' for friends/family so long as they aren't sold (or is this also taboo)? Is unlimited personal access enough of an incentive?

To be honest I think you are slightly out of date in thinking torrent sites are just the 'retail' level. The majority of pre retail releases of movies (CAM/R5/Screener/HDTV etc) these days are done by p2p groups. A huge amount of pre release leaks of bluray disks come from Chinese bittorrent sites. A huge proportion of games get uploaded to p2p sites before getting pred and many games are cracked by p2p groups before the scene groups get to them (with several notable cases of scene groups 'stealing' p2p releases).

The one area where I feel like the scene could be said to be in a different league is in preing TV, but even that is slipping with p2p groups uploading full .ts streams and itunes rips.

One change from 2.5 years ago, now the scene does FLAC releases (finally): http://i.imgur.com/YZjUw.png

I think the problem is that now it's just so easy it's not fun anymore.

I also eventually realised that I had only a finate amount of time on this planet and I don't need every discography in the world.

If you are worried about your software doing shit you don't want, open source or bust.

-- Bill Gates during speech at University of Washington

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropir...

-- Steve Ballmer, 2009 http://www.osnews.com/story/21035

Imagine this thought experiment. Imagine there was a 100% fool proof copy protection scheme in China, and the only way to acquire Microsoft Office would be to buy it. Try to imagine how many people, who make $1000 in a year would then cough up the $495 to buy it?

Its not hard to imagine because there is no manufactured good in China that commands a 'half annual salary' value proposition that is not critical to a person's survival. And Microsoft Office isn't that item.

There is an exemplar that there is a $6M value for Word based on the $2 CDs that sell, so its not 'valueless.' And there are benefits to owning a legitimate copy over a pirated copy. Further, the cost of producing a pirated product (box, CD, getting started guide, etc) is less than $2 so there actually a real-goods sort of economic value analysis possible as well.

So all we really know is that the number is >= $2 and < $495. And in information economics this poses an interesting challenge. How do you capture the maximum value for your information? Microsoft later introduced a plan where Office for this market was significantly less expensive than it was for the US and European markets [1]. That increased the value they extracted for office out of those markets tremendously. It was more than 10x that $1.50 price at $29/CD. And they captured a lot of value for it, millions and millions of dollars. But not billions of dollars.

Many have argued that much of NetFlix's streaming revenue has come from previous BitTorrent users [2]. Prior to NetFlix you could say BitTorrent was a "$xB" problem where $x is the money that has been re-captured by offering an alternative with an acceptable price.

But to understand how that works you have to think about what gives information value, its much more market driven that fiat driven. Sony can say "Its worth $X to own this movie" but if nobody buys it and it is heavily pirated they guessed wrong. Since the replication cost is nearly $0 they really are guessing at consumer value. Lots of DVDs sell for $9.99 or $4.99. At that price I won't even bother looking for a torrent, I'll just get the DVD. Its a market, it has different mechanisms that drive it.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/23/microsoft-china-di...

[2] http://gigaom.com/2011/05/17/netflix-p2p-traffic/

  > Since the replication cost is nearly $0
  > they really are guessing at consumer value.

The variable costs might be close to $0, but the decision to create the DVD still costs something.

I started writing my experiences with this up but stopped when I went to work for Google on the advice of my lawyer. Its a discouraging thing to write/talk about because without context people think its crazy, so slowly over time, as context develops, and "real world" examples get played out, the notion that information can have its own set of economic principles becomes less foreign because it sure as heck isn't behaving like it "should" if it was bound by the old rules.

Anyway, three ways I've seen so far to add value to information is that its timely, its rare, or its distilled. An example of timely information would be stock trades, very valuable right at the time they happen to high frequency traders, less and less as it gets older until its basically worthless 15 minutes old. Continuing with the stock market 'rare' or 'precious' information might be insider information about a company, it has value because it creates context that others can't see, which gives it a value proportional to the advantage it conveys, and lastly distilled value. Remember our stock market trades? Well they were very valuable 20 milliseconds after they happened, worthless after 15 minutes, but when kept over the course of time new data can be distilled from that old information (like maybe a stock always rises in the third quarter). I discovered at a conference that the intelligence agencies call this last one the 'Mosaic effect' where any single piece of information is useless but together they allow new data to emerge.

Artistic creation however is always the "best" information in terms of value. It can create value greatly out of proportion to the cost to produce it.

Anyway, like I said, I've been thinking about this stuff for 15 years. :-)

In schools students learn "Word" and not "a word processor". I've seen high schools getting software licences with special deals (way cheaper), and thanks to that other solutions are discouraged (ie. "Word" is the standard and it will be required by any future job offer)

Can all students afford a Word licence? (ie. practice at home) It really doesn't matter, piracy it's OK because it is an investment. Companies are the final target (won't run pirated software and all candidates are trained to use that software).

You can find that kind of strategy also in open source (ie. Red Hat benefits from CentOS).

* There was a $60 sale on 2007 for students.

* I was able to get a copy of 2010 for $1 for home use because I also use it at work

* You can always purchase a used copy of 2003 for cheap. It's dated, of course, but not really outdated yet.

