> A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads

I wonder what percentage of the 45m (unique?) visitors a month had an adblocker of some sort on.

I don't have any hard numbers, but I would assume that their userbase was significantly tech-savvy compared to the general population, so the percentage of visitors using an adblocker would have been higher as well.

"Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access."

*thieves

Theft is a difficult charge to lay when it is a replication; a result of memcpy'ing something from one location to another.

It might be something else, but it isn't the same as nicking your car keys or tunic.

By this logic killing someone is simply a movement of physical matter from one place to another (knives, bullets), followed by some more movement of physical matter from one place to another (loss of blood/organs etc.)

Things hold more value than simply being a sum of its parts.

How do you figure? I think it's fairly obvious where the distinction is from stealing (the original owner no longer has their property) and copying (the original owner still has their property). The murder analogy you laid out doesn't seem to track with that at all.

Making a copy of the work (or data) without compensating the author of that work denies them the remuneration that they should ideally get for putting in the effort to build that work.

Now, you could always make the argument that creation of value only happens when a physical artifact is built, but that would also be a general argument against white collar jobs and make it okay for corporations to not pay a knowledge worker such as a software developer or a technical writer, simply because they provided a copy of their work.

If I'm not willing to pay a creator for their content, it must not have any value to me. Or atleast not what they were asking. So if I copy it, I'm not depriving them of payment for the value they provided really, since I believe the monetary value of it is near $0.

If you have a painting and are asking $1000, and I take it, you lost the $1000 you probably would have made eventually. If I take a look at it, I didn't steal $1000 from you. If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you. If I print it out at home and put it on the wall, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.

> If I take a look at it, I didn't steal $1000 from you.

> If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.

This is where the inductive logic breaks down, because you are unlikely to make a perfect substitute (in other words, copy) of the product by simply looking at it, but by photographing it, now you can, which means you have denied compensation to the author of the work by being able to produce a perfect substitute.

> If I'm not willing to pay a creator for their content, it must not have any value to me.

If it doesn't have any value to you, why are you making a copy of it in the first place? :)

A photograph is not a perfect substitute for the painting made by the artist..... It's not on the same medium, and we know it wasn't made by the artist. Or are you implying I can sell a photo of the monalisa for about as much as the original since it's the same?

That used to happen with pitated software, get event then it was usually a major price drop not the same price.

That’s a narrative about yourself that you tell yourself, and it might be true about you, but it’s not true about everybody. If pirating didn’t exist then some % of pirates WOULD buy more stuff. Unfortunately we don’t have great ways of differentiating people who can’t or won’t from those who would. But many people who would pay also love free stuff, so you can’t conclude takers of free stuff would not pay. And in aggregate this opting for free reduces creator compensation; hence the charges of theft.

And the same timeline might not have people buy stuff they cannot afford and have no demo versions of, resulting in actually a worse outcome.

Every analogy that has ever been trotted out is way off base.

It's not theft, it's not "piracy," and if we're going to liken it to murder or grand larceny we may as well go all the way with it and call it "terrorism."

No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery.

Literally: the act of producing an unauthorized copy of a document, work of art, [etc.].

That's a better word for it perhaps, if you see the act in a negative light.

Even then, doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original? It's not quite the same if I make a copy of something where 'originality' doesn't apply and it is a 1:1 duplicate. Maybe NFTs will fix this ;)

> doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original?

They do, but here's where analogies become incoherent or inapplicable. Mind that "original" doesn't have to mean "master copy;" many business models (like software) trade in authorized copies.

You don't buy ownership rights to movies-- you're buying limited exhibition rights (do they still put the FBI warning at the beginning of the DVD? I haven't seen one in years). Even when you buy the DVD, you don't really own anything other than a permission slip to show it to a half-dozen people at a time, in your own home.

Thus, making unauthorized copies of a movie amounts to forging new licensing agreements, where future licensees are not accountable to the rightsholder.

Maybe the best analogy would be an NDA-- "we'll show you this movie this one time, but you can't record/copy it and show it to others." Nobody is sympathetic to the lamentations of corporate media lawyers and their contractual disputes, thus, we get lame analogies about stealing your car to try to make their struggles relatable enough to dissuade the behavior.

"No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery."

I concede. This is the better description.

That's the problem. A human body is not replicable in the same way that data or text is. The concept of ownership breaks down in the digital world. Storage is cheap, lives aren't.

