>I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.

That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.

Would that make using it OK -- that there's no other paid alternative that's more convenient?

In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them. And I don't say every artist deserves money just because they are an artist -- but every artist that people actually listen to they work does deserve a cut for that.

Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do, which is largely unrelated.

You can talk about how artists need to be paid until the end of time, but that won't change people's behavior much.

>Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do, which is largely unrelated.

We don't ask that for many other moral dilemmas -- we consider certain things unacceptable and try to stomp them even if people "do them". Why should it be the relevant question for music distribution?

Here's a moral question put the other way round. Do you think libraries are a good thing?

We now have the technology to make available the great majority of human knowledge and culture to a vast amount of humanity for free. I'd call that a very positive state both for the people receiving it and the benefits it would bring to the world.

And the only thing stopping us is that certain people would like to be paid. It's the same argument with cheap generic drugs for the third world. At some point you have to incentivise research. But also, at some point you have to consider the benefits to the rest of society too.

Libraries pay the publisher (who in pays the author in turn) and are limited to giving out one copy at a time (even electronic copies are often limited in this way). Piracy doesn't result in any money going to the artist.

Sure it does, presumably the original person that ripped their CD paid for it. Libraries don't pay the publisher "per checkout", they merely buy the books.

> Libraries don't pay the publisher "per checkout"

That depends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

"A Public Lending Right (PLR) programme, is a programme intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries [...] Canada, the United Kingdom, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand currently have PLR programmes. [...] How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. Some pay based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, others use a simpler system of payment based simply on whether a library owns a book or not. [...] In the United Kingdom authors are paid on a per-loan basis calculated from a representative sample of libraries. The current rate is 7.82 pence per individual loan."

(I imagine that any occurrences of "authors are paid" should be replaced by "publishers are paid", but I don't know specifics.)

Libraries pay authors in most countries (such as the Public Lending Right payment in the UK).

Libraries only lend out the copies that they have purchased or access that they have subscribed to as previously mentioned. Libraries are a public good since they serve as a home for the local community and a benevolent institution for those who are very disadvantaged and might not even have access to the internet.

Book publishers have definitely tried to fight libraries before though, in the past couple hundred year history of libraries. Buying a book and then loaning it to _hundreds_ of people who would otherwise have bought it themselves was viewed as stealing from publisher/author profits. I think in some/many countries libraries still actually pay licensing fees to publishers? (similar to what/how radio stations do in the U.S.). The "first sale doctrine" that's part of copyright law in the U.S. says once you buy a book you have the right to loan that book out, give it away, resell it used, or even lease it out if you want -- but the first sale doctrine is particular to the US.

Music piracy groups mostly upload copies they have purchased or otherwise legally gained access to. Their torrents are a public good since they serve as a benevolent institution for those that are very disadvantaged and might not have the money to buy the content otherwise, allowing them to participate in modern culture.

For almost any kind of digital "piracy" you can make arguments that sound very similar to yours, because in the end libraries and piracy do something very similar: both buy content once and redistribute it for free. The only reason we treat libraries different is because of history and because libraries have a bunch of physical restrictions that seem silly in the digital world.

We do exactly that for every moral dilemma when the question is what companies need to do to survive.

There's nothing wrong when discussing the morality of piracy, but it's irrelevant when the topic at hand is what media distributors should do in order to make money.

Imagine a convenience store which experiences so much theft that it loses money, and they're trying to figure out what to change to save the store. Is it useful in that context to state that "theft is immoral"?

Copyright is not about morality. Nobody has a fundamental human right to prevent others from copying their work. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that we maintain as a means to encourage creative activities.

Copyright is basically a subsidy to content creators. Just like any other government subsidy, it should be adjusted periodically to balance its benefits against any drawbacks.

There is no question of morality here, only a question of effectiveness -- is a subsidy really needed, and if so, how much?

> Copyright is not about morality

That seems like a weirdly narrow definition of morality, maybe due to the long association with the Christianity and the faith's retreat from the public sphere.

