Who's laughing?

Please explain how enforcing their right to be paid for what they sell is destroying the internet

If I pirate some content, how is that different to them compared to me just not buying it? Should they be allowed to disconnect my internet because I don’t buy their content?

The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.

Because you are getting something produced by someone for free if you pirate it and you are relying on others to fund your consumption. Take that to the logical extreme: everybody pirates everything. That is _very_ different to everyone not buying it. There is demand for the product and it has a cost to produce. If you steal something from somebody, there is recourse in law.

I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.

Taking this to the logical extreme is fallacious. The piracy wars up to this point have already shown that people buy content if it’s reasonably priced, and that piracy in many cases actually increases sales of the original content. The fact that piracy is back in the limelight has everything to do with the failing business models of greedy companies, and is the market reacting accordingly.

The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime.

And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.

If I don't think a product in the shop is reasonably priced, I don't have the right just to take it. The shop can decide to reduce the price in response to the market - they may make less profit than before and make up for it in volume. However, that is entirely their perogative.

There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer. A digital good has the cost of production front loaded, it just has next to zero marginal cost. That may be the cost of education and experience, for example. If you make something of value, you absolutely have the right to choose how you are rewarded - if the buyer decides that choice isn't right for them, you can either change the offer or you look for your next customer. You may choose to give it away, if your reward is the satisfaction of someone using it, but that is your choice, not the consumer's.

>There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer

There's absolutely a difference. If you produce a physical good, and somebody takes it, you no longer have it. If you produce a digital good and somebody copies it, you still have the original, you're still free to use and enjoy it as you see fit.

Fundamentally property rights are a negative right: you have the right not to have your stuff taken. Negative rights don't conflict with eachother, that's why they make a good basis for society. Intellectual property is a positive right: you have the right to control how other people use their property, which conflicts with people's right to use their property as they see fit.

Intellectual property is a response exactly to the difference in the marginal cost because it recognises the threat to the value creating producer. Just because you don't tangibly see the cost of the IP, that doesn't mean it was free to produce.

You can absolutely argue that IP law is cynically applied, but in principle it protects high capital and low operating expense businesses from those who would like to do the low operating expense part without bothering about the high capital part.

> If I don't think a product in the shop is reasonably priced, I don't have the right just to take it

We need to collectively stop using these kinds of physical goods analogies in discussions about piracy. To claim that there is no difference is a fundamental miscalculation.

To be clear, I do not condone piracy. I purchase the content that I view. But these kinds of fallacious analogies are misleading and dangerous to Internet freedom.

In what way is it fallacious? Or dangerous? (That's a genuine question).

Fundamentally, it's the same problem - producers have to adjust their prices to reflect the threat to their income. If I produce something, and I forecast X% of my overall market to be stolen, I have to adjust my selling price according. It doesn't matter if that something is physical or digital.

If I produce something that is digital I have the luxury of being able to reduce the cost as low as I like to capture as much value as I can, but that is still my choice as the producer.

These arguments have been rehashed for decades at this point, and I think it’s best that I just link to an overview [0].

The bottom line is it there is a lot of nuance here, and simple analogies that make one act appear to be the same as the other lead to some reductionist conclusions that have been repeatedly taken up by lawmakers who do not understand these nuances.

-[0] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-downloading-ethics-digital-pir...

Thank you for the link, appreciate the read and the nuance is important and I don't at all believe in the fundamentalist view on either side. I'm in complete agreement that threatening someone with massive legal ramifications is not good, but I do believe that people who make things of value should be able to do so with proportionate recourse to law to protect their livelihood. Law is, of course, made (or at least moulded) by those with money/influence so weighing the proportionality is the issue.

Yeah, I agree. I don’t think people should be free to pirate with impunity, but I get very very uneasy when people trot out life ruining penalties (not saying you’re doing this).

I’ve been transitioning away from a career in tech into creating educational content for a niche I love, and I’m sensitive to the need for recourse. At the same time, I think I’m far less likely as an individual creator to have much recourse because I don’t have a team of lawyers.

