From an 1841 speech to the British House of Commons on the dangers of increased copyright times:
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
When I was younger, out of curiosity I've downloaded leaked source code of Windows or video games.
Got an impression that code is not that useful to an outsider. It can help answering extremely specific questions how a particular small isolated function is implemented. Even ignoring legal issues, it won't significantly help building competing products, let alone building a successful business around such product.
When we hire people, they gain access to complete source code, documentation, continuous integration environment, bug tracker, and most importantly to the current developers. It usually takes them months to become productive. With just the source code, would probably take a year even for very smart person.
I think the irony is that someone on HN will jump on this thread saying copyright needs to be abolished, and you didn't lose anything as the user wouldn't have paid for it anyways, with the irony being that a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads(which is far worse than any copyright), or works money by writing paid software.
I think a lot of HN readers write software that is hosted somewhere, so the users never see the code. Thus, copyright provides us no protection. (I suppose the ex-employee could always take the code and start their own competing service, so copyright does have some value.)
> a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads
Have you ever seen any numbers on HN users jobs? I’m continually surprised by the diverse roles of domain experts that appear in threads. I guess I’m hoping you’re wrong.
Wouldn't it be ironic if your job arose in part due to demands placed on the internet infrastructure as a result of pirating activity? Or due to pressure on content owners to lower the cost of streaming enough to make it become mainstream? It would be interesting to tally up all the investment into streaming platforms and the supporting software and servers. Without BitTorrent I really wonder how much smaller that market would be. Or if we'd all still be waiting for our discs in the mail or trying to program our DVRs to record the right shows.
Doesn't make copying someone else's work without payment right.
> Doesn't make copying someone else's work without payment right.
I believe it is right in a moral sense. The illusion that any art is always to be treated as having a value commensurate with the effort involved (or the transient demand), is a fantasy that has been commoditized. Thats the current worldthink.
Many of us create over years and see our programs go to waste without a second thought in the same way. It has been a brutal set of lessons over the years. Media creators are no different than me and both arts are better serving humanity in the digital age where the information can flow freely in society. Software licensing is bad and media copying is goid. I believe this now (20 years later), as I always have.
The idea "exclusive monopolies" and transferable intellectual property rights for perpetuity is bullshit.
The blunt fact of the matter is - A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail. Radio did not kill Art. Internet is the new radio.
The same is true even for software. 80% of business fail. It would not matter if they gave their code away. GPL based business have made billions, i'n not even talking about open source and have more users than some of the biggest "startups".
Among the minority that made it "big" copyright contributed maybe 5% to the success. IP allows big companies to bully creators, lie to consumers and bully independent companies that they perceive as threats.
In Music, Code, Science ... openness has lead to more innovation. Movies and Games present an interesting case. They have plenty of upfront costs. Games have already embraced some notions of the freemium mode. It would be really interesting if 100 million dollar movie is entirely funded by the people. There is nothing stopping that from happening. Copyright, Patents should last at-most 1 year.
Plenty of 100 million dollar movies have been entirely funded by the people [0]. They pay using a thing called “tickets”, or sometimes by paying a small fee to download it to their homes.
To your point, the vast majority of media and software is proprietary, though much of it is supporting in nature and not directly for sale. Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations?
If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work. While I don’t think Jonny Depp, for example, is worth $650M [1], I don’t personally think that’s a great option for the editors, writers, extras, gaffers, and many other professionals that work together to make great media.
Companies are motivated to maximise the revenue from making this stuff. If they could make more money without copyright, they would have done this already. (And radio is a terrible example: commercial radio simply plays advertising for artists, called “songs”, 24x7)
> Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations?
Of course. The problem is when they demand that goverments take away their ciziten's natural rights to copy and share information in order to support their chosen business model. If publishers want society to make their business model possible by being given special "rights" and having public institudions enforce those "rights" then it is very much up to all of society to choose if that is acceptable.
Remember copyright is an entirely artificial construct meant to benefit society by encouraging creators to produce content. It is my and many others opinion that the current state of copyright is a very one sided affair that benefits mainly big corporations while having numerous negative effects on society.
> If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work.
Unlikely. There will always be a demand for entertainment and people interested in filling that demand will find a way to make it worthwile.
But even if the entire entertainment industry would instantly disappear then that would still not be an argument to uphold unjust laws. Professions becoming obsolete with progress is entirely natural. People can adapt.
While I agree in spirit with some of what you say, the law is as it is and producers invest in content with the expectation that those laws will be enforced. You want copyright to go away? Then get enough people to agree, and get the law changed.
> copyright is an entirely artificial construct meant to benefit society by encouraging creators to produce content
The problem with this line of reasoning is that all property is an artificial construct. Just because it’s an artificial concept doesn’t, on its own, make it wrong.
> It is my and many others opinion that the current state of copyright is a very one sided affair that benefits mainly big corporations while having numerous negative effects on society.
That may be true, but last I looked we live in a democracy, which means that we have a process for changing the law, which does not include doing whatever you want.
And honestly, while there is plenty about modern copyright that I find repulsive, especially the constant extension, nevertheless the wholesale removal of copyright would have many consequences that you probably don’t want. For starters, the GPL, CC, Apache and many other free licenses rely on copyright to work.
> There will always be a demand for entertainment and people interested in filling that demand will find a way to make it worthwile
Copyright supports far more than just entertainment. The wholesale destruction of journalism, for example, has clearly damaged society. Part of the damage has been caused because Google and Facebook have subverted copyright to their own causes.
> … the law is as it is and producers invest in content with the expectation that those laws will be enforced.