I prefer the definition of morality as the set of shared rules and norms that we as a society decide are to our mutual benefit. In that case, laws and morality are absolutely closely intertwined.

If indeed there was broad consensus that copyright law as it exists in the United States right now is to everyone's benefit, there might be a moral obligation to follow that law.

But all I see is a bunch of interest groups trying to pretend that there is a consensus and painting anyone who disagrees as a modern day Jack Sparrow. It's easy to manufacture a consensus if all the opponents are criminals, isn't it?

I don't deny that there might be some kind of broad consensus on the issue of copyright. I just don't think that the content of it will be anywhere near what the law of the United States currently says.

I agree, yet to say that 'copyright law is is currently not moral' is a very different claim than 'copyright law and morality are unrelated'. Most of our discussions of whether something should be law or not imply morality at some level (e.g. 'copyright law is wrong because...', 'this law is evil', etc.)

I didn't say "copyright law and morality are unrelated." Everything is related to morality at some level, so I don't think it adds anything interesting to say that copyright is either related or unrelated to morality in that roundabout way.

I said "Copyright is not about morality." Copyright is about promoting creativity first and foremost. It has zero moral value apart from whatever starlight it might reflect from the more fundamental value of creativity when it's in the right point along its orbit (when it works effectively).

Suppose you're building a startup to help poor people. That's obviously about morality. But how about your choice of javascript framework? You just use whatever floats your MVP without torturing your devs too much. And as soon as it outlives its usefulness, you can throw it away without a second thought and there's nothing morality has to say about it.

I think where I depart from your analogy is that copyright law has been explicitly framed and discussed using the language of morality by both proponents and opponents.

E.g. copyright maximalists say that pirates are thieves, that they unjustly take from content creators what is rightfully theirs.

Copyright opponents will say that this is a cash grab by greedy corporations, that this will destroy the freedom of the web, etc.

Theft, destroying freedom -- these are explicitly moral claims.

You might be right that morality is not the appropriate framework with which to think about copyright, and I tend to agree, although that certainly hasn't stopped both sides from harnessing moral outrage to buttress their viewpoints.

There are different ways to relate something to morality.

The maximalists claim that copyright violation is identical to theft, whereas their opponents claim that copyright law is being used to make huge profits and destroy freedom. The former puts copyright at the center of the moral spotlight, but the latter pushes it aside and helps us see that justice and freedom are the true moral issues.

Don't we have an obligation to follow the laws of the land we live in? I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

In the same way that we have some folk intuitions about the validity of ownership of property, we have them about intellectual property. Namely, we (the citizen of the western world) have an intuition that creators of intellectual works should have some say in how their work is exploited.

When it comes to the abstraction required to create a system of property, the one that strikes me a the most bonkers is the concept that people can "own" a geographic section of the earth.

We don't really have those folk intuitions. That is just our cultural baggage. No form of property is universal. No form of intellectual property existed until the 17th century, and it took until the 20th century before it IP worked the way we think about it today and became commonplace in the majority of the world. Guam in the 16th century didn't have a concept of personal property, leading to Magellan to dub it the Island of Thieves. Ownership of land was also a non-existent concept in many societies, famously many Native American ones.

Laws and ideas about ownership and property don't exist as some Platonic Ideal, but they change and morph to fit the societies they exist in. IMHO, IP law today, especially but not exclusively in the United States, does not serve content creators but publishers, and it is my belief that it is time to adjust the laws to fit the society we want to live in.

With the obligation to follow the law comes the right to demand changes in the law.

> I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

TL;DR: physical property="who gets to have this", 'intellectual property laws'="who gets to make money from this".

Physical property isn't natural, but it's an answer to physical scarcity, which is natural.

You and your friend can build identical houses, they can't be both exactly at the same location. Physical property creates a non-volatile answer to the question "Who gets to build his house there?".

All working societies must address this problem (even societies in which money doesn't exist), hence "property" (which I don't claim is the only answer).

Texts, recordings, etc. are a completely different issue.

