In theft you take something from someone else, and they are then deprived of what you took. I take your loaf of bread, you have one less loaf of bread.

If I copy your movie, you still have your movie.

Now, if I (somehow) get hold of a copy of a digital file you want to sell me, you'll be less likely to be able to get me to buy it (although, studies have shown that those that copy content a lot, also tend to pay for content a lot).

So we need another word than "theft" - and that word certainly isn't "piracy" - people that violate copyright, rarely murder people or disrupt trade routes and critical infrastructure.

I'm not saying we don't need some system of compensation if we want to continue to produce art - but just as a boycott is a very passive act of resistance, so is not paying for crippled (DRM) content. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that there's a need to prove that someone watching a copy for free would be more likely to pay for that copy than go outside and play a game of catch if the content wasn't available for copying.

If we accepted your handwaving, people charged with actually robbing someone's home and people charged with downloading half a season of Glee would face the same sentencing standards. That is obviously deranged.

So, no. The debate must continue, until consensus is reached and the matter fixed in law.

Can you expand on this? Seems like a non-sequitur.

I'd argue that merely the observation that many intelligent, morally sensitive people here on HN feel differently should be enough to realize that this is not a 'tangent' that can be 'put to bed'. Why would you even put it like that, knowing that there is such disagreement?

Suppose I bake 100 brownies and try to sell them one morning. I sell some and as I'm packing up my booth you take one and eat it. You argue, "I was never going to pay for a brownie, I didn't want it that badly, and anyway you can't sell them tomorrow because they will be stale."

There is something deeply wrong and immoral about this way of thinking. The idea that you alone get to value someone else's work output to be zero and then take that output and claim it has no value, and that the taking causes no harm.

It is theft. But you don't want to be called a thief. So you play semantic games.

Either you can't see the moral argument, which leads me to believe you really are unable to see that piracy is theft. Or you simply don't want to see it and then I fall back to think this is motivated ignorance.

If you don't care to engage with the idea then I don't care to continue.

The harm caused is that you are denying the copyright owner their legal monopoly rights on distributing copies, therefore devaluing their virtual asset.

What does matter is marginal cost of providing service. In this case it is ZERO. So no, it is not stealing. Nowhere close.

Say that I have an idea for a copyrightable work. It is going to take me one year to create it, working 8 hours a day. To make it simple, put a price of my time at $100,000 for that one year.

Now I could find someone to give me $100,000 as a fee for creating that work (assume that I have no other desire to make it for myself, so I would only do that if someone pays me). But now the problem is, to almost any potential customer, that work is only worth $10.00. So it doesn't get created.

Or, I could find 10,000 people to each give me $10.00 in advance to make it. Now this is in the realm of possibility. Kind of like the Kickstarter model. But now everyone either has to pay in advance, then wait a year to receive it. Or sign a legally binding contract that they owe $10.00 each once the product is delivered. This all adds friction to the system.

Can we invent some technique to remove this friction? How about, I'm willing to take a chance on the popularity of my work, and build it in advance. I really don't know how many people are interested -- it might be 10,000; maybe 5,000 or possibly 50,000. So with copyright, I can safely take that chance -- over time, if I create enough works, some may lose (not be popular enough), some may win big (and I make much more than the time I put into it). As long as it averages out, society in general is better off (assuming you think it is worthwhile for the works to exist to begin with -- I'm guessing this is true, otherwise you wouldn't be interested in obtaining it to begin with).

Now, does anyone have any other models (I mentioned the Kickstarter model already) that can equally reduce the above-mentioned friction? That is, allowing a creator to take a chance on making something in advance, and then on average extracting the fair fee for everyone who wants that service?

Patreon?

And I don't really care about mega-production Hollywood. It can burn today if I care.

Copying someones work for your own consumption? Nothing is wrong with such behavior. Nor with non-commercial sharing. Not until you have disposable income. Then consuming and not chipping in is meh.

Legal positivism is has it's stronger sides, but this is victimless crime.

And what about your views? :)

I don't think whether or not you have disposable income is an important discriminant. Who decides whether you have enough disposable income to justify paying for content?

I think there are a lot of issues with laws regarding intellectual property and content. Even though I disagree with them, I don't think flouting those laws is right or some sort of civil disobedience.

Same with copying someone's work for personal use or non-commercial sharing. The existing framework is the one we've got, and there are currently ways authors or content providers can make it clear that they are willing to do so: Creative Commons licenses are one example. Likewise with other patronage models, such as Patreon. In other cases, you're benefitting from their work without them receiving compensation. There's no agreed upon transaction. Whatever term is used to describe it, I don't think it's right.

Concerning 2): many people I know who pirate, say, a particular show, would simply not watch if piracy was not available. On the other hand, once this show becomes easily available and accessible on something like Netflix, these same people happily pay for the content. It seems inaccurate and dishonest to call them 'thieves' by the conventional definition.

tl;dr: I wouldn't defend piracy in most cases (you could just not watch the show), but I think calling someone doing this a 'thief' is a morally worse because of what that words means to most of us.

Are you only harmed if I remove your access to those records?

Theft: you have a painting. I took it.

