The original reddit comment by the author here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d4z7q/when_you_... is actually rather interesting. If you delve deeper into the comments he actually gives someone a full license copy to someone that had trouble with the cracked version.
Have you noticed something? They removed the torrent, but they refuse to do so under legal pressure from huge corporate empires.
I think that this is an elegant proof that being genuinely nice to people works. Pirate bay is a site run by an organization for a political reason, but we tend to forget that it's made up of people too.
Look, the "piracy community" is made up of people with different motivations for why they do what they do. For some of them it's an ego satisfying game. For others, it's something else. So, I would rather look at them as decent human beings making a mistake. It just makes it so much easier to deal with anyone.
Sometimes, being nice to people and holding them to a higher standard works. Irrespective of who they are, because genuine respect and decency combined with good humor is something so rare that it's a prized commodity.
They did not make an ethical mistake. Instead, they merely show what is inevitable.
There are holes in the maps of hollywood that people ignored to their own perils. They could have launch business model experiment that doesn't risk much of anything. They could have adapted. They could find the truth as to what allow them to thrive.
Even as a libertarian, I saw no wrong-doing in what pirates did. They copied, but did not steal. Even if they deprived somebody of their income, it is not sufficient to be a ethical violation of some sort. If it was, than whole disruptive business would be unethical. Chinese workers would be condemned for taking somebody's job.
That's a ridiculous comparison. If the pirates were building the software instead of cracking it and selling it for cheaper that would be comparable. Pirates depend on a honest person doing the hard work for them. Chinese workers do not.
Just because work you do benefits another does not entitle you to that value. Yes pirates cannot pirate what does not exist. That just means the market needs to find a way to pay content creation, instead of content copying.
If I create software I am entitled to sell it. People are not entitled to get it for free if I want them to pay me for it. Yes, it costs me nothing if they pirate it. But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? Of course not.
Paying for content creation is a fantasy in software. Name any big consumer application that could have been developed that way with developers getting paid about the same as they would by selling it (i.e. about the same as the value they provide).
>People are not entitled to get it for free if I want them to pay me for it.
People are entitled, no, people have a right to reproduce information they have. You do not own it.
If you think commercial programmers are getting paid for the value they provide, you don't understand the market or economics. (Hint: if software cost that much, no one would buy it.)
I do own it. By law. And they cannot legally copy and distribute it. Read up on copyright law.
> If you think commercial programmers are getting paid for the value they provide, you don't understand the market or economics. (Hint: if software cost that much, no one would buy it.)
So are you saying that nobody is buying software? Software does cost "that much" and people are buying it.
>I do own it. By law. And they cannot legally copy and distribute it. Read up on copyright law.
This discussion is on whether deprivation of income is sufficient to qualify as an ethical violation. You claimed that people are not entitled to get something for free "if I want them to pay me for it". (Really?) I asserted a general right to copy information. This right does not need to come from law, though law ought to recognize it.
I understand the law, what is the justification of the law?
>So are you saying that nobody is buying software? Software does cost "that much" and people are buying it.
No, you said:
>Name any big consumer application that could have been developed that way with developers getting paid about the same as they would by selling it (i.e. about the same as the value they provide).
Virtually nothing is sold at the price of the value it provides. It it were, the buyer would get no gains from trade.
In truth, commercial software is frequently sold way below the price of the value it provides. This is why people buy it. (though the provided value will vary from buyer to buyer.)
Some will make their whole income with visual studio or photo shop, but only pay a tiny fraction of that.
I realize you see an injustice in rampant copying, but I don't think you're thinking through your arguments, or not wording them well. Because these are coming out very obviously flawed.
> But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it?
If you can find a way to do so without entering the factory, or removing any of the factory's contents, then sure. The traditional law of theft is a purely negative right to not have your property removed from your possession, not any sort of positive right.
1. The law-technical issue. I suppose we agree that piracy is illegal. That there are different laws for the two things is not very interesting in my opinion.
2. The ethical issue. Do you agree that the end results for the factory and for the developer, namely reduced income, are the same?