This is the other aspect of these piracy discussions that always bothers me. It’s really the behemoths vs. individuals, which to me points at very misaligned thinking when it comes to the resulting policy/laws.

If you sell a table, I am absolutely free to pirate that table by going home and making a copy of it. Totally legal. Creator gets no money for their work.

Digital goods have far more legal protection against this than physical ones.

They are not the same.

People who are convicted of drunk driving are often permitted to drive again (especially if they need to to go to work) but are required to put a breathalyzer interlock on their ignition so they can't drive drunk.

Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.

> Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.

So we need a pirate registry? And if you're convicted of 'internet piracy' (a term that is an excellent example of propaganda) then you forfeit any rights you have protecting your privacy and shielding you from warrantless government searches. Doesn't sound like an appropriate punishment for the offense to me.

People who drive drunk and regain their privileges, do so with restrictions that are meant to protect the people around them. The breathalyzer interlock is made to ensure that this person cannot endanger other people.

I think it’s extremely problematic to compare piracy to drunk driving, and to model a punishment for piracy on the punishment for drunk driving for the reasons stated above.

Obviously you have to believe that the behavior causes harm to justify a restriction, but if you don't accept this premise then you cannot have an opinion on what would be an appropriate response because you believe there should be no response.

I'm not trying to take a position on this either way, but within the context of 'internet piracy causes some sort of damage' I don't think the comparison is particularly problematic.

Restrictions are not the only form of punishment. Many infractions result in a simple fine. Others in mandatory education, etc.

My point was that comparing this to a crime that kills people by the tens of thousands every year seems very stretched.

anybody can simply change the ports on which they choose to download a torrent.

Anyone can disable, bypass, or remove the breathalyzer in their car.

agreed, other than your "Punishments are supposed to fit the crime statement." that's one ideal out of many. I would say that companies that create things that are beneficial for people to learn how to use, but that are prohibitivly expensive for students, and younger people to afford to learn how to use like how Adobe products used to be, should always put systems in place to allow people to obtain free access to their products where that kind of thing is obviously applicable. Things that are meant for consumption (movies, tv shows, music) only should be paid a fair market price for in one way or another by the people that consume it. I say this as a both a member of the music industry and the software development industry.

Do remember that Adobe, say, does not give away their product to students out of the goodness of their heart: they want you to use their product when they start working and ask your employers to shell out the full amount.

[delayed]

Brutal, but true :/

The word piracy was obviously chosen to create exactly this sort of confusion, but piracy on the internet is fundamentally different than stealing which is not buying someone's stuff and also depriving them of the ability to sell it to someone else.

You are, instead, "stealing" the means for the producer to make more if they can't afford to do it any more because you've normalised using people's work without compensation. It doesn't really matter if the marginal cost of reproduction is near zero, it is the producer's choice what to price their product at, not yours. You're pushing the cost on to others to subsidise your consumption.

But now we're getting into a much more nuanced argument about the shape of society. If I, as a lone actor, hook my tape deck into the output of my radio and "steal" the newest Britney Spears track have I normalized the act of piracy?

If everyone is doing it then it does seem pretty normalized, but if everyone is doing it then your presumption as to society's values seems flawed.

In reality these media producers seem to be making healthy profits so perhaps internet piracy is not as normalized as you think.

I think the word piracy is worse honestly, because what it really means is to swashbuckle on the open seas. And i don't think stealing physical goods or digital goods is quite comparable to that.

"Sell"? They don't sell anything anymore. You get a licence, revocable at any time. And you keep paying and paying and paying.

>You get a licence, revocable at any time.

And without refund.

They don't have a right to be paid.

You don't have a right to the fruits of other people's labor.

When the fruits of your labor are something that can be endlessly reproduced for nearly zero cost, I don’t think you have a very strong right to be paid.

There is no scarcity in digital media. Supply and demand will inevitably drive down the price to near zero.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. --Thomas Jefferson

That is about patents, not about copyright. Patents protect ideas/inventions, and are controversial. Copyright protects works, and aside from what should happen with it if the author dies, is not really controversial.

