If we use words to refer to things they don't mean, words will lose their meaning.

Who decides the meaning? You?

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Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum - 2nd edition - London 1736

Pirate: one who lives by pillage and robbing on the sea. Also a plagiary.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=O50-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PT181&lpg=P...

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Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman - First published in 1701, the quote below is from the explanatory preface added in a 1703 edition

Had I wrote it for the gain of the press, I should have been concerned at its being printed again, and again, by pirates, as they call them

http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm

This site really isn't news for hackers, either...

> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...

I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.

I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.

This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.

So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.

See also Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).

You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.

Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of concepts.

Why is this pedantry relevant to the original point? I don't understand what you're driving towards.

What difference does it make if it is copyright infringement or 'piracy'?

We're talking about incentives for authors and how they can fund their risk/time for publishing a book.

Because the main source of ire of book authors is that they lose some part of the revenue from book sales due to copyright infringement, which many call piracy.

Now, piracy is an incorrect and am emotionally charged term to describe this phenomenon. I believe that a productive discussion on any matter requires clarity of chosen terms. Piracy is not one such term when talking about something not related to sea and ships.

Feel free to call it whatever you want. I will call it piracy because most people do.

EDIT: Interestingly, the first recorded usage of "pirate" to imply copyright infringement is from 1913, talking about "pirate broadcasts".

Pirate publishers were a thing well before that:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.28173/

Wow! I took the 1913 date from the Etymology dictionary, so I'm surprised it goes back another 100 years before that.

It goes back even more, it predates copyright.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=jFMEPUO7LS0C&lpg=PP1&hl=de&...