My company is currently using RedHat in a very large number (let say, we pay a lot to them...), but looks like we might end up switching to CentOS. Basically the price vs. amount of support we get from them does not seem to be worth it. And it is very close to what we would get from an Open Source community or by using Google.

But I do agree with the rest what you said.

Look at the consequences of CentOS. There are mailing lists, forums, IRC channels, blog posts, lots of people providing support and training for free.

That rich ecosystem is translated into business for Red Hat.

EDIT: ate a word.

And it's not only Microsoft, some other companies (Audodesk, Adobe, Apple) also keep higher prices and worse quality in some of poor countries than in the USA. It's kinda like they try to punish people that want to buy their software legally.

For me, it's an easy decision, I just don't use their software at all, but some people have to use their software, and I totally understand why some of them decide to pirate it.

I remember getting burnt badly trying to install ... Mandrake was it ... back in the days.

It worked.

But it's definitely not only the goodness of their heart that leads many companies to offer free or cheap software to students. Microsoft BizSpark is all about giving startups free Microsoft software in the hope that they'll build on the MS stack.

Voila: enter a good or bad serial, and it works. A bunch of us under +Fravia came to an agreement that this simplicity was intentional. I think we all can come to the conclusion to why that is...

As to your supposition that no amount of 'junk' would stop pirates, I do beg to differ. Back around '98-2000, there was a CD burning program that was notorious to crack. I don't remember the name offhand. There were over a thousand verify checks built into the program at crazy locations. Many would also attempt to write corrupt CDs and ISOs. And the "best part": if you were using a 'naughty' code, it would silently take it and slowly corrupt everything that program touches.

Most pirates ignored it and went with NERO to crack/distribute. A few of the hardcore crackers took on that program. I knew of 2 successes.

CDRWIN's author's rant and viewpoints against piracy, from March 1998

  When all software distribution moves to the Internet (which it will   
  when high-speed fiberoptic connections because commonplace in the   
  future), the big developers like Microsoft and Sony are going to come 
  down hard on the pirates and WAREZ. These big companies are not going 
  to allow the Internet to become a "candy store" where software can be 
  stolen with the push of a button from the comfort of your home. If you
  think that all of these "bits" are free, then try developing a really 
  good software product yourself and see how much money and time you have
  to invest in it.

[0] - Great Grandparent Poster? :D.

http://71.6.196.237/fravia/progcor.htm

It's down in the rabbit hole for you :P

I had links about about bypassing anti-debugging techniques, I'll see if I can get my hands on them again.

Those guys at Ableton are serious business.

Another popular, niche product that has proven difficult to fully crack is a program called Pro Tools, created by DigiDesign, now owned by Avid. It uses a protection called PACE Anti-Piracy[2]. Many expensive pieces of software require unique hardware, either a security dongle or some other external device.

[1] eLicenser.net

[2] paceap.com

But I think Microsoft and Bill Gates have learned to accept that, because imagine if China, India, and all the other poor countries out there were forced to use the free Linux instead of the pirated version of Windows. Then Windows would've had 50% or less market share in PC's, and that would've meant they wouldn't have had a monopoly in browsers, nor in Office anymore. So having Windows everywhere, even pirated, has helped Microsoft a lot to get its monopoly position.

I think in the next decade, it will be Android which will be what Windows was for all these kids in poor countries. It will be much cheaper to even get the hardware for it than it was to get a PC 10 years ago, and this time the software will actually be free and open source. I truly believe Android will revolutionize the world in this sense.

It's unfortunate that Microsoft and Apple are trying to slow it down right now, and make the devices more expensive than they should be through bogus licenses and lawsuits, but they won't stop it.

But.

I'm not sure what the bigger point is, here. Should we be okay with piracy as long as the pirate is using it for self-betterment? Do games count for that? What about pirating Game of Thrones episodes? (Or, to take a wild leap: Is it cool for a kid to steal a car if he learns how to be a mechanic from it?)

Today, I do feel there are some motions towards providing better access to software and hardware in poorer parts of the world. Which is great. And, to be frank, the quality of both cheap hardware and open source software is insane relative to twenty years ago. So, again, I'm not sure what Vlad's bigger point is.

If the point is to justify piracy, I think he only does it in the very narrowest of ways: Considering the state of technology in the 1990s, piracy enabled people in poorer parts of the world (and kids in wealthier parts of the world) access to the growing information technology industry. I'm not sure that argument exactly holds in the same way today.

Finally, Microsoft can survive a fair amount of piracy. But not every software company can. What happens when this "it's cool because I'm using it to educate myself" stance kills software companies? Or game companies? Or media companies? Is that better for everyone?

---

EDIT: I'm not equating the act of stealing a car with the act of pirating Windows. I am merely wondering about the general nature of morally justifying a crime based on it being done for self-improvement. If we say it's okay in a case of software piracy, are we okay with it in other contexts?

http://zacharyalberico.com/post/16427595132/no-infringement-...

Also, stealing a car is nothing like copyright infringement. There is absolutely no parallel you can draw there.