The law can change tomorrow with the stroke of a pen and society won't owe them anything for these past "investments" no matter what their expectations were. Which, of course, is why they invest so much in politics and astroturf campaigns to head off any attempt to actually change the law to something more in line with what most people actually think is right. (If you applied the principle of estoppel and required anyone who had ever violated copyright law to suit words to actions and vote against it then you probably couldn't even get a quorum in favor, much less a majority.)
> The problem with this line of reasoning is that all property is an artificial construct.
Property rights arise naturally as a result of scarcity. Someone has to have the right to decide how the scarce resource will be used or it might as well not exist.
"Property" rights in things that are not scarce are a purely artificial construct.
> For starters, the GPL, CC, Apache and many other free licenses rely on copyright to work.
Copyleft licenses were created as a reaction against copyright. Sometimes they overstep their bounds, true—especially the less permissive variants. However, in general, if copyright and software patents did not exist then there would be no need for any of these licenses.
> The wholesale destruction of journalism, for example, has clearly damaged society. Part of the damage has been caused because Google and Facebook have subverted copyright to their own causes.
Taking it at face value, this appears to be an argument against copyright? Not that I really agree that Google and Facebook are primarily to blame. The public simply prefers to be entertained and reaffirmed rather than informed. If anything, copyright reinforces this outcome since you can't copyright facts (and rightly so); as such, actual journalism, uncovering the facts of the situation, has become a cost center to be minimized, whereas the "expression" is heavily subsidized via copyright monopoly.
> The law can change tomorrow with the stroke of a pen and society won't owe them anything
What you say is literally true, but because most investment ends up as wages, such an act would literally destroy tens of billions of dollars of working capital, and put a hundred thousand people out of work overnight.
I assume that's not an outcome you actually advocate.
> Property rights arise naturally as a result of scarcity
Rubbish. The whole concept of rights is almost entirely artificial [0]. For most of history, property and other rights were determined by whoever had the biggest army. Jesus, many people still don't have the right to their own bodies in some places in the world.
The idea that rights of any kind are somehow anything other than a set of cherished beliefs codified in law, is nonsense.
> Copyleft licenses were created as a reaction against copyright.
I think the situation is much, much more complicated than that, but it is a side issue of this conversation at best.
> this appears to be an argument against copyright... The public simply prefers to be entertained
You surely can't blame people for wanting to be entertained? Are you saying you never watch something fun?
In any case, weak and misapplied copyright laws have enabled Google and Facebook, in particular, to concentrate the important elements of journalism and present it to their users in a way which reduces the diversity of all journalism. They show just enough to get away with "fair use" while ensuring that the likelihood of people clicking outside the walled garden is minimised.
Imagine what these companies would do to us if basic copyright was even weaker. Do you think Facebook would link to an article it can just copy? 2 billion+ people on the earth would have just one web browser and it would never - not be allowed - to leave fb.com.
> I assume that's not an outcome you actually advocate.
I don't wish misfortune on anyone, and I expect there would be a transitional period in any real-world implementation, but just the same I cannot possibly justify continuing this parasitic situation any longer than absolutely necessary. If I were presented with a button that would eliminate copyright law instantly, globally, and permanently, I would press it without hesitation—and then get to work dealing with the inevitable fallout.
> For most of history, property and other rights were determined by whoever had the biggest army. Jesus, many people still don't have the right to their own bodies in some places in the world.
You are obviously referring to legal recognition of rights, not the rights themselves. The law is artificial, founded for the most part on non-defensive application of force to achieve a desired outcome, and doesn't correlate very well with the rights that people naturally possess. Some legal systems are better than other in this regard. No law which comes from a government will ever fully recognize natural human rights because, quite simply, that would put them out of business. However, here in the U.S. we at least explicitly recognize that there are rights which humans naturally possess ("endowed by their Creator"—whatever that happens to mean to you) which do not derive from the law, but rather have priority over it. There is a difference between what the law says you may do without penalty and what you may rightfully do, and when the two are in conflict it is the law which is wrong, no matter how popular the law might be or how much force can be brought to bear to back it up.
> You surely can't blame people for wanting to be entertained? Are you saying you never watch something fun?
I'm not blaming them. I'm just saying that there isn't a strong market right now for actual journalism. It's thankless work, for the most part, with or without copyright.
> In any case, weak and misapplied copyright laws have enabled Google and Facebook, in particular, to concentrate the important elements of journalism and present it to their users in a way which reduces the diversity of all journalism. They show just enough to get away with "fair use" while ensuring that the likelihood of people clicking outside the walled garden is minimised.
Are you trying to say that copyright should be expanded to cover facts and not just expression? That it should be illegal to quote or paraphrase a small portion of a copyrighted work? I believe the majority would side with me in vehemently disagreeing. Keep in mind that (in the U.S.) the exceptions for fair use are the only reason why copyright law was not declared wholly unconstitutional on 1st Amendment grounds. Freedom of speech is far more important than this runaway social engineering experiment known as copyright. (IMHO they gave in too easily. Copyright law violates the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech even with fair use.)
> I don't wish misfortune on anyone ... I would press it without hesitation
I can’t reconcile these two statements. People would definitely die if you pushed that button; I don’t think you want that.
> here in the U.S. we at least explicitly recognize that there are rights which humans naturally possess
Perhaps true, but only for certain values of ‘human’.
> Are you trying to say that copyright should be expanded to cover facts and not just expression? That it should be illegal to quote or paraphrase a small portion of a copyrighted work?