Copyright infringement: You painted a painting. I took a picture of it and sold/gave away prints to all my friends.

Violation of privacy: I got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics.

Warrantless search: The police got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics, possibly finding evidence of a crime.

They are different issues which can look similar at times, but are actually completely separate. Pretending like they are is just adding muck to this discussion.

Piracy: You have a ship. I climbed aboard, murdered some of your crew, and took control of your ship or stole some of your belongings.

If you reproduce my song without my consent, that's a violation of a very specific law which allows me a temporary* restriction on your rights. The ethical question raised, I think, is of a very different nature.

*temporary: used to be ~20 years, now is until 70 years after I die.

Disclaimer: I do not condone piracy, I just believe you've made a logical fallacy.

Copyright infringement isn't theft, it's counterfeiting. It's 100X worse because instead of just stealing some physical items like a television, it's devaluing the television to the point where it can no longer be sold.

It's not that people wont pay for media content, it's that they won't allow rent seeking behavior to stifle cultural innovation and enjoyment.

I view trying to silo culture to extract maximal rent as considerably worse than taking away their artificial monopoly in response.

What if the copyrighted material was code instead of media?

Suppose company A invests $500M in writing code for a major new product. Development finishes and they begin selling the product and slowly recouping their costs. Now, company B comes along and surreptitiously hacks into company A, copying their their source code (they haven't stolen the source code, only copied it). Company B now begins selling a copycat product for far less than A wants to charge, destroying A's ability to earn back its investment. Has company B committed a crime?

Certainly company B let company A keep its source code, but by copying the source code it did not let company A keep its way of earning money.

But I think you've got a couple of holes in your simile. Source code is a much more powerful thing to have than the final product. I can't remember a time where a movie's entire set of footage and effects assets were leaked/stolen, and the equivalent of a movie being leaked is compiled binaries being leaked, and that happens all the time. I'd also judge selling an illegally copied thing to be a worse offense than giving away an illegally copied thing.

> Certainly company B let company A keep its source code, but by copying the source code it did not let company A keep its way of earning money.

And yet, companies still make software, movies, music. I'd be more worried if those businesses were made non-viable due to copyright infringement losses and more sympathetic if I thought something copyrighted today would exit copyright within my lifetime.

But there are circumstances that might mitigate how the public (and perhaps law) feels about that, eg, if company B bought a copy of the software and slightly modified it to work on a new operating sysem, then sold just the changed version.

But apparently not all people believe in charging for value, since a lot of shows, movies, etc. aren't available to stream.

What good is half a season of something, especially if it's the second half? I've not watches shows just because there's no way to catch up to where the current Hulu/Netflix/Whatever offering was. Sometimes I'd pirate it, but sometimes I wasn't really sold enough on the premise to bother.

I wonder what the marketing department would think of that. "Your attempts to sell me something failed so hard, I refused to bother stealing it."

Obviously, the traditional model was designed to subsidize creating something for everyone. But, now, it has been subverted to improve margins by creating everything for everybody / lowest common denominator. On the off chance that it fits my tastes, I still have to buy the rest of the crap just to view what I want.

I'll pay for content, but I want to be able to buy what I want. Content creators have always had a tough time monetizing the content vs the mode of delivery. You pay for the theater when you go to the movies, you pay for the bandwidth when you stream, you pay for the dvd printing when you buy a DVD. It would be nice if the licensing per item were fixed, and the mode of delivery were left up to the buyer.

Instead we chose to ignore that lesson, and now we're collectively suffering for it today.

If you are uncomfortable with that mental gymnastics, here is a slightly less harsh approach. I currently pay for Netflix, HBO Now, Spotify, and Audible. So I am willing to pay $40-50/month for access to high quality commercial-free content on unlimited basis. But back when iTunes was the only option for streaming at something like $1/episode and $5/movie, I would not dream of it. So I guess the cost I am willing to pay is not quite $0 per each piece of content, but it's definitely not $20 each. I think a market adjustment is coming for content producers because I do believe lots of people have similar price points.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160317/09274333934/why-a...

i.e. the advertisers entire business model is lowering their costs by pushing those costs onto me.

Then after I install an adblocker, they complain that I'm the one who's stealing. No, I'm trying to read an article. If Forbes refuses to let me read articles with an adblocker in place, I'll just go somewhere else.

And that's ignoring all of the arguments around artificial monopolies, and the perverting of the copyright system through the "immortal mouse".

I'll care about people stealing from an oligopoly when people care about regulating natural monopolies and oligopolies to the point they behave reasonably.

In any case, the moral argument doesn't appear to work. People just don't care.

Why would it work? You could equally successfully try to shame people into not breathing without payment.

While I agree with your post overall that ideally the end consumer shouldn't access such content illegally, the days of the end user going to jail or being fined over illicit downloads are long gone. The content companies and the governments finally woke up to the reality that going after those who profit from making the content available, rather than the end user, is the correct thing to do. As the GP said, people will naturally take the easiest path, and often downloading a TV episode from an illicit source is easier than attempting to purchase it legally (for some shows one must subscribe to as many as four streaming services to get all seasons/series).