And the fact that they can't afford it gives them justification for stealing it? Would it not make more sense, that if you can't afford something you aren't entitled to it? If a poor or homeless person were to steal food from a shop they wouldn't be allowed to do it because, although they would like to pay, it isn't possible for them to do so.

Is it wrong for the homeless to sleep in your house in the room no one is currently using?

The restaurants have to pay to replace food the homeless would pick up during the day (or even put in work to prepare it for a restaurant). Food that's leftover at the end of the day and can't be sold the next day could certainly be given to the homeless for free (and I know of at least a few restaurants in my city that do this).

The homeless person sleeping in the spare room creates cleanup work, and prevents you from using that room at a moment's notice. If a homeless person could sleep in my spare room without using the shared spaces and leaving the room instantly, in perfect order, the moment I wanted to use the room, I don't think I can morally justify not letting them.

So while the situations you mention may or may not be moral, it's shifting the debate back into a worldview centred around scarcity.

You're committing an act of classism. Please check your rich whiteboy privilege.

But, are crimes in general justifiable if the person committing them does it for self-betterment?

Yeah, probably in many cases. Possibly in this case. But I also worry that it becomes a rallying point for piracy in general. That's what concerns me. I don't think most people pirate media for self-betterment. They do so because they don't want to pay.

To beat on your poor car analogy some more: if copying cars was free and easy, then we would indeed have a lot more cars, but they'd all be 1930s VW Bugs. Competition drives innovation, but there has to be something to compete for, like our dollars.

To your last point: the top torrents at TPB are all video games, TV shows, and movies. Seems more like self-worserment, yuk yuk.

If piracy caused future GoT episodes to not be made, that would be a bad outcome. But it won't happen. A series of GoT costs $50 million to make and they could probably fairly easily crowdfund it, (e.g. $10 * 5 million or some other multiple). I'm sure lots of people would be prepared to pay that amount (or a lot more) to ensure they could watch the next series -- I know I would.

The point Vlad is trying to make is that when he was 15 he pirated Photoshop, learnt to use it, and got a job using it. He might have learnt some ideas and methods had he downloaded GIMP and used that instead, but ultimately he would have nothing on someone with years of Photoshop experience. The UI and many ideas are completely different.

To be honest, I don't care about people pirating stuff. It is the moral justifications that seem rather specious at best. What is wrong with accepting that you are doing something wrong and... keep doing it if you wish?

How about this: a young woman has a sick child in a jurisdiction without universal health care. Her income is insufficient to pay for his treatment, so she has sex with some rich men in exchange for money. Sadly, prostitution is illegal.

Is it ever right to break the law in order to improve your prospects (or those of your family)? Some would say it is a moral imperative.

Well.... If the easy availability of the torrent led to more sales than it diminished, then the crime is still victimless regardless of your datapoint, since the supposed victim actually received a benefit.

This may seem far fetched, but I understand that for all but the largest block busters, there is some evidence that this is true for films: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2176246

If you're a film maker, making non-blockbuster films, you should probably be supporting piracy from a purely financial point of view. I fully expect that the same is true in music as well. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/48001/pirates-more-music-onl...

By that definition a criminal who steals a a physical product from a store is guilty of both stealing the product and depriving the store of his hypothetical future patronage.

What about producing better substitute product. Am I guilty because I create a product that stops people from buying your product?

If it's not the act of piracy that makes it immoral, but the result, then anything else that has the same result should be equally immoral.

>> you are doing something wrong and...

>> keep doing it if you wish?

Because we believe there’s honestly nothing wrong with it.

Paraphrasing you: I don’t understand what is wrong with accepting that pirates are doing something right and... abstain from doing it if you wish?

Your belief is not required. Laws are laws.

Or the software companies can release 'lite' versions of their software intended only for personal use and then rely on employers/schools and people purchasing the full versions to make most of their money.

There's a whole mess of us "working in the web" who never pirated software for web development.

This may be more a 'kid/adult' thing - I went through about 3 years of pirating games for my C128 back in the 80s, then pretty much just stopped pirating. So, I can't say I've never pirated. I did. I bought many games too, but copied/traded with friends at school. There was an element of social currency when trading (who had skyfox? who had bard's tale? etc). But by 12th grade, there was no attraction for me anymore.

As an adult, I've paid for almost all my software, but have primarily used open source software (desktop linux for years), learning the LAMP stack from the ground up - absolutely 0 need for piracy of any sort, and it's provided a great foundation for working in the web field.

Perhaps with fewer people justifying the means with the ends, we'd have more users/contributors on open source projects and tools, continuing to make that ecosystem even better, vs propping up the dominance of some established commercial vendors with legions of essentially free training and advertising by continued acceptance of pirated software use.

The only difference is that the there has been a shift of development, where some Eastern European and South American countries can now afford software licensing, but at the same time massive numbers of people in Africa and Asia have reached wealth levels that are sufficient for buying computers yet too low to afford the software.

While you might not be depriving someone of a car, you are devaluing the product. Consider in the OP's case, he learned how to do certain things with this stolen software, and now he can sell his services for what is most likely less than what those who paid for their software and training charge. This, in some way, steals work from them. His knowledge is "illegally gained." Even if they don't charge less for their work, maybe they come here on a visa. Once again, taking jobs from those that earned it through legal channels.