I think it’s pretty clear that I’m saying that fair use has been subverted by companies for profit, and that eliminating copyright will make things far worse.
> Freedom of speech is far more important than this runaway social engineering experiment known as copyright
Given the rate at which people are getting sick and dying in the US right now, I’m not certain that the “runaway social experiment of free speech” - as moderated and directed by the copyright infringing trolls at big social media - is working out too well for you guys either.
> Copyright law violates the 1st Amendment and freedom of speech even with fair use.
Didn’t you just essentially argue that the law is not morally authoritative?
You clearly believe that there exist natural rights. I happen to believe that the right to control the things I create is natural. Just because something can be copied easily doesn’t abrogate my natural rights, any more than the fact that your genome can be copied abrogates yours.
Despite what you think, its entirely possible and natural for me to suffer a loss if you copy something that I created, particularly if creating it was expensive for me, and your copying it prevents me from making good my loss.
While there is much I find dismaying about copyright law, there is nothing unnatural about it.
The number of CEOs who think printing money is a good idea might make you wonder if they even know anything about money. Polluting air costs less money why not do it ?
80% movies don't need the 100 million dollar budget and I'm pretty sure Johnny Deepp would be happy to release Edward Scissorhands to the public domain.
Most big movies make their money by single day screenings and releasing movies at different dates in different regions with market buzz.
> If we take away the option of artificial scarcity then an entire highly trained professional class will be out of work.
Interestingly your argument fails for porn. Its about 1/4th the size of hollywood.
How about publishers own the copyright and creators own the copyright instead of commoditising a copyright artefact ?
I assure you musicians can survive and Depp can do some theatre. Most EDM is essentially copyright free, especially techno. 1 year of exclusivity is fine. Fuck NDAs.
These days the cost of production has gone down so I think you will see more indie media taking advantage of that. The average budget for a reasonable movie is less than 5 million, heck even 500k dollars going by kickstarter funded movies.
I don’t really know what you’re arguing, you seem to be making a few assumptions about my position, which are probably wrong.
In terms of $100M movies, I think they almost all suck, but that was the value you suggested. I’d say that no movie needs to cost $100M!
But plenty of movies cost $10M. If it takes 100 people a year to make a movie then you can easily spend $10M on salaries and overheads alone.
> Interestingly your argument fails for porn
Does it? I’d guess that the average porno costs a few hundred bucks to shoot, and takes a couple of hours. There is easily 100x more hours of porn produced per day than narrative fiction, and yet it only makes 25% of Hollywood, and notoriously, the actors are frequently exploited. I’d say that porn is a warning of danger rather than a proof of success!
> Depp can do some theatre
When was the last time you paid to go to the theatre?
> Most EDM is essentially copyright free, especially techno. 1 year of exclusivity is fine. Fuck NDAs.
My raver days are (sadly) behind me, but sure, OK, like porn, EDM can be produced with little investment. So what? No everything that is good is also cheap or easy to build.
> These days the cost of production has gone down so I think you will see more indie media taking advantage of that.
I’m a huge fan of indy media but, because of that, I pay for it, and I don’t like it when people freeload.
> The average budget for a reasonable movie is less than 5 million
I think you’re just making things up now, but even so, 5 million is a buttload of money that you need to get back. Few people are gonna spend that sort of money with no expectation of recouping it.
There are a lot of undeserving idiots with money out there, no doubt. And they have certainly taken advantage of copyright to get wealthy. But it seems to me that you just want to solve this by making everything “indy”, on the cheap, and as much as I love independent music and film (I saw 40 movies over a two week period at a film festival last year, it was awesome) I think the world is far more complex and interesting than can be expressed by a couple of dudes with a camera.
The problem is that some productions are simply expensive. Think about sending an imax camera to the space station. There is literally no way to make that cheap. And why concentrate only on music and movies, what about games? What about journalism? There are a huge number of industries that depend on at least some form of copyright, even if not specifically the bastard form that exists at this moment.
> Is copyright / patents the only way to finance and get money back ? Absolutely not. Thats the argument I am making.
But as far as I can tell, you’re only arguing against copyright, you’re not actually making an argument for a viable alternative, and that is my problem.
Just because you dig EDM and punk, and these specific types of music can be made on the cheap, doesn’t mean all good media can be made cheaply. Just because most $100M movies suck doesn’t mean that $10 million movies shouldn’t be made.
Accept that, and then explain to me how to repeatedly raise the $10 million investment needed to create high quality, high cost products that will be given away for free, no strings attached. I think you’ll find that the problem is that doing so is incredibly hard and extremely risky, which is why nobody is doing it.
I believe in reform. 1 year exclusive copyright / patent at most and author always holds the copyright. Its ironic that the movie with the biggest budget is a pirate movie ;)
So we agree :) except that like the pirate party, I’d make copyright 5 years since some works take much longer than one year to create, and it can often take more than a year to distribute certain works or plan and go on tour.
Also, I believe nobody should go to jail or be bankrupted for copying digital works.
And what do you know? Two randos came to an amicable position on an Internet forum :) next stop, world peace!!
> A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail.
What exactly about being in the public domain would help a movie "gain more" if it hadn't had a successful box office run previously? "GPL-based businesses making billions" does not strike me as a meaningful comparison here. ("Well, 'Cats' is a fiasco, but if we give it away for free we can make a killing selling enterprise service contracts for it!")
How about scene by scene commentary for cats on a youtube video. Sports have this and you can watch old sports matches on youtube. Right now youtube would block it and my use case extends the fair use by quite a mark. You have to understand that under DRM even seeing the movie with family and friends is illegal.
The problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem. In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it because the collective will would exist to prevent it.
Then everybody would be as wrong as you. You can repeat this as much as you like, but it is simply false.
Legally speaking: copyright infringement is an offense distinct from theft.
Speaking from reality: copyright infringement does not deprive the holder of the right of their property.
Speaking ethically: Copyright infringement is a violation of a particular commercial mode of exchange. "Unauthorized Looking" would be a better term for what retail bittorrent users are up to.
I agree with your interpretation of copyright and that it is not theft, but your position ignores the fact that very many “properties” would not exist except for the understanding that they might be profitable. In some cases, like GoT, the likelihood of profitability is very high.
In that sense, copyright infringement _indirectly_ deprives the holder of the property through the capital that they invested in order to create the property in the first place.
I mean, if I spend $100 to make a movie with the hope that 100 people will each spend $2 to watch it, and then you make a copy and distribute it for free to my audience, then you’ve deprived me of my $100 in capital, and the $100 in profit. The profit itself is a loss because it is an opportunity cost: if I hadn’t made the movie then I might have spent my time making money some other way.
The distance between your position and mine is, I think, one of scale. Individual infringement of a property with millions of views is a tiny fraction of the cost of creating that property. But as the number of infringers increases relative to the audience, it really does deprive people of property.
The actual likelihood of this happening in the real world approaches zero, given the intrinsic incentives of pirates ie to release as early as possible, and the fact that pirates don’t usually know (or care) if the product has recouped its investment, or not.
Even if it was possible, surely the people who have invested real money should be the ones to make this decision? Indeed, lots of IP becomes free (even freedom-free) after it’s made money, eg the Quake engine.
> Even if it was possible, surely the people who have invested real money should be the ones to make this decision?
Why? They have no inherent right to limit the distribution of their content, only the special rights society has decided to give them in order to encourage the creation in the first place.
But all rights are granted by society, including your right to own a house or a car or a laptop or the clothes on your back. ALL of these rights are “special rights society has decided to give”.
And in the case of copyright society has decided that media is something that is worth investing in and we have created laws that encourage that.
Some of those laws suck and are stupid and overreaching, but that’s not the argument here.
piracy is taking someone else's work without compensating them for that work. There are lots of forms of work that require nothing but time. Programming is one, lawyer work, accounting work, digital design work, planning, managing. I'm sure we could list 100s more.
I don't know what the legal term is for hiring someone for a service and then not paying them for that service.
If you want the your tax forms filled out you pay the tax accountant. If you want the movie you pay the creators of the movie.
I know there is a difference in the the movie already exits but is that an important difference? When I arrive at the tax accountant's office to collect my tax forms they already exist. Maybe I should just make a copy for free and leave and say "copies are free so it's not theft"?
It's not the document that was stolen, it was the value of their time.
I am unsure when you grew up, but for many of us who grew up in the 90s and 00s, this is exactly the mindset we have. I used to be able to take a movie I had and lend it to a friend, the same with music. The movement away from physical copies took this away from many of us, so we tried to take it back in kind -- piracy is what they called that behavior.
I understand it might not seem right to you, but in all the social groups I am a part of piracy and sharing accounts is normative. The only fault I see is mixing personal and work resources, which naturally have separate concerns.
I see nothing wrong with "lending a movie" to someone.. But how often does the "lent" movie ever get "returned" ( read: deleted )? If not your analogy breaks down and it becomes the same as physically copying a VHD/DVD/CD.
I’m not sure why that’s important. I don’t frequently watch movies multiple times so the loaning and watching once is, I think, most common.
Back in the dvd days, I would frequently never get discs back. The few times I’ve loaned a file from a digital file I’ve bought on Amazon, I’ve never watched the movie again. So for all I care, they could keep it forever.
I wrote more about this in another comment [1], but I believe that the limitation of not being able to lend something is a constructed limitation of digital goods. I already do "lend" access through streaming services -- I would call it "lending" because many of the services have limits on concurrent streams (This is the exclusivity principle that is important in lending, as you mention).
In terms of digital goods writ large, there is no good way for me to lend access in a provable manner -- so of course piracy is the natural evolution because that's the only way to lend things.
Also, we used to copy Blockbuster tapes too, which is illegal, but there was never enforcement because we never re-sold these copies. Maybe I'm just a miscreant through and through. Irrespective, this is another clear example of where the transition to digital caused a dissonance between the physical and digital worlds that led users to believe behavior called "illegal" was actually just a subtraction of their ownership rights.
I just don't understand this argument, physical copies of virtually any type of media absolutely still exist. If you want to own even Netflix shows on disc, you can do that pretty cheaply. I'd you want to get Blu Ray discs delivered to you by mail for a subscription fee, you can probably do that (although this is slightly more geographically restricted).
That claim isn't true. There are games that are not provided with a physical copy (i.e. Beatsaber for PSVR, Quest for Booty-Rachet and Clank, etc)
Also, I'm sure there are other Hulu, Netflix, Prime excluses that won't make it to the physical market.
----
This still avoids the main issue here: It's the right of ownership of the copy. Having a digital copy, in it's current state, prevents you from transferring it to others. Amazon's ebooks have the option for lending, but you're still reliant upon Amazon's "holy permission" to do that. (They can reascend it at any time). With physical mediums the original creators cannot prevent you from reselling what you own. (They can try.. but often times they've failed)
It absolutely is. I said virtually all, and for virtually all it's true. A small number of counter examples that aren't relevant to the majority of the media-consuming public does nothing to change the inarguable fact that the vast majority of media is available in physical form.