Original works might be rare, however, there's no scarcity in using them : you and your friend can both listen to your copy of a recording without interfering. So there's need to answer "who gets to listen to this recording?", as there's no scarcity, and thus, no conflict.

The conflict lies between distributors, because the only scarcity that remains, when works can be copied for free, is in the exploitation. For distributors, money is scarce, so question becomes: "who gets to make money from this recording?".

This is a very different question, which already presupposes the existence of money, and exploitation.

My point is that both of these problems, who gets to occupy a spot of land, who gets to exploit an intellectual creation, are solved through the abstraction of laws.

Arguments that the concept of intellectual property serves no purpose are refuted by the increasing role it plays I our economy.

well, in a very narrow sense, if you are a creator you are in the unique position at first to copy the the piece - or not. That's not just a fictive right. And indeed, industrial entities often enough choose to refrain from public publishing. And artists may choose to remain underground and cryptic lest they be copied and their ideas diluted.

That statement is exceedingly difficult to square with a vaast body of law which preciscely and specifically claims that copyright is about moral rights.

See: Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany,[4] before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928.[5]:37 Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur).[6] The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989,[7] and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

The article you linked to says:

> Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.

I have a moral right to insist that I wrote something, and argue against people who say otherwise, even if I assigned the copyright away, renounced it, or let it expire. It's more about honor than property. A Picasso is a Picasso no matter who owns the painting now. It's an insult to Beethoven to say that he didn't compose his 9th even though all his copyright has long expired. The same would be true even if all copyright law was repealed tomorrow.

The claim was "Copyright is not about morality". The fact is that there is an extensive scope of copyright law, dating to the 18th century, which is specifically couched in language of morality.

Reegardless of how you feel about that scope of law (and I'm not declaring views one way or the other), the point remains that your initial assertion does not square with the stated foundations of law, in at least part. Regardless of how separable or inseparable those moral rights are from any other.

If the HN hivemind wants to declare its support for the counterfactual, so be it.

Most laws in the past were couched in the language of morality, or even better, divine commandment.

But just because people think all law is about morality doesn't make it so. It's the job of a philosopher to question people's assumptions and identify errors in them. This looks like a classic case of hasty generalization. Some laws are about morality. Other laws might not be.

I think copyright belongs in the non-moral category. You have not offered any reason to disagree with my statement other than a vague "But people in the 18th century believed otherwise!" Well, I'm not disputing your historical facts. The fact is that people in the 18th century believed a lot of things. Some were true, some were not.

My point is not that the law is moral. It's that, as you've just stated, it was coached in the language of morality.

Again, this is at odds with your initial statement. And again, for some quite large and significant aspects of copyright.

You're right, many laws were (and still are) couched in the language of morality. I'm not disputing the historical facts! But why should I care how they are couched? People can couch anything in any damn language they want, and the couchings are often misleading.

I think it was you who derailed this particular subthread by confusing the concepts of "moral rights" (being named as the author of something you have written) and "morality" (not being stolen from, or randomly killed).

This confusion was no doubt intended by those who coined the term "moral rights". But they are not the same thing. Copyright law is not needed to enforce moral rights, as you can very well see from the fact that we do acknowledge the creators of works that predate copyright by hundreds or thousands of years. We can freely copy Homer's works. And we do. Be we don't remove his name from them.

In practice we're talking about large, wealthy multinational corporations. I'm not convinced a moral argument is appropriate when one side of the transaction has no morals, in the traditional sense.

It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

Of course, this assumes consumers and content distributors can join the dots - and so far there isn't much evidence they can.

Artists are labor for labels, if labels figured out how to get paid better, the vast majority of their artists would not be paid much better. The point of the label in a for profit system is to capture value by intermediating between producers and consumers. Musicians by themselves are often very poor at capturing economic value.

Since the producers are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders under most corporate structures by supreme court decisions, their focus will be to reduce labor costs while maximizing total revenue from consumers.

There are no winners here except the distributors. Some kind of artist cooperative is a necessity. Then at least the smaller creators will get paid fairly.

It's also worth noting that part of the reason the UK has/had such a vibrant music scene is the dole. That is, they pay their artists to let them do their thing.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/money-are-y...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/role-of-th...

Creators haven't stopped creating at all. The reason that people look back on earlier decades as agolden age is that then there was comparatively so little music produced that various demographics could broadly agree on a canon of "great bands/albums". These days, there is so much music being produced that groups of people -- even if they share a similar background -- might have no overlap in what they are listening to.

On the contrary, this is a great time for music of all kinds.

Right now, I'm following maybe 10 or so artists on social media, youtube, bandcamp, etc.

I pay a handful of them $1-$10 a month via patreon in return for them releasing their music for free via youtube (I generally also get clean, high quality versions out of this).

There's another handful I follow who release albums on Bandcamp and I can listen, and if I like it I can pay $5-$10 to download and keep forever.

I don't use Spotify or similar services, but my friends who do tell me about a huge world of similar small artists and variety of tastes they discovered through that service.

The music industry no longer takes a few select artists and makes them superstars everyone has heard of, yes. But in return there's something for everyone, and lots of artists making ends meet rather than a few artists getting rich. I think this is a net positive.

> It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

This is ok, perhaps even desirable. Ultimately, the market for music is already so oversaturated that more artists aren't really "needed" (that is to say, there is much more than enough music to service demand, not that more good art isn't valuable), and most non-elite artists would welcome reduced competition.

> There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

Well either way that is a totally subjective argument that cannot ever be concluded definitively, there is so much more music produced today than in the 60s-90s that it'd be impossible to even make a fair subjective judgement regarding which decades produced "better" music. Certainly, I think everyone can agree that stronger economic incentives do not necessarily mean better work is produced and there are those who suggest that the opposite is true.

Stronger economic incentives may actually result in more bands/ artists being manufactured by labels, which generally produced worse music.

Costs of prediction are pretty low now, everything except the cheapest indy albums sounds great.

> There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

That may be true for music, but simultaneously, we have another "golden age" of western TV series (both live-action and animated). What's the difference? From what I can see, TV series are just as heavily pirated as music is.

>What's the difference? From what I can see, TV series are just as heavily pirated as music is.

The difference is those series have still enough paid subscribers to make the production costs and handsome profits worth it.

But producing music these days is extremely cheap, it's not like decades ago where it required time in a million dollar studio to produce something that sounded decent. Meanwhile TV the opposite is true, budgets have soared with the increasing use of spectacular sets, CGI and special effects.

I agree that we as a society should make sure that artists can make a living. But I am honestly not sure an open-access approach to music would be any worse financially. Historically, the recording industry was one of the most exploitative. You can find a hundred stories of bands that sell a lot of records only to see barely-getting-by money in return. You can find a thousand stories of modest-selling bands getting totally screwed.

Things are now in a great turmoil, so we're still seeing where this goes. But I think it's no accident that Patreon was started by an independent musician. They expect to pay out $150m this year to artists. What do patrons get in exchange? Basically nothing. They just like supporting people doing good work.

I agree the morality of pure piracy is not so great. But the notion of piracy itself is rooted in a specific and entirely artificial theory of ownership, plus an industrial model built around that. The morality of that industrial model is in practice not so great either.

Things like Patreon and Wikipedia suggest that the morality of the commons is one that could work well in practice. It has its issues, but I don't think they're a priori greater than the historical alternative. Especially if it's supplemented with the sorts of things that Kevin Kelly describes as "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

Maybe the Payment Request API will help? https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

I'd start with why this is illegal in the first place.

In the US this comes from the copyright clause of the constitution.

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The problem this was trying to solve was how do you incentivize people to create in order to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts' for the public's benefit. Limited time monopolies are the means to get to the overall goal of promoting the progress of science and useful art for the public's benefit.