So simply suggest that the only ramifications are from the software company missing out on a sale ignores the entire ecosystem.

Blending both concepts of copyright violation and theft together, what happens in this common situation?

  1. I go to a store and buy an audio CD. I'm given the receipt.
  2. My audio CD is stolen at some later date. I still have the receipt.

Is the thief guilty of copyright infringement?

Edit: as meeting this line of thought out, I realize there are 2nd hand shops that can legally sell media of all types (cd's included). How this works is the person (me) goes in with the intent to sell the disc. They give me a price, which we come to a meeting of the minds. Sale occurs based upon first-sale doctrine.

This would indicate that the proof of copyright does not exist in the receipt. So would the rightful copy retain with me if there is no meeting of the minds (theft)?

Not intending to bite your head off. :-)

A rap artist is hired by a label to create an album. Said artist later dies. The label goes bankrupt soon thereafter, or perhaps simply folds up shop and leaves the business without auctioning off its assets.

I have produced a copy of the album, which I host at my own cost from my server, once these events have transpired. There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement, and indeed I'm helping to reduce the scarcity of this product in the world.

While somewhat contrived, this thought experiment is not particularly far off from reality.

Software companies never go out of business without selling off their assets, and it's the extreme edge-case where people continue to distribute the works.

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

Illegal? Sort of. Immoral? Not really.

The victim is the artist's heirs.

I've been trying for years and I still haven't managed it!

Of course, in a lot of cases demos would work well for that, but they seem to have fallen out of favour recently.

The fact that a content company's product is easily stolen simply because the nature of his business means it is effortless to do through the internet doesn't change anything. If you go to a lawyer for legal advice and then refuse to pay him saying "I haven't deprived you of a tangible product so it's not really stealing" you are missing the point, it's still theft. No one would do that, but they do pirate content because it's unbelievably easy and there are no consequences. That's the only reason.

Some people are honest about it and say "I just don't want to pay for it". But most people I hear justifying piracy feel entitled to it and don't think there's anything wrong.

Choice of words here is very, very important. If you want to start staking out a moral claim on information, you damned well had better choose your message carefully.

Consider, if you will, that for hundreds of years the concept of intellectual property--indeed, even the idea of land ownership in some places-was foreign. You simply cannot throw up your hands and say "But semantics!" and expect to be taken seriously.

At best, you look lazy--at worst, you appear a sycophant to those who rely on provably unneeded monopolies of information distribution.

You're position is indeed much simpler: you seem to be either unwilling or unable to understand that this ongoing public dialogue about intellectual property, copyright, and related matters is something that isn't cut and dried.

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." Thomas Jefferson

"The ordinary subjects of property are well known, and easily conceived... But property, when applied to ideas, or literary and intellectual compositions, is perfectly new and surprising... by far the most comprehensive denomination of it would be a property in nonsense." Lord Gardenston in Hinton vs Donaldson, 1773

To me and a lot of others, illegal copying is far more morally defensible than theft. If someone tries to call a person that pirate a thief, my immediate reaction is that the claim is not only flat out false, but offensive.

Copyright protection is an artificial government monopoly on an activity that does not affect your property rights, and as such it is perfectly defensible for someone to consider it moral to violate copyright. I do consider some forms of copyright violations morally wrong, such as selling copies, but I do consider a lot of piracy morally acceptable (despite the fact I don't engage in piracy, though I did some 20-25 years ago)

Theft is materially different because it deprives the owner of continued use of that which was stolen.

I see that a programmer or artist is slightly different because the work the programmer or artist did can be duplicated where as the lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic's work can not but they're still effectively the same. Someone worked and expects to be compensated for that work. Not compensating someone for work you received I believe is also called "theft".

I'll also note that the most pirated software often represents a lot more work than a single lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic. If you use one of their services you'll likely get a few hours of their time. If you pirate photoshop or MW3 that likely represents a few hundred man years of time.

Anyway, I'm not arguing against piracy. I'm not sure what other word their is though for taking someone's time/labor without paying them.

That's not only "slightly different", that's the crucial difference. So no, they aren't "effectively the same", they are two completely unrelated cases. Would people please stop trying to use this dishonest and flat out false argument to support entirely wrong chains of argumentation?

Besides which, the work an artist/programmer has done is unrelated to the distribution of the result. If one expects to be paid for the actual work done, they have to seek other models. One that often comes up here is Kickstarter, where a form of contract is made - money for work done. Perfectly fine. Musicians have and always had concerts and merchandise as their source of income. Comissioned works are also possible, and are a very valid source of income. Additionally, there's patronage - which is, for example, basically the way Linus Torvalds makes his money.

I'm positive this list is by far not exhaustive.

So no, pirating something is not taking someone's work time, since their time and money spend for distribution is effectively zero.

I'm not saying they are the same but I have yet to see someone clearly make the distinction on why one person's duplicate able work needed to be paid for and another's is not.

If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?

I live in a country where it’s forbidden to organise people to jog in the park together via social network (unless you get appropriate permission, lol). Is such a 'crime' immoral?