These are not a small number of counterexamples, these are patterns that are pervasive throughout modern media distribution. Let's look at Star Wars as an example. I bought a Star Wars box set and I can't watch it on my computer without installing malware. I can't play "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order" without installing malware. I can't watch the new Clone Wars or Mandalorian show without paying for yet another streaming service. "Think of the content creators" is the new "think of the children". It's not my fault that every aspect of our culture is for sale to the highest bidder; my rights matter more than the profit margin of faceless megacorporations and as long as they engage in these unethical business practices I will not give them my money. Piracy is civil disobedience.
"Civil disobedience" is a rather grandiose way to dress up not paying for things you use because the person who owns them didn't sell them exactly the way you wish they did. You're not marching in the streets, you're watching TV.
I don’t buy movies on dvd or Blu-ray any more. But I still lend access.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that if I watch a movie that I like, I should purchase it again on physical media just to loan it. And that my friend should buy a DVD player just to watch a borrowed movie.
If I’ve bought it once digitally, I will make copies and lend them to friends. Or more specifically, I’ll give them a login to my private Plex server.
It’s great to hear about people using software to share culture. Re: Plex, I looked in your bio but didn’t see contact info. I also have a private server to share culture with friends. Find my contact info in my bio and maybe we can talk more?
I agree that the statement "Physical copies don't exist for digital media" is false (And I wasn't trying to assert that, of which I could have been more explicit), time of release aside. I can still hold the above position and not be in conflict with that, though.
The issue we saw is that there is no way to legally lend a digital resource to someone else, which is a constructed limitation. Lending here involves two things, one is that the resource is exclusive and the other that it has the same traits as the original good. In crux, why do an illegal, but "not as bad" thing when there is no legal difference -- just do the illegal thing at that point.
This is how torrenting, piracy, and account sharing became normative. Access to digital goods was restricted further than physical goods, meaning that as content moved to digital first, there was a dissonance between worlds (This is where all the "First Sales Doctrine" litigation tens of years ago comes from). When that dissonance was resolved in favor of businesses, we adjusted via legal brinksmanship -- wherein we said "This is normal behavior, but if you're calling it abnormal and illegal I'll just do the actually illegal thing because it doesn't matter anymore".
I have a library card, where I borrow exclusive, digital copies of a resource for a reasonable price (If we snake a path between my taxes and the library service). I think this system is great, even though it has just the same properties as physical lending has. It is when properties are lost inexplicably that you see new, emergent behavior.
Once again, I understand that this isn't widely accepted view point in some circles and that you may just fundamentally dislike it. I know that behavior might be illegal by US code, but the nature of something being illegal is that it is illegal because it is an accessible possibility. We create laws to inhibit possible behavior, and, in this case, many of us have just said "I don't care" to these laws in a similar way to jaywalking or speeding.
> Access to digital goods was restricted further than physical goods
You only have two choices as a rights holder when it comes to digital works; much less sharing or much more. There's no workable digital equivalent of the kind of sharing limits imposed by having to move a physical thing from one place to another. In order for sharing to be viable with digital versions the DRM would need to be much more sophisticated, or the prices would need to be much higher.
Edit: if you want a concrete example of the harm caused by this attitude, go look into why there's no HD remaster of DS9 or Babylon 5. The studio broke down sales figures for previous SciFi remakes and then the degree to which those shows are torrented. If even an appreciable fraction of the freeloaders ever actually bought the discs, then it would be worth it to make one. You don't, so they don't.
Are you sure digital piracy is theft?
Wikipedia defines theft as:
"The taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
Copies are made, sales (possibly) lost, but no property is being taken such that the owner cannot continue to sell/rent/etc it.
My take: I'll pay for whatever streaming service that has the content I want (except Hulu), but if it is not available to stream then Internet Copies are an option for me. I don't have a DVD/Bluray/etc player to go the physical copy route and would simply go without if not for streaming first then Internet Copies.
physical copy theft: the physical medium is being stolen, the works are still available, but it is theft because packaging is an industry unto itself, costing money. Making an internet copy costs (basicallly) nothing.
In all: I will pay for what is available, I will even wait if they announce something I want is coming to x-platform at y-date. Because of Netflix alone, I basically don't download movies now. Disney+ is an interesting option now, too. If the market provides, it can have my money!
My reason: movies and TV shows are a form of storytelling and the execution is often very bad if you care to think about it. Storytelling doesn't need to cost much. Poor storytelling should cost even less. Shows from the 80s were very enjoyable but cost only a fraction of current shows. With current distribution systems, shows should cost even less. And I never asked for a team of 100 CGI artists. I just don't want to contribute to the absurdity of all this.
Just get a DVD/Blueray player. The content is there for you to legally get and pay for. Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally. There is really no excuse not to pay.
HN is a global community. Quite a few people here are in countries where legitimate DVDs/Blu-rays are not available locally. If a person were to try to order them from Amazon, the shipping fees would be enormous, and the package may get stuck in customs and require further payment to get it out. In fact, some online shops (like Criterion) will not even ship abroad, because they have licensed the content for a DVD/Blu-ray release only in North America or some other limited geographic region. Consequently, it is no surprise that many ardent cinephiles turn to torrenting (or buying a release from the local marketplace that is going to be a pirated copy anyway) even if they would have liked to build up a physical collection.
> Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally.
Not really, I pay for Amazon prime, tho in Germany, as such the content is very limited and often only exists dubbed, granted: They've been getting better with this.
