[shrimp_emoji]

>"oh content creators never would have made any money anyways"

Are you referring to the "lost sale fallacy"? That's one argument, but another is that the content creators DO make money anyways.

Particularly, if you make your content affordable (see textbook prices) and usable in whatever way I want (e.g., I can't play iTunes shows in MPC and have to rely on the platform I bought them on), my incentive to pirate your content goes down dramatically.

Doing the latter is absurd, though; how do you protect your content from being shared? I don't know either.

I guess I'll pirate decrypted copies of it. It IS "wrong", I don't pretend otherwise, but it's cutting the Gordian knot of unfavorable economic paradigms. Kind of like slavery. Except way less worse. See lost sale fallacy.

[baddox]

I think the best example is Steam. A common sentiment online is "I don't pirate games any more because Steam makes it so easy to buy them, plus there are often incredible sales." I share this sentiment.

A large part of Steam's success is that they built a better product than the one offered by piracy. That's worth paying for.

Granted, this isn't a cure-all. I'm sure some people still pirate games, and it's probably impossible to estimate how many represent "lost sales." Moreover, games are one of the trickier things to pirate, often requiring some technical knowledge (using disk images, keygens, cracks, etc.). Music is obviously much easier to pirate.

[Insanity]

I completely agree. Steam was the reason I stopped pirating. For music, spotify did the trick :-)

[anigbrowl]

How are artists doing under Spotify? Oh wait, that's not your problem.

[ionised]

You're right, it's not his problem.

[Insanity]

Are they doing better when people are pirating? The bands that I like, I buy the album from anyway just to support them. But for music that I listen to every now and then - they would not get me to buy their album. So they actually would either make no money from me, or a bit through spotify.

[baddox]

How are artists doing with traditional album sales (digital or physical)? As far as I can tell, music sales have basically always been A) you're a huge artist and make lots of money or B) you're not huge and you can only make money touring.

[diminoten]

It just feels like you're holding the content creator hostage with your threats to steal their work if they don't do what you tell them to (price their content "reasonably").

If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable".

Edit: I've said some unpopular things on HN today, so I'm now being rate limited in my responses. Here's my response to one comment:

> Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it

Yes, it absolutely does. You're working in the world of "is" not "ought". This is firmly an "ought" conversation. You "ought" not copy my book, because as part of me giving it to you in exchange for money, I asked you not to do that, and you agreed.

> but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be.

This is only true if people are willing to take my product without compensating me at all, which is exactly what I said originally is "holding the content creator hostage".

If you don't pay my (possibly absurd) price, you don't get my work, period. There is no working moral framework in which you get to decide if you deserve to steal my work or not.

[dleslie]

Digital works are ephemeral. There is nothing to own that is not a fantasy wrought of the agreement to abide by certain rules; if your customers do not agree, then you must convince them to or adjust your attempts at compensation accordingly.

Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it; but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be.

[wfo]

Ownership /in general/ is an ephemeral fantasy that does not "exist" per se and is socially constructed. You "own" a piece of property only by virtue of the fact that the law decides nobody else can step on it.

[Dylan16807]

You don't really need society to enable ownership of physical objects.

[anigbrowl]

Yes you do. Otherwise I can just come along and take your stuff because I feel like it, and if you object I'll beat you up.

[Dylan16807]

But you'll get hurt too.

There are animals that own objects where that ownership is not enforced through any societal methods.

[dleslie]

Non-ephemeral objects can be scarce and intrinsically unique, whereas digital information is made so artificially, at best. Digital works have no intrinsic material value.

[mikebos]

There is nothing wrong with slapping an absurd price on a license or item. What is wrong is the legal framework that allows it for years after your death to slap a price on it. The reason it's wrong is that copyright was meant to balance the right's between consumer and creator. In the old days you had to perform or sell an item, no licenses.

[s73ver]

So after you die, I should be able to just take your car, right?

[cookiecaper]

>If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book.

Absolutely, and I think most people recognize that piracy is morally dubious at some level, but that it's more along the lines of speeding than grand theft.

In fact, that model may be a good compromise. Instead of getting hauled to court and slapped with a multi-million dollar judgment for using filesharing software, or literally sent to jail, you get a $100 ticket for it. That sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

>I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable".

Intellectual property is not personal property.

Personal property is an object or parcel that you can possess and pass down. There is one unit of it. You can protect it and stop people from taking it. It's a real physical thing that can't be trivially copied or spread.

IP is a time-limited government-granted monopoly on thoughts ("intellect"), and it's much more dangerous and treacherous than we give it credit for.

These are limitations on how people communicate, discuss, and share -- they are limits on speech. It's funny that we're so sensitive about censorship of political and religious speech in the U.S. and then so flippant about the extreme censorship in place on the use of cultural icons. You must not represent Mickey Mouse on terms that may upset or threaten The Walt Disney Company, or they will bare down on you with overwhelming force [0] -- in the case of TPB, Disney and its cohorts called on their proxies in the USG to threaten international economic sanctions if the speech, which didn't even originate from TPB (they merely indexed it), wasn't controlled to allow them to make more money. [1] That's insane.

Kim Dotcom is another case where an international incident was caused on behalf of the copyright lobby. It's clear that they don't care what the law is in your country -- they can and will use military force to get you to stop speaking in a way that they feel threatens their profit. Why are we just casually ignoring this disgusting hijacking of our government by BigCorps?

Copyright and patents have a purpose, but they are easily abused and need to be carefully monitored. We have let them go completely out of control.

Before 1976, works were copyrighted for 28 years. I personally think that's a little long, but it's not horrifically unreasonable. There was an option to file an extension and double the term for up to 56 years of coverage.

That has been retroactively multiplied by about 2.5x since, with copyright now lasting 2 full lifetimes by default (life of author + 70 years). If you make something at age 25 and live until 80, that's an absurd 130 years of copyright protection. And that's by no means an atypical case.

Additionally, fair use is a nearly impossible defense for anyone who's not a megacorp, so it doesn't really help, and since software is a fundamental part of the functionality of most durable goods we possess, copyright's aggressive, near-eternal monopolistic protections have legally boxed people out of their own belongings. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894)

Copyright is out of control, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they don't understand how deep it goes, and I'm sure that has nothing to do with big media companies controlling the political dialogue for the last 100 years...

[0] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/89040900...

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sancti...