Originally this limited time was 14 years with the ability to renew (once for 28 years max) - it also wasn't automatic and had to be registered. Today it's automatic and 75 years after the death of the creator (or 95 years for contract work) and even worse this change was retroactive. The retroactive change isn't within the original spirit of the law since people don't need to be incentivized to create something they've already created. You also can't opt out of it for works you've created, the best you can do is permissively license something (just stating 'this is public domain' doesn't do anything).

Not only does this lead to problems with orphan works, but massive amounts of culturally relevant material is now off limits for new people to create with - this inhibits new work except under the narrowly defined free use exceptions. Inhibiting progress of science and useful arts is the opposite of the original intent.

Copyright law today has mutated into protecting the profit of the rights holders and extending the length indefinitely, but only by a handful of years at a time so the supreme court can't rule it unconstitutional since it's technically a 'limited time'.

All of this was never intended to stop not for profit sharing of content and the law does a lot more bad than good - we want the minimum limited time restriction to encourage creation for the public benefit, not years after the death of the creator so the family and subsidiary companies can profit forever.

In the case of the journals it's even worse since they're exploiting the researcher's need for prestige and blocking access to publicly funded research. It's a corrupting influence on science and incentivizes scientists not to cooperate. These journals hold science back and offer no real benefit - maybe scihub will actually force them to provide value, but even if it kills them everyone will be better off.

You can look at this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Tom_Bell... to see what's going on with copyright. To me, this looks like clear abuse of the law - it can't be that you needed 25 years to promote progress of science in 19th century but you need 100 years now. It's clear rent-seeking, no wonder people fail to believe the moralistic preaching of the same people who buy the laws that are convenient to them.

I think part of the difficulty is that the copyright clause argument is more nuanced to fully explain. It's easier for rights holders to loudly argue that people are stealing content and ignore the original intent of the law.

This is further complicated by rights holders having enormous amounts of money they can use to influence legislation.

It typically all comes back to the campaign finance reform Lawrence Lessing talks about in Republic Lost. I think Copyright was one of the original issues that lead to his core argument of a corrupting influence on modern US politics. Specifically the issue with the journals was what drove Aaron Swartz to try and export them all (probably to make something like scihub, but he never got there).

The copyright law is absurd in the context of scientific publication. Here's why. The private property associated with the publication is created at the moment of publication, and is the association with the author's name. It is this association with publication which undergirds lifetime tenure, or reputation leading to employment, a cash flow which when discounted can be worth many millions of dollars. The investigator author knows this and the publisher knows this. The author gets permanent monopoly rights due to the association. It's remarkable. Unless the publication is proven wrong, the name association can last centuries. That's why I say many millions of dollars in the case of a significant publication, especially, pre-tenure.

Now the publisher knows this too, and tries to assert monopoly rights, using the skirts of copyright law, over a certain time frame, in the vending of images of the publication. It's ridiculous how little value he's added. And when you examine who paid for the research or work in question, it's a racket. Third world baksheesh is certainly less injurious to progress.

It also seems interesting to imagine a system or volunteer driven piracy that ends up giving artists a bigger cut than the Spotify model, which mostly gives them a pittance.

There's a huge crisis of compensation for "content creators", and Spotify does not seem like the hundred year solution. Especially seeing how it keeps maintaining an artificial distinction between producers and consumers and acts as a filter for what counts as music.

The Spotify model is arguably more successful _because_ they pay artists so little. I don't buy music much anymore. Pandora and Spotify satisfy most of my desire for it.

>The Spotify model is arguably more successful _because_ they pay artists so little.

That's a non sequitur.

I guess the meaning is that Spotify can offer low subscription price because it pays little to the authors. Seems quite logical to me.

That's not applicable to papers though, because the authors are either not paid by the journals or pay the publisher.

The questions Wiley are dancing around are "what does the publisher actually do" and "is anyone, author or reader, prepared to pay for that".

Have you heard of Pinkapp? This may seem unrelated, but it's a prostitution app. The founder seems to have a sense of design and an extremely healthy sense of keeping himself safe via Tor. I grilled him a bit on his opsec and it was clear he's competent. If he's even a he.

