A lot of people will argue about the morality and legality of this sort of thing within the system, but I think this sort of thing is truly the result of rising pressures on society to be as efficient as possible in the ___domain of capitalistic activities.
Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content. However, I also know that we have become a ruthless world where inequality is enormous. And I don't just mean inequality in the traditional sense: even the middle and upper class are forced to live in a world where they are absolutely dependent on the upper tech elite for basic things, and costs are rising.
Thus, piracy of this sort is inevitable. It should not just be those who can pay who should have access to knowledge and ideas. Everyone should have that. In a fair world where there were limits to corporate power and technological development, there would be more equality and piracy would not be necessary.
So as much as I want to make money myself on my own content, I also support piracy simply because it's the only solution within the capitalistic system for some sort of equality in terms of access to knowledge.
> Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content.
This is often the framing of the debate around piracy, but I think it's fundamentally incorrect. Numerous studies over the years have shown that pirates spend more money on media, not less. Media companies want to frame this as a debate about money because it seems logical that we should reward content creators, but it's fundamentally not a debate about money because if it were, content creators would have no reason to be unhappy about piracy.
In reality, the real issue is control. Media companies want to control how and when you consume media, and pirates want to control how and when they consume media. This war isn't just being fought in the piracy space either--it's part of the motivation behind the move to subscription streaming services and streaming protocol changes that no longer serve up video files.
Personally, that's exactly why I spend more money on media than my friends: I have an extensive CD collection (and a somewhat less-extensive BluRay collection) and if you do the math on that it's very clear that it would be cheaper for me to pay for literally every music streaming service than what I spend on CDs each month. I'm not going to give exact numbers, but the amount of money isn't even in the same ballpark. But my CDs don't disappear, I can rip them and play them on any of my devices, I can leaf through my CDs and rediscover something I had forgotten instead of having some algorithm push me toward the latest dictated hotness, etc.
And to be clear, I'm saying "media companies" here, not "content creators", because almost universally the content creators aren't the ones trying to exert control over the content they create. On the contrary, my #1 tip for pirating academic papers is to email the author and ask them for the paper--I've literally never received a "no" to literally hundreds of such emails I've sent. Music and movies are different because they're usually less of a one-person product and more of the money actually makes it to the content creators, but generally musicians I've talked to are not the ones restricting their media to one streaming platform or refusing to allow MP3 downloads, or refusing to release on physical media--that only ever happens when big media companies get involved.
The thing is that countless of lives have been ruined by bigcorps for doing "piracy".
But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!
The worst part is that these individuals whose lives have been ruined weren't even harming anyone. Their operations were on such a small scale that it barely had any impact.
But these bigcorps are looking to reshape society, destroy many jobs and industries, rewrite social contracts, and it's all just hunky dory.
> But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!
I'm definitely about as anti-corporation as you're going to find on HN, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're describing. It seems like bigcorps are definitely still fighting against piracy. At the moment, players like Anna's Archive appear to be winning because they've largely figured out technical means to bypass the legal problems, but I've been in this sphere for long enough to know you never really "win" this war--all you ever can do is carve out a temporary, limited space where knowledge is preserved and liberated. In fact, there are some pretty glaring weaknesses to stuff like Anna's Archive (which I'm not going to share here because I don't want to give anyone ideas) and I expect someone on the wrong side will figure those out in a decade at the most, and services like this will disappear.
Sure, but I'm not sure what your intent is for bringing this up.
If your intent is to claim that this is evidence bigcorps aren't still fighting against piracy, I don't think that's true. Corporations are amoral, and it's naive to expect that they have a consistent ethical stance which they apply to themselves.
That is to say, Microsoft can be pirating everything they can get their hands on while at the same time trying to prevent anyone from pirating their intellectual property. They don't care that that's hypocritical; it's profitable and that's what matters to corporations.
That is right. The near sole determiner of whether an idea flourishes these days is whether it greases the wheels of capitalism. Sometimes, those ideas are in line with our morality and greater good, but most of the time they are not.
> even the middle and upper class are forced to live in a world where they are absolutely dependent on the upper tech elite for basic things,
paradoxically, we are all super dependent on the poor and low-income earners as well. If everyone was as well-off as the average HN poster, things would get expensive and services would become scarce. I don't say this to disagree with you, but rather to support the fact that we need to have a middle and lower class for our economy to function. the cost increases in basic goods (including books and entertainment), but especially housing, is destroying the middle and lower class. why would someone participate in an economy where the lowest-paying jobs don't even pay enough for a place to live?
> it should not just be those who can pay who should have access to knowledge and ideas.
I've thought a lot about this and particularly for prisons, where by definition there isn't a market for them to buy much of anything. They should make prisons, and perhaps hospitals, copyright-free zones because even if they brazenly "steal" content, its not really possible for the consumers to pay for it anyway. And prisons could use premium IP materials as an incentive to reward good behavior or placate them, without technically stealing anything.
Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content. However, I also know that we have become a ruthless world where inequality is enormous. And I don't just mean inequality in the traditional sense: even the middle and upper class are forced to live in a world where they are absolutely dependent on the upper tech elite for basic things, and costs are rising.
Thus, piracy of this sort is inevitable. It should not just be those who can pay who should have access to knowledge and ideas. Everyone should have that. In a fair world where there were limits to corporate power and technological development, there would be more equality and piracy would not be necessary.
So as much as I want to make money myself on my own content, I also support piracy simply because it's the only solution within the capitalistic system for some sort of equality in terms of access to knowledge.