No. Hacker News and its community ruined the internet. That is the hard truth, but it is the truth. We are responsible for the enshittification and decline of the internet. How many of you work for Meta again? Hmm.

Not challenging you, just had an eye brow nearly leave my face... I've been coming to HN for years now and genuinely interested in where your angle comes from? I'm missing something and would like to know... thanks

My guess is that Meta employees are a small minority of HN readership, so I think you’ll need to explain how you think the HN community is responsible. Unless you just mean the tech community at large. But that’s tautological, as the enshittifiers of tech are categorically a subset of the broad tech community.

Lol - kitanata's is funniest comment I read today! But spot on if you think about it.

That subset of HN users that work for FAANG, advertising company or similar, are like the sharp edge blade wielded by the business folks.

So yeah, in a way parent is right. Not that I'd ever hold it against those HN users. You're (at most) the tool used, not the one wielding it.

The framing is guaranteed to draw downvotes because many here are doing all they can to resist enshitification, even within FAANG, but unfortunately large corporations will always bend towards profits and the average consumer will always bend towards cheap and convenient. At the end of the day it’s extremely difficult to see what any individual (even the business folks) can really do to effect broad change. Some systemic change would be necessary, but it’s hard to see what changes would lead us in the right direction, especially given the inherent corruptability of incentives in any human-instituted system.

The whole thrust of tech for 20 years now has been to commodify every part of human relationships, knowledge, and experience that can be commodified, sell the commodified versions in place of the real thing, and sweep the unmeasurable/uncommodifiable values under the rug without talking about it too much.

Years from now? I've been mad at this for at least a decade.

Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry.

Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on.

These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams.

Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.

I recall trying to find an HDMI cable that would allow me to stream 4k from my legit Netflix account to my legit Roku to my legit TV... Ffffff--

As much as I agree that copyright in its current form is a joke, I don't believe it's responsible for destroying the internet. The internet is a wasteland because too many people are on it. It started out as a thing for academics, then became available to non-academics with enough skills to use it (and whom appreciate it), then young people got access to it in school, then smartphones put it in everyone's pocket, and finally we have virtually everyone in every part of the bell curve on it whether they comprehend it or not. The greater the audience, the more the internet is dragged towards the mean. Of course it will no longer serve the same purpose it once did. The original types who were on it early make up less than 1% of the current internet population.

Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.

I often wonder if we could start a new sub-internet. Like a wide area mesh VPN. Perhaps something like tor but not so focused on anonymity so it doesn't immediately degrade into the cesspool that tor has become.

What you're describing is a lot like Yggdrasil, which I love and use for networking my devices:

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Though I haven't really bothered joining a larger network yet.

I feel like new TLDs could fix a lot of issues but they've basically been made worthless by spammers and people charging too damn much

Another instance of this is Urbit. I wish it didn't use ETH for namespace but it is a pragmatic solution and funds development, the rest of the architecture is free of blockchains. I especially like the model of moving your "ship" from one "pier" to another if you don't like the moderation, tho the network hasn't really gotten big enough to actually experience a netsplit like mastodon - it's a couple thousand users if that. The fact that a 32bit name costs money adds a bit of a durable reputation factor, but 128bit names are free.

It was right around the time everyone's grandma figured out how to get a facebook account that it all went to hell.

i can second that

This debate predates facebook by a while. Napster came out 5 years prior, and that's when I remember the biggest push from media companies, but there were efforts even before this to limit the free exchange of information.

”Destroyed the internet”? Try society.

I’d say the ad and privacy machine destroyed the internet by several orders of magnitude over the copyright industry.

Maybe that attacked it from two different sides at the same time?

I've been thinking recently about what sort of impact two significant changes to IP law might have in shaping things.

1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it.

Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really.

2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same.

Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?

With the copyright, multiple creators could work on it with a signed deal saying they'd be paid, but the sole ownership would go to a single person. A profit sharing plan could be put in place if desired.

> Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore

It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor.

A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool.

Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago.

Here's the prefix list for appliances, but there are larger ones for all products: https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php

I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...

> 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone.

This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists:

- Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold.

- Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold