[lucideer]

> all the people who try to moralize piracy be saying "<insert strawman>" or today's rationalization du jour

To explain your logical fallacy: The rationalisations haven't ever changed, they are not "du jour", and they have never included your one quoted example. The fact you've quoted an invented example that is easily falsifiable doesn't automatically discount other, valid rationalisations.

> the pain that I - like every content creator - has to bear for them

And this is the crux of the primary valid rationalisation. I don't believe the pain is causally attributable to piracy. I could be wrong, this is my subjective stance, but it is not only far from easily discountable, it's been continuously confirmed by research. There's even been repeated correlations shown with improvements of content-creators' lot as a result of piracy.[0][1]

It is of course understandable for content-creators to be frustrated by piracy. Content-creators do genuinely struggle to make a reasonable living from their work, and the media tells us it's piracy's fault. Who are we to argue?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pi...

[1] https://gigaom.com/2009/11/02/419-research-p2p-filesharing-n...

[johnfn]

I hate to do this but I don't have the energy to give you a full response. Arguing against all of HN simultaneously on this topic has been exhausting. :P

I will say that if you've never heard the example argument I gave, that just means you haven't been arguing against proponents of piracy long enough. I see it trotted out often - in fact it may be one of the most popular arguments.

(To be clear, the argument I was paraphrasing was "anyone who torrents wouldn't have bought your stuff, so it's fine.")

And yes, I've heard the "but piracy is actually GOOD for business don't you see" arguments over and over too. And it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that these sort of studies take exactly the form and shape of what you'd expect the post hoc rationalizations to look like. And please don't say "but it's a study, that means it's true and accurate." Correlative studies can basically be made to prove anything. Until I see a double blind replicated study I will remain unconvinced.

Anyways, like I said, sorry I can't go deeper here. I'm pretty exhausted by all this and will probably move to talk about aomething less contentious on HN. Like how great TypeScript is or something. :)

[lucideer]

I don't really know if piracy is good for business, but I don't believe it's bad for it. At worst, its net effect is innocuous for content-creators.

Your example expanded with more context is something I've heard - I wouldn't fully agree with that rationalisation, but to expand further I would say that torrentors who would have otherwise bought your content often will anyway, and often wouldn't have if it hadn't been torrentable (not so much because there's a culture of sampling before buying - there is but it's rare - but more because torrent sites are far superior even to Spotify as discovery platforms, which is the best that's come out of the industry to date).

Add to that the balancing nature of a network where exposure is not governed directly by economics, and you see discovery naturally decreased for Beyoncé and U2 relative to <insert any genuinely struggling content creator>.

Typescript is great.