If you think your country’s laws are always correct, think again.

There are even cases when what has been considered a crime now is considered a bravery. For example, Lithuanian book smugglers were commiting a crime, but now they are considered to have been doing the right thing.

And what is dishonest about that?

When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life.

Nurses, doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, mechanics, service staff, chefs, teachers all have the same deal. You can't multiply your work by the people who benefit from it forever (maybe everyone who likes the person whose life you saved?) and get paid by each one.

Now to me, that seems sane and normal. You want more money, you do more work. Getting the government to pass special laws allowing you to extract rent from your creative endevour for every person who experiences it going into the future is what seems dishonest to me.

A builder:

  - is hired by a single client
  - to build a house for many months
  - and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary, 
    which is pretty much guaranteed (unless being let off for typically external reasons).

  - also takes many months to complete a book/movie/game but
  - he is not hired by any single client
  - his income is directly related to the reception of the end product by the audience.

Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.

Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.

Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.

Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.

We need new software, because: a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright), b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation, c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).

If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.

If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).

What's dishonest about it? The mental gymnastics to rationalize their actions when it's really about "I don't have to pay for this and there are no consequences if I don't so I'm not going to".

What I've been saying is that for many people it is not a rationalization. They genuinely believe, because of arguments from history and logic that sharing isn't wrong. They aren't jumping through mental hoops, this is their honest belief after considering the alternatives and arguments.

Now that isn't to say that there aren't some, maybe many people for whom it is purely rationalization, but your posts seem to entirely ignore any other possibility.

It comes up every time because piracy and stealing are worlds apart morally. Were I to steal someone's car, they would be incredibly inconvenienced. Were I to illegitimately obtain a piece of software, the developers just get a smaller check at the end of the month.

As the article says, things are not black and white and we should not treat them as if they were. There are degrees of 'badness', and piracy is not as bad as stealing.

..Only if you were going to buy it in the first place and decided not to.

That is theft because you've robbed the lawyer of his opportunity cost. For the time he was spending giving you legal advice, he could have been giving it to someone else that would pay him.

A more apt analogy would be secretly listening in on a lawyer giving legal advice to a paying client. You haven't taken anything away from him or the paying client, and all you've done is "copied" what was being heard anyway.

It's not stolen, it's copied. One of the dark-arts pro-copyright people used was to conflate those two terms into one word. We can still discuss if breaking someone's business model by copying is moral or not, but we really need to separate those two words and talk about them with extreme precision - especially given how heated the discussion is.

Mix that in with a bit of Work-for-Hire for things no-one really wants to make, and it would hopefully be viable. Maybe I'm an idealist.

It is materially different from theft. Enough so that making property law fit copyright is not feasible in any reasonable way.

One is based on an presumptive right of the individual to protection of their right to continued use of something.

The other is an artificial government monopoly restricting the public from exercising their right to full use of their own property, by preventing them from copying and distributing information that is legally already in their possession, and where nobody are deprived of continued use at all.

The people actually in the market for $99 dollar software in the first are not going to do all that nonsense (unless you have done something terribly wrong with your legitimate distribution channels...), and who cares if people who aren't in your target audience pirate it?

Photoshop is the classic example. The people who pirate it are jobless students, while the target audience for Photoshop is undeniably professionals (who buy it). This is evidenced by the lengths that Adobe doesn't bother to go to to prevent piracy.

Similarly, with video games people either pirate them because they are not in the market for things that cost $50, or because someone royally fucked up the legitimate distribution (with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever). Gamers who are in the market for games buy games.

So..I should be forced to compete with someone making an exact copy of my software and giving it out for free? Does this make any sense to you?

Should hackernews.com be forced to compete with hackernews2.com, which is an exact duplicate?

"The people who pirate it are jobless students"

Do you have any evidence to back this up? Adobe has a student edition that can be purchased for almost nothing from many sites and it's all legitimate. Microsoft has these programs and also things like the bizspark/webspark programs. You can get free Microsoft software and all you need is an LLC (costs very little to create).

Your reasons don't really make sense anymore.

"with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever)"

Wow, we sure are in an entitlement generation. If you can't get exactly what you want, you take it upon yourself to just take it. I also can't really take anyone that uses the word "draconian" seriously.

The problem with your logic is that it never ends.

Look at the music industry: At first, it was because CDs were too expensive. The record companies responded by having 99 cent singles and very cheap music. Next, it was because the artists weren't being treated fairly. With the Internet, you can now release your music without any label.

Hell, even the infamous louis CK $5 comedy special was pirated like hell the day after it was released. It's very cheap, DRM free, and people still pirated the hell out of it. How do you explain this? The "Draconian" DRM? Too expensive? The bits weren't in the right order for the pirates' specification?

Piracy came first, not "Draconian DRM", so this is not a valid excuse as to why people are pirating, sorry.

"Gamers who are in the market for games buy games."

Your mindset isn't new and as a software developer (and business owner), I just need to change my business plan. Now, you will need to pay a monthly fee for my service instead of owning it outright. It stops piracy dead. I hope you enjoy paying a monthly fee for all of your software, because it's a world piracy helped create.