On the 2nd one, reduced income isn't very interesting to me, since I don't believe there's any ethical right to make income from things in the first place. Traditional views on theft I think are justified by a negative right to not have the security of one's person and possessions violated, e.g. to be free from assault, burglary, etc. So with traditional theft, I don't see the wrong being that the thief got something for free, but that the thief removed from me something that I rightfully ought to still have.
That doesn't necessarily mean copyright isn't justified: one can argue for a positive right to control distribution and reproductions of one's intellectual productions. But I think it has to be argued for on completely different ethical grounds from the traditional ones used to justify theft being banned, because someone copying a book in their own home, on their own photocopier, isn't a violation of security of one's person/property in the same sense that assault or theft are.
The main reasonable grounds I can think of are a good-of-society kind of argument: that the government creating a new positive right, the "copy right", is good for society, because it encourages the production of things that society wishes to encourage the production of, by providing a mechanism to reward creators with income.
I agree, but I don't see as big of a difference between theft and piracy. As a software developer people pirating it sure does feel like theft. It evokes exactly the same kind of feeling as when somebody stole something physical from me. And the actual results for me are the same too: it costs me time and money. Moreover, the grounds for making theft illegal are good-of-society arguments too. Of course there are some differences too.
Positive vs negative rights is just an artificial distinction. It doesn't make a difference to me as a software developer. About as interesting would be classifying things according to the letter they start with (T for theft and P for piracy). You can phrase copyright as a positive or a negative right, it's just a difference in the wording not an actual difference:
"Copyright is the right to stop other people copying your work."
"Copyright is that you're not allowed to copy the work of people who don't want that."
Note how this is exactly the same as with property rights.
The positive v. negative rights distinction to me is that it involves trying to control how people behave in their own homes, versus how people interact with you. Theft fundamentally is bad because it is an unwanted intrusion: you're on that person's land, or in their house, or rummaging around their shed. But I can copy something without ever intruding anywhere.
If I buy a Honda, and then carefully build a replica in my shed, with my own tools and materials, this isn't a violation of Honda's property in the same way that breaking into their factory and taking one of their cars would be. It isn't even a violation in the same way that breaking into their factory at night and building my own car using their assembly line would be--- I'm building it 100% with my own materials, on my own assembly line. It is still a violation of their design copyright, but that seems much different to me.
That's not what positive/negative right means, but OK. I doubt that many people would agree that theft is bad because someone is on your land. Theft is bad because someone is taking something away from you, and you'd otherwise be able to use the thing, and now you have to buy or make a new one. If I dropped my bag on the street and somebody takes it that's still theft, and the reason why it's bad is because I want to have that bag, not because I don't like it when somebody touches my bag.
If you put a crack of my software online I effectively don't own that software anymore, because I can't use it anymore in the way I was (selling it). So perhaps it's more similar to destruction of property. You could say that I shouldn't have expected to be able to sell the software in the first place, but that's not true because copyright law gives me that right. Whether you think that copyright law should be removed/changed or not, while the law is still in place making a crack is effectively the same as destroying my property.
I don't follow the last part of your post. Rights granted by the government are not automatically all property rights. This is infringing on copyright, an artificial monopoly granted by the government to encourage social progress. I agree that's illegal, but it's not removing any items from your possession; it's circumventing the government's attempt to give you a monopoly in duplication, which harms your business prospects, but does not damage any items in your possession. For example, you can still use any software you have.
I mean, if reducing something's value by making it harder to sell is equivalent to destruction of property, then any competition is destruction of property. If I open a bakery next to yours, I'm damaging your bakery. But I think calling it theft or destruction of property would be absurd, even if I broke the law in opening my bakery. If my bakery failed to get the proper permits, or violated zoning laws, I'm competing with you illegally, and might be guilty of some sort of illegal business practices. But I'm not guilty of robbing your bakery in the same way I would be if I smashed in your front window and stole your oven. That's something rather different.
I did not say that it is the same as destruction of property. I said that it is an illegal activity that has the same effect on my life as destruction of property. I'm saying this because some people seem to think that it is ethical to pirate software, or at least nowhere near as bad as destroying property.