Yes, absolutely. Let's compare the act of killing another human being with that of copying bits.

For murder to be comparable to piracy, it'd have to involve materialising a dead copy of a person who then keeps on living their life, possibly without even being aware. For the most part it'd just be creepy as shit and violating, but fairly harmless past that.

Exactly, the crime is infringement, it is not theft, and it certainly is not piracy.

On the subject of the term piracy, if you are going to pick a heinous crime to represent your infringement, you might as well call it software rape, it is closer to what you are actually doing.

The term "piracy" has been in use to describe copyright infringement since at least 1736. Three centuries should be enough that we aren't "picking a crime to represent your infringement" anymore. It's just a valid word for the thing.

Intellectual property isn't property (at least, it shouldn't be)

To all those who downvoted and responded, I really don't care you feel about it. Stealing content is theft. Doing it makes you a thief. Full stop.

Feel free to continue responding with self-righteous justification though.

Many parts of the internet are filled with people who feel entitled to steal the work done by other people without compensating them for it. HN is no exception.

I've seen that argument for 20 years and I always respond with "give New York back to the native Americans".

The Native Americans sold New York in a consensual deal - not that one theft begets another, even if they hadn't.

I mean, not that I personally have a problem with New York returning to Native ownership, but it's both (1) wrong to claim that it wasn't purchased in a consensual deal and (2) completely and totally irrelevant to the problem of digital piracy and entitlement to the work of others.

This kind of logic makes me believe that pirates can't be reasoned with - that theft is a core part of their moral framework - but only when it benefits them, of course. If they perceive that their employer isn't paying them what they're due, it suddenly becomes a huge problem.

Copyright is a legal invention and the law is clear that unauthorised copying is not theft. Feelings don't come into it.

Nothing to do with feelings, but logic.

How is it theft if the original still exists? If I copy your words above verbatim and send it to a friend, is that theft? Your comment will still exist unless dang deems otherwise.

It might be costly or undesirable to the producers, but that's just a problem with digital media. Enforcement is always going to be difficult unless we invite 'rightsholders' to control our devices.

"Nothing to do with feelings, but logic."

I'm not going to lie... this made me laugh.

Your entire argument revolves around why content ought to be free to copy. What ought to be has no relevance to what is.

Find me 1 country that agrees with you. I'll show you 100+ that doesn't.

What is has no relevance to what ought to be.

> What ought to be has no relevance to what is

Then why even argue?

But that's besides the point. If a law is unenforceable, it doesn't really matter. You could create a law mandating everyone wear green socks on Tuesdays, and see how many people comply. Or (looking to what is as you wish) how many people enjoy a puff of a joint despite it being illegal in most places?

Or remember the US banning the export of cryptography algorithms? How well did that go?

The state has guns but even they have limitations if I decide to copy a few words off a page in private among my friends. Same if I send them a few bytes using HTTP/SMTP/whatever.

Conflation of enforceability and legality.

Oh, it's definitely illegal in most every jurisdiction. I was never in the dark about that :P

> Your entire argument revolves around why content ought to be free to copy. What ought to be has no relevance to what is

What it is, in the US, anyway, is copyright violation. That is not legally theft, but a different violation entirely.

Arguing that piracy isn't theft is correct. It's not arguing that piracy isn't wrong, or that it is harmless.

100+ countries can also show you that copyright infringement is not the same as theft in the eyes of the law.

We really don't care how you feel about your number ownership delusions either.

Yes, stealing is theft. But downloading a pirated copy of a file is not stealing.

That is why you are downvoted.

Intellectual property isn't.

I upvoted this comment just because it goes against the Hacker News hivemind.

I agree though. If I could steal a car without facing any consequences, I'd probably do that too.

It was specifically popular because it was free. There are other similar sites and also other services if you are willing to pay.

For me it's all about the access. I happily pay for Usenet access and indexers because it allows me to have a single interface for accessing all media. I don't have to play the guessing game of "which streaming service is this show / movie hosted on this month?". I just hop onto Sonarr or Radarr and it's on my NAS ready to stream in a few minutes. I still pay for Netflix and I get Disney for free from my cell phone plan so if it's outside of those I'll reach for Usenet.

Some repackers actually pay for dedicated seedboxes. There's Dodi for instance who by his own account pays $100 per month keeping games up.

I pay for a seedbox myself.