I'm sick of people like you that just can't be honest: you want free stuff and you aren't willing to use you hard earned money to get it.

You seem to think that I am defending pirating; offering up a moral justification of sorts. I am not. I am not interested in the slightest in the morality of the topic, one way or the other. I offer them no moral defence, nor do I morally condemn them. Rather I am telling you that you should not get bent out of shape over it.

And for the record, despite your insinuation, I pirate neither software, nor music, nor movies, nor whatever else there is to pirate. Why would I?

I think you are taking my response too personally for some reason.

Given that Photoshop is still profitable for Adobe, this is objectively false.

" “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them.

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so. "

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Even today, GIMP is no Photoshop, Blender is no Maya, Openoffice is no Office, and the list goes on, and this has been after decades of trying to catch up. The truth is that for many domains, commercial software is the standard and has been shown to be adept at outpacing Free competitors. (This is not true in many domains as well.)

And besides this, a teenager who is a sponge for learning the coolest and most popular software could not care less about the tired philosophical debate about free vs Free, they just want to be able to play with Photoshop because that's The Thing.

Things have changed though. It's not a free vs Free philosophical debate, it is about doing something illegal when you have a choice.

This is not just about teenagers. I can tell you that a legal copy of Microsoft Office for home use in Spain is really rare. Same for Photoshop, and other "essential" software that every home computer has installed, but nobody paid for it. It is, in practice, free.

I believe piracy is one of the reasons free software is not more popular, but well... I may be wrong.

This is the problem. Marketing is really effective to teenagers as they have not worked out the reality behind the branding yet. So free software gets less feedback and a smaller user base and so it goes...

"commercial software is the standard"

I'm just hoping that using 'the standard' gets a bit old and being different becomes a bit more popular.

For the record, now that I have money, I purchase the lectures that I listen to. Maybe if I become wealthy, I will go back and buy the ones I listened to.

Moreover, I think that piracy mostly happens because either it's the only way or because it's way too cheap.

The first case is similar to how I was as a kid: I pirated all my games and software and copied all my music, and then bought the best games and the best albums that I could afford. I owned the games and cds that I considered the best, and worth owning. I paid for them so that I could own them: not because I would've wanted to make sure the authors could make a living. No amount of piracy laws and copyright enforcement would've added anything to the funds I had at my disposal. I already spent whatever I had.

The second case is why some people hoard files. They download full discographies and filmographies of nearly everything there is because copying is so cheap it's practically gratis, copying can be fun, and just to make sure that if the world comes to an end they'll still have years of entertainment in their hands. They probably watch and listen one percent of what they're downloaded, and they probably actually buy one percent of that one percent.

There's a third case of "piracy" which is just casual copying, to sample the products. People first download music and torrent movies and sample what they've got. If they find a good director or a good band, they buy a collection or a set of albums. I don't really consider these people a problem since they're consumers at heart and they use downloading mostly to find stuff to buy. If they couldn't download, they wouldn't find much music or games or movies, and they would subsequently buy less.

I think this is (close to) the case of people who are actually a problem. The first two cases don't represent much lost oppurtunity. In this case, the people pirating might go out and buy the stuff. Because of this, the oppurtunity cost of them already having some of the stuff is far more significant than in the first two cases (where there was minimal oppurtunity lost)

I can agree and sympathize with this until he said that most people pirate out of need, not greed. Not sure that's really accurate but I'm also not sure it's measurable.

Every option has been exhausted and I'm kind of annoyed. I wanted to ditch my pirated version of Windows 7 and finally go legit now that I can afford it, but Microsoft just won't take my money.

A torrent just works.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Is Windows 8 not available for download in Bolivia? If so is that some silly regional trade reason? Or are network speeds too low?

Without access to the software, I would never have been able to learn the skills required to earn the money to pay for the software now.

I'm not saying that piracy should be accepted for that reason; I'm saying (and I believe the OP was saying) that piracy is simply the only way to access the tools required to get out of poverty for many, many people.

This shouldn't be how it is, but some serious thought has to go into how to make things available fairly to those people who would otherwise just pirate it. Some money is better than no money, and software that is frequently pirated is obviously in demand with people who can't afford it.

The story presented by the writer is one that is largely inapplicable today. Developers and other content creators have got a better grip on regional pricing, most markets see software being released particularly since online distribution, and the software market has seen more budget alternatives to big name brands become available.

This response may appear rather dishevelled, but that is because I'm not sure what the point is that the article is attempting to touch on. The quasi-Marxist monologue is tired when the quality of free, or cheap software today is very high and so some wishy-washy argument about self-betterment through piracy is left looking rather weak.

There are some fairly strong arguments in favour of piracy, some even quite convincing. This is not one of them.

"Sorry bub, you bought that X from the company who makes them, in another country. And because they sell stuff cheaper in THAT country, you have no rights to what you buy past yourself. Even if I did sell to you."

Regardless that companies use price arbitrage on everything under the sun, including the workers and the WHOLE company (to get away from higher tax regimes). We peons aren't allowed to use the same tools the big guys use.