But delivery of certain shows sometimes is days and weeks late compared to US release, streaming quality has also been spotty for me with no real way to fix anything.
I also have shared access to Netflix, but once again: It's German Netflix, as such it does not have the same offerings as what's current in the US, for example no second season of Twilight Zone.
With Netflix I could use a VPN to get access to the US version, but finding a free VPN with enough bandwidth to stream Full HD content is easier said than done and finding a good paid one seems like quite a bothersome task.
Meanwhile, none of that matters with the warez scene, which also covers everything, not just specific IP. Meaning that I don't run the risk missing out on something interesting or a new season due to not having properly kept up with the news or checked dozens of different services.
No weird issues with streaming, just a handy *.mkv file, add whatever language subtitles I want/need because unlike the entertainment industry, the warez scene actually has been extremely good and consistent about setting and keeping standards [0]
> With Netflix I could use a VPN to get access to the US version, but finding a free VPN with enough bandwidth to stream Full HD content is easier said than done and finding a good paid one seems like quite a bothersome task.
My understanding is that you'd still be breaking copyright laws, so you might as well download from torrents...
Some services restrict online commerce to USA, because that's where money are, doing anything beyond that is an effort that is unlikely to pay off. Also DVD/BD is just plastic waste.
There isn't much of a difference between digital media and "services." We'd all agree it would a dick move if I walked out of barbershop without paying, even if the barber didn't have any other available customers at the time.
If I used my haircut-robot to create a strand-for-strand identical hairstyle as the one you paid your barber for, is that me stealing from your barber?
In many jurisdictions this isn’t theft either, and often the police can’t do much about it. Technically it counts as non payment of debt, which would have to be recovered by a civil action.
In practice they’ll just bar you from the premises.
It’s not theft. It’s not legal, but it’s not theft. It’s also not a big deal, maybe you disagree with that assessment but it’s how the majority of people feel.
So I’d say that piracy is potential copyright infringement and leave it at that. It’s curious to see moral judgement on this. I assume that the judgers work in media or something.
But I also come from a generation that thought DLC was unjust.
I think the jury is still out on copyright infringement. I think it may be a net benefit to society, although a negative for copyright holders.
Back in the Napster days I bought so much more music based on stuff I downloaded. Not everyone was like me, buty piracy made money for the record industry.
I also think copyright infringement has allowed lots of knowledge and entertainment to be available to low resource markets that would never attract releases. How many young people in Lagos got software and media only through piracy?
I challenge you to demonstrate that copyright infringement per se is bad for society. This would mean copyright is good for society which is still to be proven at least in it's current acception.
As part of society. Piracy is pretty good for me. Paying for DRM-infested media and fragmented streaming services on the other hand is bad for society.
Some people we're never and are never going to pay for some of the they consume, they'll either pirate it or just not consume it.
I'm presently watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which I just pirated earlier today. I'm never going to our-right buy, nor rent, it.
One season is presently on Netflix here in Australia, so I'll watch that there, and the publisher will get their three cents out of me via Netflix, or whatever Netflix pays.
That's three cents they were otherwise never going to get out of me.
If the content was available at a reasonable price, say some portion of what I pay my ISP and the AU$8 I pay the VPN service to hide my traffic from my surveillance-state ISP, I'd pay it.
But it isn't, and I can't afford to pay for all the content I consume on my trifling skilled-tradesperson wage.
You realise when people like me see job ads for doctors getting paid in a day what I earn in a fortnight, and revenue figures like:
The Last Airbender had grossed $131,772,187 in the United States, and $187,941,694 in other countries, making for a total of $319,713,881 worldwide.
... there's no way you're going to convince me this side of the heat death of the universe that copyright infringement in universally bad.
While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic.
I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t steal ____’.
The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry.
I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opinion that it’s absolutely a type of theft.
It's not pedantic at all. If we could copy-paste food, clothes, etc. for free, theft would be very different.
Or maybe not, I can just about imagine a bunch of suits suing Jesus for multiplying bread to feed the poor because it deprived them of their baked good sales revenue.
Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy.
If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (though the owner still has their good so not entirely identical) but that doesn't seem to be the typical scenario. The ads only make that equivalence because it's better for the companies if they convince people it's theft.
From a moral perspective I think whether it is theft really depends on your motivation/what you would do in the absence of piracy.
> the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have
You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale? Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly competing with artist A and taking the place of many sales, and there still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of anything.
Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual damages." And yet they have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high ground…
Furthermore, by the way, theft typically destroys total value. If someone steals a wallet (or anything really), the amount he gets from fencing it is typically much smaller than the cost (including hassle, time spent, and potentially nostalgic value) to the original owner of replacing everything (if that’s possible at all).
Copyright infringement, by contrast, arguably creates value - instead of one person being able to see the movie, two can see it.
If I don't watch your movie or watch it for free, it doesn't change anything for you (I'd even argue that the later might actually be better for you, but that's another topic)
On the other hand, whether I eat your apple or not make a big difference to you, since you might not be able to eat it in one scenario.
The ads that infringed the copyright of a small music creator ... when the execs of the companies that paid for the ad go to jail for conspiracy to commit theft I'll change to using your wrong terminology.
"Piracy" is not the problem, it is the solution. The truth is all subscription services straight up suck. They don't hold a candle to copyright infringement. Despite making billions of dollars in revenue, they simply can't compete with what's essentially a bunch of enthusiasts. More often than not the reason why they can't compete is copyright itself.
