Item — HN Reader

The question is: where does your mindset come from?

Promoting a freer market does not mean sacrificing rights. To have my creation used and enjoyed by many would be great. The compensation I think I deserve is only symptomatic of the current economic system under which we live. Don't pretend that you're starting from square one and the OP is suggesting a great shift. It's you too that should explain your motives.

1 comments

I think most people (both in general, but particularly on HN as we make things here) wouldn't bother explaining what we generally take for common sense. However:

- People that make things should be able to charge what they they want for them.

- If people don't like the price that's fine, they're not forced to buy the item.

- Taking something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Edit: People convinced that the ability to easily take something making it right won't be convinced otherwise. This is HN - we make apps. Posts that advocate taking them without our permission should simply be flagged.

The way I see it is the dilemma isn't between pirating a single project or not pirating it.

The dilemma is whether society encourages people to build ideas upon ideas and push forward, or to lock up ideas in their own owner's domain, where nobody can build great things upon them.

The open and closed worlds are not independent and disconnected. Whenever someone creates a closed, proprietary product and wants to restrict uses of it, he is directly harming the open world too, by drawing away resources from the creation of an eco system and net effects around the open product to the closed product.

Also, assuming a person places some value X to openness, if the closed product is created and adds value Y to that particular person, and Y>X, it's effectively encouraging a closed world.

I think the single greatest thing we're losing on is derivative works. We live in a world with almost no derivative works, because of closed creations. For that I partially blame the closed content authors and really wish they had created less of it.

If you share these beliefs, it's easy to reach the conclusion that piracy is better than purchasing and encouraging these closed works. Of course it is better to avoid using it altogether (to avoid creating net effects around it), but if you are going to use something, it is better to pirate it than to purchase it legally.

> Taking something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Here lies the problem : define "taking". If I download a music file, I'm not removing it from where I've got it. I'm not depriving anyone from it, or preventing anyone from listening it. Therefore, I didn't take anything.

This has nothing to do with the fact that it is or isn't easy.

> Here lies the problem : define "taking".

You're right.

Using something somebody has made without their permission is unethical.

Fixed.

Would you consider parodies to be unethical, since they involve using something someone made without their permission? What about the other traditional exceptions to copyright? What about something that goes way beyond copyright, like an architect putting up a building and then saying that nobody was allowed to look at it unless they paid him money first. Would you say that people would be morally obligated to pay him money in that case? If someone decided that they regretted publishing a book, would they be within their rights to insist that everybody with a copy of that book destroy it, provided they got their money back?

I'm having a hard time understanding where your attitude here originated from. Copyright in the US has always just been a matter of practicality from the founding of the US through hundreds of years of jurisprudence, and you can see that in how readily aspects of it are traded off against other public interests. Copyright as basic morality would result in a system radically different from the one we have now.

> Would you consider parodies to be unethical, since they involve using something someone made without their permission?

No, as the value being provided isn't the item being used, but the satire. Piracy doesn't add value like satire does.

You switched from "using something without someone's permission is morally wrong" to "using something without someone's permission is morally wrong, unless you add value to it". From the perspective of the person whose work was infringed via parody, they don't care that something was added, only that their work was used without their permission.

Which is why intellectual property isn't a moral right, but a tradeoff. And currently a lopsided one, at that.

I changed the language to illustrate that whether the originally copy still existed makes no difference.

> From the perspective of the person whose work was infringed via parody, they care only their work was used without their permission.

No, they care that that are being made fun of. People who attack parodies aren't concerned that someone would buy the parody instead of the original work - very few people would.

I find your ethics disturbing, and will not be subscribing to them.

Dogma is harmful to a thoughtful discussion of alternatives, and suggestions that a class of ideas which are not objectively bad should be flagged and not allowed to be discussed because it goes against our economic interest is reprehensible.

> ideas which are not objectively bad

Piracy is objectively bad. Using someone's art without compensating them is wrong. It has not successfully been argued otherwise.

People for piracy simple keep stating that digital replication somehow changes the ethics of this, but cannot specify why this changes the ethics.