There is also a difference in degree in opening a bakery without permits. This doesn't nearly give you as much of an "advantage" as a pirate giving it away for free. I can't think of anything that would give you a comparable advantage with physical goods.
Your copies of said software aren't destroyed. Your "property right" is more akin to owning all copies of software.
Instead, piracy protect your marketshare against people who offer their "property" for free.
GIMP can't effectively win against photoshop + pirated photoshop. They will have an easier time to win if people actually respect copyright.
To the extent that it is my interest to encourage other people to go after pirates, that is in my interest. However, it is not in my interest to develop methods to prevent people from copying my software, nor is it in my interest to use the court to go after these pirates. What I would do is annihilate the possibility of pirates existing by not making my goods artificially scarce and work on the problem space of making money in the assumption of infinitely copied software.
I also win by making it easier for me to compete with similar products because their marketing capacity is reduced through the reduction and destruction of illegal distribution channel for their products.
No, my property right is not like owning all copies of the software. It's like owning the exclusive right to give a copy of it to someone else.
Saying that piracy protects me against open source software is silly. Suppose that X people are buying my software, Y are pirating it and Z are using an open source alternative. Now magically all Y people decide they don't want to pirate anymore. That probably means that some of them are going to go with the open source software and some of them are going to pay. Yes, fewer people are using my software, but I'm getting more money so who cares?
Pirating software is very similar to not respecting open source licenses, for example closing down a modification of GPL'ed code. Why?
Because when you put a GPL license on software you are saying "you can have this software but you have to do something I want in return: if you make a modification you have to make that open source so I and others can use it (among other things)". When I charge for software I'm saying "you can have this software but you have to do something I want in return: pay me $x money". In the first case you are asking people to `pay you back` in work, in the second case you are asking people to `pay you back` with money.
> work on the problem space of making money in the assumption of infinitely copied software
Yeah, I'd like to work on solving nuclear fission too. This is just not feasible with certain kinds of software.
That probably means that some of them are going to go with the open source software and some of them are going to pay. Yes, fewer people are using my software, but I'm getting more money so who cares?
Network effects, more code contribution, and the like. That's important for open source software. For me, it's opportunities to get paid more. If I can expand my market, than I could raise my price or get money somewhere else.
Beside, it does not mean that some customers will buy your software. The advertising effect of piracy may increase sales. The only way to find out is that if people magically respect copyright.
Pirating software is very similar to not respecting open source licenses, for example closing down a modification of GPL'ed code. Why?
I was referring to less restrictive alternatives not whether or not if somebody broke the law.
> work on the problem space of making money in the assumption of infinitely copied software
Yeah, I'd like to work on solving nuclear fission too. This is just not feasible with certain kinds of software.
It is certainly feasible to run small experiments on a small portion of your business. You do not have to risk your entire business operation to learn the truth about what work or not.
An accurate belief is more important in business than who win debates in hypothetical business models on Hacker News, no?
> Network effects, more code contribution, and the like. That's important for open source software. For me, it's opportunities to get paid more. If I can expand my market, than I could raise my price or get money somewhere else.
I don't understand what you're saying here.
> The advertising effect of piracy may increase sales.
This I consider highly unlikely to weigh against the lost sales, but unfortunately it is pretty much impossible to find out.
> I was referring to less restrictive alternatives not whether or not if somebody broke the law.
I don't understand this either...
> It is certainly feasible to run small experiments on a small portion of your business. You do not have to risk your entire business operation to learn the truth about what work or not.
What kind of experiment do you suggest? Giving away the software for free. Something is telling me that that would not increase income ;) So what king of experiment do you mean exactly?
> Maybe they took it down, are doing a good job, and then they're going to put it back up.
The people that cracked it are from the scene, and have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. In fact, sceners despise all forms of P2P, including BitTorrent.
There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?
Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.
> There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?
No, the scene refers to a specific group of individuals who are the source of almost all pirated material on the internet. There's some info on Wikipedia[0], but the article's not very good (some on the talk page say that's because of deliberate vandalism on the part of sceners to prevent knowledge about it from spreading). The way I see it, the defining principles of the scene are:
1. Very strict rules in terms of quality and release format/naming. Scene councils made up of members from the biggest groups in each release category convene on a regular basis (once a year, I believe) to decide on whether standards for different release categories (MP3, DVDRIP, APPS) need to be updated/modified and then release the new rules in the form of a scene notice.
2. Extreme paranoia. It's extremely difficult for someone to get into the scene if they don't know someone IRL who's already in it, particularly if they don't have something to offer, whether it be source material, servers/hardware for storing/spreading the material, or technical skills (most important for cracking software).
3. Lack of any websites. I think some scene groups had websites back in the day, but for security reasons they now operate solely on private IRC channels (I think mostly on EFnet and LinkNet these days, but I'm not sure. The groups that have enough hardware probably run their own IRC servers for added security). All file transfers are done via FTP.
4. The scene is highly decentralized, and the closest you get to any leadership are the scene councils mentioned above.
5. Data spreads very quickly (literally in seconds) because of the high speed servers that they have (these can be either legally owned or hacked servers - higher up in the scene, they tend to have legally owned servers to ensure reliability). They have "autotrading scripts" that automatically "race" releases from one server to another. The data moves down into lower tiers very quickly through the work of "couriers", whose incentive to do this is that they get credit for uploading data to a server, which they then use to download stuff from that server themselves. Much like on private torrent sites, they're expected to keep their "ratio" of uploaded data to downloaded data above a certain value. They use a protocol called FXP, which basically allows them to connect to 2 FTP servers and negotiate a transfer of files from one server to the other.
6. There can only be one release of a particular copyrighted work (whether it be an music album, movie, TV episode, etc.). In some cases there are multiple releases in different formats (like standard def and high def for movies and TV shows), but in other cases there aren't (music is only released in MP3, no OGG or FLAC or anything). Whichever scene group releases first wins the race, so there is a lot of competition for speed. However, loss of quality from trying to be the first to release is mitigated by the fact that if a release is bad it can be "nuked", meaning the scene group loses credit for the release and another group has a chance to release a "proper", which is essentially the same release, except done correctly.
7. Virtually everyone does it for fun (for the thrill), not for money.
There's some more stuff in these[1,4] Wired articles, and they're moderately accurate. There have been two video productions[2,3] on this topic as well, but they're both rather inaccurate and cheesy in my opinion. In fact, a parody of the first aforementioned video production was also created[13-20]. For a more individual perspective, there are these[5,6,7] Reddit threads.
You can also watch scene releases as they're released in real time at any of these[8,9,10,11] sites. The traditional method of viewing scene releases is via a "pre channel", an IRC channel that has a bot that announces the releases in real time and has a database of old releases that can be searched (a "pre db"), but most pre channels are invite only and the web format is more accessible anyway. This[12] article mentions a pre channel run by a private torrent tracker that's open to the public, but the article's kind of old, so I don't know if it's still available.
Hope that answers your question ;)
> Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.
Haha, thanks. Neuromancer's one of my favorite books.
Haha, the funny thing is that the scene has been around in one form or another for more than 30 years. In 2007 a pre db with 27 years' worth of releases was leaked[0]. Prior to the creation of IRC in August 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen, sceners used BBSes as their primary method of communication.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking that the people who crack software for fun/kudos also want it widely distributed. The warez scene and the people who share its output online are two different groups (with a slight overlap).
Well he wasn't exactly being "nice" to them, just mocking the skills of the crackers (which my mom wouldn't think is so nice). So maybe it's more of a testament to reverse psychology or the huge egos of the crackers than being nice.
However, when they were asked politely by a family to remove a torrent of autopsy photos of the family's murdered children (just the photos--the family had no problem with the reports and other documentation on the murder case), TBP told the family, "That is one helluva gripe. No, No and again no."
> Pirate bay is a site run by an organization for a political reason
I was not aware that making money is a political reason. TBP is commercial. They are in it for cash and nothing else.
I found the opposite to be true. Whenever I did something "guerilla marketing"-style, it never worked.
Though, of course, the intentional part of this was that I took a screenshot to share with my friends and Twitter followers, but I never thought it would become that popular. (BTW, I took it and posted to Twitter in May, however it became hot when I used it as an illustration of my opinion in reddit comment.)