They have clunky interfaces, making users miss mpv. They don't have chapters, making it annoying to seek to a specific part of a film or episode. They don't allow users to download content beforehand, locking them out whenever there's no internet connection. They have annoying DRM, preventing content playback on perfectly good computers and TVs for no good reason. They aren't available in most countries, locking out entire regions of the globe. When it is available, users get only a subset of the content and feel like second rate consumers. Whatever ends up being available is frequently modified, censored or cut. Users straight up lose access to content with no warning when licensing agreements expire. Every copyright holder launches its own little streaming service with its own annoying quirks. They compress the video so much even pure black frames have massive artifacts and have the audacity to charge for this garbage. They don't have enough subtitles. There's usually zero extra content such as commentary tracks. They track everything users do and watch.
There is exactly one area where streaming offers a superior experience compared to copyright infringement: multiple audio tracks. This is because of a technical limitation: video players can load subtitles that are external to the video file but not audio tracks.
Something as good as "piracy" shouldn't have to stop existing for the benefit of aging industries. It's the 21st century, copyright doesn't make sense anymore. Society must rethink its laws. The copyright industry must adopt new business models or disappear.
> Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie?
The fact everybody is infringing copyright is evidence that the law is wrong. Laws are supposed to codify the customs of a people. If everyone is violating a law then that law obviously does not represent the customs of that people. Society must recognize this and adapt so that the behavior can be allowed.
> … video players can load subtitles that are external to the video file but not audio tracks.
Not true for MPV:
--audio-files=<files>
Play audio from an external file while viewing a video.
This is a path list option. See List Options for details.
--audio-file=<file>
CLI/config file only alias for --audio-files-append. Each use of this option
will add a new audio track. The details are similar to how --sub-file works.
They said before Netflix was available in their country. There were / are many countries where it is impossible to legally watch US cable television. I cannot hold someone at fault for wanting to view creative works that are blocked just because of where they live.
I had Netflix for a year and canceled because I ended up still using torrent. There are lots of movies and anime missing in Netflix and it is annoying to use with Widevine (as I run almost 100% FOSS I use Kodi as a media center).
While maybe not the nicest way to phrase it (and I think you know that), I'll take the bait and tell you how I think we differ from Trello:
- Crazy amounts of hotkeys. You can do everything in Kitemaker without using the mouse. It feels pretty awesome to move issues around the board, assign them, etc. all with hotkeys. Also like many modern products we have a command center (ctrl+K or cmd+K) where you can do everything.
- Our issue screen is quite a lot more powerful than Trello's card view. We've talked to many teams who use Trello and they rarely have much content in their cards. In our issue screen, you get a rich document part (feels quite like Notion, with a lot of things you can drop into the issue like images, Figma designs, etc.) and an activity part (with threaded comments, a history of what's happened with the issues, updates on relevant information from integrations, etc.)
- Better GitHub integration. Our issues actually have issue numbers, so you can do things like "Fix ABC-123" in your GitHub commits and our automation feature will move the issue around the board accordingly (you can set up different rules for if such a message appears in a PR, a commit in master...er main, etc.). We show any activity in GitHub related to the issue right in the issue's activity feed as well.
- Better slack integration. Mentioning issues in Slack automatically attaches the conversation to the issue and also provides useful info about the issue in Slack
- List view. You can see issues in a list instead of a board if that's your thing. Nice for use cases like backlog grooming.
And we're moving fast and adding more useful stuff all the time without becoming too complex or unpleasant to use.
So yes, we have a pretty board and pretty boards tend to look like Trello. But there's a lot more to it than that.
If you haven't noticed the chorus of trashing Jira for the sake trashing Jira in this forum you aren't reading it. It borders on the hysterical. A large part of this crowd believes they have an objective handle on cognitive bias yet most of the Jira commentary seems to come from the subjective experiences of developers who simply don't like having their work organized or fixing bugs. Jira is the most extensible, best platform of its type for workflow management & I would argue (without at all being linked to Atlassian in any way other way than having seen it succeed in numerous disparate use cases) that bad experiences with it are the direct result of not having any idea how to use or configure it correctly to model the work being done.
That's all well and good, but being a foot soldier engineer in a big company, I don't have any influence in either how it is configured or how the work is being modeled. I just know that the page loads took multiple seconds and converted a sub-minute task of updating status or checking information into a multiple minute task.
I tend to track my personal workload in a text file at a more granular level. When my team's project was approaching a deadline and a crunch and I needed to stay synchronized with the developers working closely with me, I transcribed this list to Trello. I showed it to the PM as a curiosity and the next day all of the cards had been printed out and affixed to the wall with masking tape. That's the type of environment a lot of us are working in.
The problem with JIRA is the culture that it encodes and enables. It's rooted in the belief that programmers are factory line workers who aren't smart or organised enough to keep track of their own work, so invariably control of it gets assigned to a "project manager" who then spends far, far too much time engaged in busywork. You end up with hard-coded workflows that don't match how people actually work and the people who need to actually use the workflow get frustrated.
Fundamentally JIRA is an over-grown bug tracker. A bug tracker should be designed, built, administered and used by programmers and only programmers. Project managers should not even have access to it, in my view, let alone try to use it to create reports or control the team.
Typical problem I face in my JIRA shop: there'll be no way to move a task straight from "to do" to "done". You have to move it to "in progress" then "in review" then "in qa" then "done", even if in fact, the ticket just tracked the need to do a quick code cleanup that happened to get done as part of some other task. There's no justification for this type of thing beyond over-empowered project managers.