I think if people can develop Tinder + Buy It Now with no repercussions, questions like "is it okay?" cease being useful. The question of morality goes out the window.

> I think if people can develop Tinder + Buy It Now with no repercussions

That's a big if; repercussions for prostitution listing services, even with basically zero opsec, tend not to be immediate, and pinkapp hasn't gotten big yet.

From pinkapp.io:

> On top of this, we will allow shareholders to opt into hidden ownership to allow them to remain fully anonymous. In such cases, we can distribute profits via Monero or other methods.

Is this legal?

It's not, but the founder of Pinkapp believes they can operate outside of the legal system.

I hope their opsec is on point.

Moral/ethical issues of piracy aside, your final point of musicians earning a living just isn't a good analogy for academic publishing. None of the traditional or open access fees goes to the authors, so sci-hub or not, it makes no financial difference to the author. Mostly salaries come from the university and research grants, which in fact include money to pay for open access fees that the publishers are charging.

Popcorn time comes to mind. It's a quality service based on piracy. But personally I'd rather be legit and pay a bit more in effort or money.

yes, piracy is good.

if you think artists should be paid give them money directly, or go to shows and buy merch.

nearly all intellectual property barriers make no sense in a post-internet world. we effectively live in a world without intellectual property barriers (because piracy is easy and prolific) but for some reason people refuse to acknowledge the free and open flow of art and information as a good thing.

That's because there's no such thing as the free and open flow of art if there's little or no art - or at least high quality art - being made, because creators aren't being rewarded.

It's odd how rarely there's no apparent understanding that the flow needs to go both ways - and if it doesn't go both ways, there is no flow.

I have an unusual perspective on this because 90% of the music I listen to is remixes and 90% of the literature I read is fanfiction.

Which are works of art where a good fraction of the work is done by unpaid amateurs who are at risk of being sued by the "original artists" (or rather their labels/publishers).

The point is, from that perspective, copyright is an existential threat to a very large fraction of the art I consume.

If artists don't get paid directly by sales to consumers absolutely nothing bad will happen. Society will have an abundance of artistic output and artists will find ways to monetise their art anyway. Don't pretend otherwise.

Sure, some middle layers become obsolete, but the point of art wasn't to provide food for its one time symbiotic parasites.

>if you think artists should be paid give them money directly, or go to shows and buy merch.

Would you say that for your work too?

Or it's because conveniently it's not that easily copyable?

Can you please go down load my PyPi package? I need to negotiate a raise.

> In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them.

"...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.6

You ask would that make it OK? That would depend on your opinions on Intellectual Property (IP).

I personally think it's fine and expect you think differently.

I'd rather not hash out an entire thing on hacker news about why IP is a well intentioned but bad idea.

Instead I prefer to argue that piracy isn't going anywhere.

Regardless of your opinions on IP, piracy is here to stay. The real questions we need to ask, imo, is how do we progress those IP based industries that have yet to find solutions to piracy.

Music has found value add services, emphasis on live music and merch, as well as a revival in vinyl interest.

Games have found early access, emphasis on online gaming, and crowdfunding.

Video and artistic content creation has found crowd funding, ad revenue, and physical sales of brand products and exclusive value adds (meet a creator).

Software has found expert training, charging for use of apis or backend driven services, charging for additional functionality, often software as complex enough that charging outright for the software and support of it is very common place. Also software highlights that even if one spends countless hours of their lives doing something for free (open source) they can easily take advantage of demand in their technical and creative skills to make a very generous wage in the market.

In conclusion there are a lot of arguments for why we should be IP bound. A lot of these are really good arguments - even the if I voraciously disagree with them. But in the end I don't think IP will win. It's better that we encourage working with solution in a framework with limited or lacking IP.

Sry 4 bad spelling. I'm the lame guy who writes walls of text on hacker news with his phone.

We can imagine but it does not exist. These large companies still have the time and opportunity to provide a better product. If these corporations have so tilted the playing field that supporting organizations that pirate is the only way to encourage them to change, so be it.