All of that said, it really is a game of whack-a-mole the governments and content companies are playing by going after the little guys distributing the content. Just as with the war on drugs and the war on terrorism, it's a war that will never be won.

>go to jail(for watching)

So much hyperbole. The article refers to people selling preloaded piracy boxes for profit, which is different than setting up your own.

For example jay-walking is wrong because it's dangerous but many people do it anyway and it's not generally villianized. So then is the solution having police patrols in the streets fining/arresting people as a deterance? Will that reduce the problem and legitimately help both pedestrians and drivers? Or will educating people on the risks, creating alternatives such as adding more crossing points, improving cars ability to detect pedestrians, etc, etc, be a better solution?

Not everything is black or white, good or bad.

Is it then immoral to walk under the road when some people interpret that as technically jay walking even though you're not directly effecting anyone in the way that the law assumes you will?

The tunnels are private property, with a sign saying "Private Property - Do Not Enter", and nothing gives you the inherent right to use them.

You're conflating laws and morality. Wouldn't it make more sense that the people pirating movies don't see it as morally wrong, instead of people pirating movies because they are amoral?

> It's shocking to me the way so many people, especially in the generation after me, have proudly abandoned any pretense to morals or ethics. Sure GenX has its share of amoral people, but at least they had the good taste to lie about it. I mean, that's kind of admitting that morality is important

You are either saying saying society is more immoral now (which is irrelevant and off-topic), or saying the piracy is immoral, which is debatable. But then you don't provide any points to back up your argument.

Your first sentence, that piracy is illegal, is true but also besides the point of morality. Slavery was legal for a long time and I'm pretty sure we can all agree it was not moral just because it was legal. Apparently it's illegal to have an ice cream cone in your back pocket in Alabama, does that immediately make it immoral?

You keep calling it stealing, which it is not. If you want to bring legality into the debate, piracy is legally not stealing. Loaded words like that do nothing to help a discussion.

> You guys do in fact proudly believe it is right to steal someone else's work product

And where are you getting this info? I haven't pirated anything for years and am generally against it. I certainly don't believe it's anyone's right to do so. I bet many people here feel the same way.

However at the same time, realistically, I don't believe piracy is causing as much harm as anyone makes it out to be. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who pirates things or has pirated things that would have purchased it otherwise. They just don't view/listen to/use the thing.

Often the most successful software products are the ones with the highest piracy rates. Anti-piracy measures generally screw over the average consumer more than they screw over pirates.

I liken it to jay-walking. Is it illegal? Sure. Is it bad in some circumstances? Sure. Should we dedicate a giant task force to jaywalking, create city streets that have anti-jaywalking barriers, and lock up anyone who does it? That would do more harm than good.

If that's your morality then everyone after GenX surely dodged a bullet. You'd prefer someone act like a psychopath rather than admit they don't agree with your moral code.

Equating one nation's laws at one point in time to morality and ethics is just the icing on the cake. Perhaps you still think that African-American men who marry white women or use non-segregated bathrooms are immoral too?

Not moral or ethics? I don't think so. Do you mean different morals and ethics that yours, maybe?

That comment about the new generations is so old as the first generation, by the way.

If there's a specific law they're breaking, I'd be surprised.

It looks like the law stems from European Directive 2001/29/EC (2001) [2][3]. That directive isn't law in itself, it's an instruction for the EU member states to implement law to deliver that directive (in fact, the UK were initially convicted of failing to implement it by the 2002 deadline).

At a guess, the relevant law is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 24 [4]:

  Secondary infringement: providing means for making infringing copies.
  (1)Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who, without the licence of the copyright owner—
     (a) makes,
     (b) imports into the United Kingdom,
     (c) possesses in the course of a business, or
     (d) sells or lets for hire, or offers or exposes for sale or hire,
     an article specifically designed or adapted for making copies of that work, knowing or having reason to believe that it is to be used to make infringing copies. 

[2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A6...

[3] http://www.out-law.com/page-333

[4] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/24

If that's actually the case, then it's hard for me to see how selling the fully-loaded Kodi box is more illegal than selling a computer with an internet connection. After all, there's third party software for computers that give access to pirated content as well, right?

edit: Ah, I guess I misunderstood the article. Some people are selling boxes preloaded with Kodi, and other people are selling boxes preloaded with Kodi+the third party apps, I guess?

In fact, I think it's a fact that shows just how messed up the law is. That people can be overwhelmingly against harsh penalties for copyright violation, yet they still exists...

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-socially-acceptable-110228/

But I don't understand your comment really. Law shouldn't reflect the will of a powerful minority, it should reflect what the population in general finds acceptable.

If most people find copyright violation acceptable, I can't see any argument for harsh penalties in a democracy.

...in the US.

I'm sorry, where is the value FOR ME in paying for something that is constantly taken away from you, and where the inventory is always in flux? It's essentially pointless. It's like having a membership to a gym where they're always changing out the equipment, but never have enough variety to get a full workout.

I _do_ want to pay for these services, but they need to provide value.

I get value from the sun, but I don't cut a check to it every month. Economics shows that on any large scale, people aren't going to pay more for something equivalent to something they get for free.