I think the article wasn't so much about the glory of piracy and how you can make a profit out of it. Rather, it is a perspective on desire and finding a way to feed it. I think that this is the one of the best things about living in our current state of the internet: if you can get the initial tool (the computer or the smartphone) you open up access to so much opportunity.

As a matter of course, pirates often find themselves becoming quite knowledgeable about topics (audio and video encoding, protocols (FTP, NNTP, BitTorrent, etc.), tools such as BNCs and VPNs, encryption, storage methods, etc.), all of which have valid uses aside from committing piracy, that they would otherwise have little motivation to explore.

The desire to commit piracy undetected acts as a motivation for people to gain a deeper understanding of the systems they are interfacing with, and this is often a good thing.

Pirates always get the better product (with the possible exception of AAA online multiplayer games).

Of course what changed my life even more was subsequently downloading Slackware Linux (on that same 56k connection!) and realizing that I didn't need to pirate an expensive IDE to write code...

GNU.

I have no problem with pirating (except for the word). But why illegally download an expensive OS when better, free versions abound on the net? Stay legal, and have a more powerful, hackable OS to go with your clean conscience.

In short, I think Vlad is trying to explain that piracy was only a last resort for him. And it should only be a last resort.

Just to nitpick a little here (and I apologise if I misunderstood your post) but I don't think I've EVER heard anyone argue that piracy is not a crime just because it's not stealing. Copyright infringement ("piracy") is definitely a crime, and it's definitely not stealing. Whether it's morally defensible is a whole different debate and one I don't want to enter into right now.

Adobe and Microsoft can sustain their products being pirated wholesale partly because it undermines their smaller competitors.

It's easy to justify downloading episodes of syndicated television shows, platinum albums, or computer games from 1992, but as a startup-centric site, it seems more relevant to question the impact of piracy on small independent businesses/artists/producers.

Maybe they should be "grateful for the publicity", or "flattered" that their product has been downloaded thousands of times on thepiratebay.org. Maybe the losses incurred are made up for by a wider audience and more sales once the user has reached maturity...

The point is that someone has invested a lot of time and money into creating something and they are offering the usage of that software for a price. If you use it without paying that price, then you are disrespecting the person that created it because you are ignoring their wishes for the thing that they have invested a lot of time into. It just feels very wrong to me.

Likewise.

Instead of ad hominem attacks, explain to me why exactly you think I am spoiled. I expect better replies from Hacker News than something like Reddit, and yours fails to meet such a standard. I appreciate constructive, well thought-out criticism to my arguments, but your post demonstrates nothing of the sort.

Promising to not hire someone is an ad hominem attack of itself. Really helpless and pathetic one at that.

I don't say things like this. This is level DH0 (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). If you keep posting these sorts of comments, then you don't belong on HN because you can't formulate a coherent argument against my points. Other people can -- just look at some of the other replies I've gotten. For some reason, you seem unable to do so.

In fact, I just looked through your comment history. It's amazing how many of your posts are gray, indicating that you have negative points. There are a lot of guides on the internet for coming up with better arguments (with more etiquette as well). Immature arguments belong on places like Reddit or 4chan. Hacker News holds itself to higher standards, so hopefully I can get you to reach these as well. If you need some tips on good debate skills, I will be glad to share them with you.

Because "I probably would not hire anyone who thinks X" is a really lousy argument on NH. In the first place.

Give me reasons. Intelligent, coherent, logical reasons. There is a tendency for people on the internet to just state things and assume the other person can read their mind. If I thought my own argument was lousy, then I wouldn't have made points in favor of it, would I? So I can't possibly know for what reasons you think it's a lousy argument.

(Also, "mind your own business" is a cop out. If you want to end the discussion, fine, but don't keep posting or I'll keep replying to you.)

So your position is amusing. Why is it about hiring? Why not "I would not sleep with you if you have weak stance on piracy"? Or "I would not shit in the same toilet"? Why is it about hiring? I would propose it tells something about you. It tells us you're an authoritarian person. It tells that you are likely to try and force your world views over your subordinates or colleagues and/or demand extra, not work-related, activities from them. When rejected you would then use your leverage as a more senior leading to strife.

And this, as one well-known site likes to recite, is The Real WTF.

If someone goes to the lengths required to pirate & use your creation you should be flattered.

The very nature of the action of them trying to get your creation - even though they don't have money - is testament to the value they think you have created.

If they keep pirating your stuff every time you release a new version - you really should re-consider your pricing options or your distribution strategy. It means you are likely leaving money on the table.

Ignorant? Do you know what that word means? Let me quote dictionary.com for you: "Lacking in knowledge or training; unlearned". I don't appreciate you calling me ignorant, seeing as how I do not meet the definition in any way.

> If someone goes to the lengths required to pirate & use your creation you should be flattered.

If someone goes to the lengths/peril required to rob your bank, you should be flattered. Sorry, this argument holds no water with me. How I "should" feel about something is not up to anyone else.

If they don't have the money to afford my creation, they should talk to me about it. If I think they have a good reason for needing it, I'll give it to them for free. If I don't think they do, then it really should not be their decision to just take it anyway.

I guarantee you, if you make something that so many people want such that they go to great lengths to pirate it, you are in a good position and should feel flattered that they do it.

