[slg]

>The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.

I'm just tired of this technolibertarian mindset of "it's not wrong because no one is stopping me from doing it". There is no "honor system" in life either and if you see that as permission to be an asshole, that just makes you an asshole. And if your best defense against being accused of being an asshole is some form of "they couldn't stop me", then you're tacitly admitting to being an asshole.

[voidfunc]

Unfortunately the winds are not blowing in your preferred direction. We are being shown time and time again and in increasing frequency that being an asshole is the best way to succeed.

[anon_e-moose]

That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success.

If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party.

[voidfunc]

You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :)

[thwarted]

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

[ninetyninenine]

It's only a tragedy if everyone acts the same way. If a few act against the grain then it's no longer a tragedy.

The common thief is an example. Also pirating games and movies is another example.

[ToucanLoucan]

Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability.

And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.

In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.

I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.

[komali2]

History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended.

[llbbdd]

They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale.

[komali2]

Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities.

Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements).

Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well.

[glitchc]

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene demonstrated through experiments that society collapses when everyone is an asshole. It also collapses when everyone is nice. There's an optimum ratio (~23% assholes to the rest) that leads to long-term sustainability.

[komali2]

This in opposition to millennia of human history, which should teach us that the surest path to human success is cooperation. Why else would we have invented language?

[reaperducer]

being an asshole is the best way to succeed.

Being an asshole is the opposite of success.

Unless you think life is a video game and the score is tallied in dollar signs. In which case, you've already lost.

[afarcryfromhome]

this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about.

humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence.

[llbbdd]

Some people seem to think that because they don't want to be assholes that assholes have no reproductive usefulness, and I'm not sure that's valuable.

[bigyabai]

Then maybe we'll never see eye-to-eye. I grew up with an iTunes account, but I never spent my money on music. Some weeks my family lived paycheck-to-paycheck, some nights skipping dinner. I downloaded my music off YouTube to my 2005 HP Compaq, put it on my iTunes library and synced it to my iPod Shuffle. Didn't weigh on my conscience when I pirated video games or FL Studio either, not then and not now.

If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide.

[9dev]

Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.

Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well.

I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content.

[scns]

> Spotify payout

~1000$ to ~12000$ a year:

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/19/zoe-keating-spot...

[aspenmayer]

> Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.

Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal. Or in other jurisdictions, it’s not an offense at all, but rather priced in to the costs of recordable media and storage media/devices.