> we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.

I can't.

The whole premise here is that volunteers can't reach every peak, that some endeavors require resources and those endeavors are how companies can be "better than free". Spotify has infrastructure, input streams, curation, and technical advances that I can't see any volunteer organization matching more than in slim part.

> That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy.

That was what.cd. You could get things not found anywhere, the artists / album map was awesome to discover new artists and the forums were the best.

To be fair, spotify was able to thrive because the pirate-solution alternative got shut down (grooveshark).

Grooveshark is exactly the point though. The reason they were better than Spotify was because they had EVERYTHING at a time when other services had much smaller catalogues. Now the movie industry is headed down the same path. No Disney, having your own service isn't going to increase demand, it's going to drive people back to piracy.

I'm at this point already. The price for most video streaming services would be okay if it gave me access to all the content. But I'm never going to pay for Netflix and Amazon and Disney and YouTube Red and the list goes on when I just want to watch one show on each service.

YouTube red isn't even available in my country for some reason. According to advertisements I'd get it with my Google music subscription. Nope. Not available for some reason so enjoy the ads of course no access to their specific content. Back to Spotify and ublock I went.

I don't think most people were using grooveshark BECAUSE it was a pirate-solution. They had paid plans as well that allowed you to do more than the free ones. I don't think most people knew there was any real difference between grooveshark and spotify.

And Napster before that et al.

However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.

Maybe I just downloaded different stuff, but I think I can count on one hand the number of 'dodgy' MP3 files I ever got from napster/limewire. Even to this day I have friends who say "oh, i never torrent anything today - I got sick of all the viruses I got from limewire whenever I tried to get mp3 files". What on earth were people doing (or searching for) to get viruses from mp3 files?

I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?

> I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?

I remember Madonna's "What the fuck do you think you're doing" mp3's. But it really didn't make me change my habits, or even really annoy me.

Actually, I still haven't changed my habits, as Spotify and Deezer don't have everything I want to listen to, and unlike Grooveshark, they don't allow me to add my own music.

yeah - I use spotify, but it doesn't have everything I always want - maybe... ~80%. live stuff, bootlegs, etc from various folks, they don't have. Not really their fault specifically, but it doesn't cover all my needs/wants.

They were being idiots and not paying attention to file types. GoodMusic.mp3.exe

Besides the convienience of streaming, I stick with spotify for their discovery features, and radios that are very targeted and generally produce good results. Their Discovery Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlist offer far more value than any other music service has.

Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.

I've never used Spotify, but even I mostly stopped pirating too... other legal means are just too easy and cheap, and increasingly likely to actually support the artist.

true. happily paying netflix and spotify. if there were a better one to pay for a larger catalogue internationally, I'd be on that. if all you've left is handcuffing customers, your business is already dead.

Except Spotify doesn't pay artists. I'd be glad to pay them if they paid artists.

Of course they don't pay artists. That's not the people Spotify has contracts with. Spotify pays labels, and Spotify pays them a lot. That nothing emerges on the other side is not Spotify's fault.

Right but the label is the equivalent the publisher in this case aka the institution that adds no value.

They pay more than radio per listen.

The are serving songs on demand where radio is not, so what they pay shouldn't be compared with radio.

So instead of the record firm chosen top 50 and the nostalgia 200 it gives the long tail radio play payments too.

It isn't clear what this means. Are you saying that radio isn't as valuable because we can't be sure that anyone is listening? That isn't the way that radio sells its advertising: "We charge less for ads because much of the time nobody is listening!" Beside the study that GP presumably references [0] specifically controlled for audience size.

[0] http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1155395/business-...

Radio isn't as valuable because you don't get to choose what you're listening to. Your favorite artist may never be on the radio.

No, I'm saying Spotify is more like owing the records -- you can play whatever you want, replay it as many times as you like, etc, than radio, which offers a lesser service.

So artists should get more from Spotify than they do for radio plays anyway.