Ask Peldi from Balsamiq. He handles piracy in the best possible way.

Balsamiq is widely pirated, yet if you email him and tell him you want his software but can't afford it, he will likely send you a license free.

But the problem is that every business has to tolerate some level of immoral activity whether they like it or not. Department stores have to tolerate some employees stealing merchandise. Restaurants have to tolerate employees giving meals away to their friends. Gas stations have to tolerate the occasional late night robbery. With regards to profit, there is an optimal amount of resources you should spend on fixing behavior like this. Spend too much and your company will lose money. Spend too little and everyone's going to see what they can get away with. Same with software.

However, just because this stuff happens and people are expected to deal with it and build it into their business plan does not mean it's okay. Cities deal with murder and theft on a daily basis; they shouldn't be flattered that their city is so popular that is has a lot of crime.

I am unfamiliar with Balsamiq, but he has a certain model that works for him. Great. But why should everyone else be forced to adopt the same model he does? There's a gas station where I live that gave me free water once when I was on a run. Does that mean every gas station should be forced to give me free water? If they don't give me free water, should I just take it anyway? It's a negligible loss to them; they won't notice anyway. In fact, if I hadn't taken the water then I wouldn't know how great their water was to come back and buy some more or tell my friends.

Do you understand what I'm getting it? There's a difference when arguing piracy on an optimal business basis vs a personal moral basis. I am arguing on the personal basis. I think we both agree on what makes the most business sense (as should any intelligent businessman).

P.S. I'm still curious why you called me ignorant. What field do I lack training or knowledge in that pertains to this discussion?

Wow, and for the past X (10? 20?) years, we've all been told "pirates wouldn't have bought anyway, so the 'lost revenue' is only $0'.

Also, the same can be said about software. It seems to me that the firms that create the most pirated software (from MSFT, Adobe, Apple, et. al) are doing ok.

It is black and white. It's theft.

The issue of whether you shold steal in certain conditions is a separate issue, as discussed some in the article.

But it is black and white, it's theft.

It's obvious that copyright violation is not directly equivalent to theft on a black and white basis; there are clear differences, such as theft depriving someone else of a physical good, so under the "clear distinction" interpretation of your statement, it is plainly wrong.

And as to moral interpretation, it's not obvious that theft is always wrong either.

No, it isn't.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/theft-law-in-the-2...

You might be too young to have read this in Phrack, but I feel it's apt:

Let me tell you something. Information does not want to be free, my friends. Free neither from its restraints nor in terms of dollar value. Information is a commodity like anything else. More valuable than the rarest element, it BEGS to be hoarded and priced. Anyone who gives something away for nothing is a moron. (I am indeed stupid.) I can't fault anyone for charging as long as they don't try to rationalize their reasoning behind a facade of excuses, all the while shouting "Information Wants to be Free!"

Trade secrets don't want to be free, marketing projections don't want to be free, formulas don't want to be free, troop placements don't want to be free, CAD designs do not want to be free, corporate financial information doesn't want to be free, my credit report sure as hell doesn't want to be free!

http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/2600/infofree...

Perhaps a better wording would be "Information tends to spread". It's really about the arrow of time. It's much easier to give someone information than to take information away from them. Taking public knowledge and making it secret is a lot harder than taking secret knowledge and making it public.

> Trade secrets don't want to be free, marketing projections don't want to be free, formulas don't want to be free, troop placements don't want to be free, CAD designs do not want to be free, corporate financial information doesn't want to be free, my credit report sure as hell doesn't want to be free!

Personification confuses the issue here, but assuming those examples were meant as "want to be secret" rather than the much weaker "don't want to be free ('cause they're information, and have no will of their own)" then I should point out that it's actually YOU that wants your credit report to stay secret, and the army that wants troop placements to remain secret. The information wants nothing, but will tend to spread.

There's nothing to stop you working against this natural tendency, but it requires you to put in a certain amount of effort and maintenance. Water tends to flow downhill, but we can make hollows and dams and the like to keep it in, and that's a very useful thing to do. But in a sense water could be said to "want to flow downhill".

Of course, if someone argued against dams because "water wants to flow downhill", that would be ridiculous. I'm sure that a lot of (most?) people who use that phrase mean it in exactly the way that you interpret it, which is unfortunate as it is then reduced to something more like "I feel we have a moral imperative to share information". And surely there's a better way of phrasing that.

So maybe I'm the one misunderstanding. But I like my interpretation better.

I certainly can't imagine my 13-year-old self, who was a big enough geek to be giddy warezing Turbo C++, getting access to Dreamspark.

Example: I'm in school for drafting/design tech. Due to the school which I am taking classes, we learn Autocad and Solidworks. Both have student versions available, and both are with nasty "We'll send you the serials sometime next week".

So I went onto the local pirate archive and grabbed a copy of both programs. Half an hour later, they're installed and they work flawlessly. Fellow students are still waiting for the serials through email sometime next week.

I do think its different for a for-profit enterprise to go out and pirate everything under the sun. If you make money, you should pass the buck, so to speak.

Read my history to rehash the 1 day old long drawn out argument about DRM. No sense in repeating all of that.