You believe that Jira has "encoded" that culture in your company, not that your company has encoded it's crappy culture in your Jira implementation? Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
I saw how that culture evolved over time as the company got bigger. It didn't start out that way. JIRA was once a bug tracker for us. It became a some sort of flowchart madhouse with horrifically convoluted processes around it. Partly yes, because the company felt a need to hire project managers, and partly because the tool existed and therefore there was something for them to fiddle with all day. If they didn't have the tools to create over-engineered processes, it would be less likely to occur.
At some level, yes, JIRA just enables problems, it doesn't directly create them. On another level, its whole structure encourages that way of thinking.
Part of the reason people complain about jira is because their own company has tweaked it so much it became slower than a turtle and is riddled with all those random fields their upper management requires to make some meaningless reports.
Jira Server is really hindered by the centralization of its workflow management administration tools. You cannot have "workflow admins" that can change issue type schemes and stuff like that for a subset of projects without giving them full admin rights.
Imagine having a guy in Dev that can fix your workflow so that "Start working" is not hidden in the dropdown menu.
I don't have to imagine it. This is a textbook example of a Jira implementation failure not a Jira failure: "not having any idea how to use or configure it correctly to model the work being done."
i am completely fascinated by this response. it is literally so dense with self-parody and hacker-news-ness that any attempt to quote it, analyze, refute, or satirize it in any way would only dilute the message.
I think if you need a tool to "keep them honest" you may have a major culture problem in your company. We started our company to make a tool where people collaborate to get stuff done together, not to be a place where managers keep tabs on their people.
That being said, despite that I personally don't love Jira I do think there are some cases where you need particularly complex workflows (e.g. compliance use cases) where Jira's complexity is fully justified.
And we know our tool is not for everyone. If your team is happy using Jira, power to you. But I think it really is important that the team is happy with it, not just the bosses.
> I think if you need a tool to "keep them honest" you may have a major culture problem in your company.
What kind of organization doesn't have real OKR's or performance metrics? Do you draw a pretty picture with sunshine and rainbows and report that to investors?
You said developers don't like Jira because it's there to "keep them honest". I don't think micro managing your people via an issue tracker leads to better performance on OKRs.
I report actually meaningful numbers to my investors in terms of value delivered to users, not number of tickets churned through.
Anyone who makes general complaints about Jira like this a) works in a place where Jira has not been correctly configured or b) works in a place with a terrible internet connection c) works in a place where both a) & b) are true or d) doesn't have any idea what they are talking about. P.S. what exactly is "a hot circle of garbage" other than a mixed metaphor?
> works in a place with a terrible internet connection
That excuse just doesn't hold up when any comparable issue tracker (or web app in general) works fine on the same internet connection.
JIRA, just like any other Atlassian product has a slowness to it on every click and navigation that makes it feel like you are wading through molasses.
We use Jira cloud, so if it is misconfigured, blame them. My internet isn’t great, but I will anecdotally note that Atlassian sites are the only ones that ruin a videocon connection. As for your general criticism comment, glass houses.
- they’ve had a ticket to hide completed epics from the roadmap open for over a year.
- their user management is a unmitigated disaster. God help you if you use bitbucket or Trello (although Trello users are getting integrated in after 4 years!).
- it took me literally 2 months of help desk tickets to figure out how to get an invoice. The former billing poc was fired, and even though I was the site admin, I had to recreate his account in our SSO, log in as him, and then assign the role to me.
- have you tried to set up even a slightly customized Jira Service Desk?
- want to expire “done” issues faster than 14 days? Pound sand.
- I could keep going, but what’s the point? Atlassian is a bunch of decent products drowning in scope creep, terrible cross-product integration, and a painfully slow development cycle that is focused way more on cosmetic features that fixes their trainwreck of a dumpster fire.
There are myriad ways to misconfigure a cloud instance of Jira. You thought I was referring to the configuration of the actual web app I suppose. That's kind of a silly assumption but gives me a lot of insight into what you've said here...
A quote from a funny TV show still doesn't really make it a thing, does it?
If it's not, there probably is a way to do what you are trying to do that you just don't know about.
I work at a very large organization. The user lookups in Jira are lightning fast & the permissions are granular for a reason.
Can't help you with your billing problems but it kind of sounds like a "you" problem.
I have fully configured a Service Desk instance, yes.
It sounds like maybe you aren't actually using the release feature & or that maybe you don't know how to write JQL queries or maybe I don't know anything about the amazingly advanced way you are trying to use the features. "Hey doc, my arm hurts when I do this?" The doctor says "Then don't do it."
I could keep going too but it would be a waste of my time to try & have a reasonable discussion on something which you have prononuced your verdict: "Atlassian is a bunch of decent products drowning in scope creep, terrible cross-product integration, and a painfully slow development cycle that is focused way more on cosmetic features that fixes their trainwreck of a dumpster fire."
I‘m working for 2 companies atm where one uses Jira and one uses Linear.
Doing anything in Jira / confluence is really slow. It’s a nightmare to navigate and it seems like every time I click on anything, it takes 2-3 seconds to load.
It’s really hard to explain but I guarantee you that if you tried linear out, you’d “get it”.
This isn't quite true, as others have mentioned throughout the thread, JIRA Cloud is noticably slow to use, to the point where doing non-trivial stuff is frustrating - page loads take several seconds, and most operations require a page load. I'd expect their hosted version to offer the best performance, but apparently it doesn't. It's not unusable or anything but it's definitely a very sluggish feeling experience compared to a lot of the SaaS we are used to.
Which would be a fairly rubbish take, because when it's my workflow, it's MY WORKFLOW. What they might mean is "I have not set up my workflow according to Jira's needs" which is entirely Jira's problem to solve.
