To say the truth, files to be shared often need to be produced first: books scanned and OCRed, DVDs grabbed and repackaged, games actually cracked, etc. There is a scene beyond just people running Bittorrent nodes.
> the act of illegally copying computer programs, recordings, films, etc. to sell them at much cheaper prices
What's interesting is that this definition includes selling.
So by this definition at least, regular file sharing of copyrighted media, even illegal or infringing distribution, would not qualify as piracy, since no sale is involved.
If you pay attention, the sites that get taken down are often laden with ads, so rather lose the ability to claim some sort of non-commercial exemption.
Even if it's fruitless in the end, we're still gonna shame the use of the word "piracy" on sight. It's quite simply offensive to compare the copying of bits to high seas piracy which includes murder and rape. Of course the copyright monopolists had to spin up such propaganda: copyright infringement just has no weight to it.
> Even if it's fruitless in the end, we're still gonna shame the use of the word "piracy" on sight.
Who's this "we"?
> It's quite simply offensive to compare the copying of bits to high seas piracy which includes murder and rape.
You are talking that way, way too seriously and interpreting it in weird way in order to take maximum offense.
And my point is it isn't a comparison: "pirate" has an established meaning that is literally just your "file sharing enthusiasts." Also, actual high-seas piracy has diminished to the point where "pirates" is mainly understood as file-sharing pirates or as goofy cartoon characters (e.g. "talk like a pirate day" and "Pirates of the Caribbean"). You have do to a lot of deliberate work to strain to take offense at the association.
> Of course the copyright monopolists had to spin up such propaganda: copyright infringement just has no weight to it.
It should be noted your alternative "file sharing enthusiasts" is at least as propagandistic, just from the opposite party.
Not that I think copyright piracy is that big if a deal, it's just that computer geeks' overwrought stridency on the issue is obnoxious and obscures more than it informs.
People such as myself and the person you replied to.
> You are talking that way, way too seriously
I am. It is a serious matter.
> interpreting it in weird way in order to take maximum offense
Yes, I take maximum offense when some monopolist tries to compare me to rapers and pillagers because I copied bits.
> You have do to a lot of deliberate work to strain to take offense at the association.
Not at all. Actual piracy is still happening even today in the 21st century. Everyone knows exactly what a pirate is and it's exactly what comes to mind when someone mentions them. It's not some forgotten history only geeks know about. People will even mentally picture those very same "file sharing enthusiasts" you mention as roguish types when in fact perfectly normal people forwarding pictures, videos and documents on WhatsApp are a perfect fit for the definition. People literally infringe copyright every day at massive scales without even realizing it. They infringe copyright when they save a picture from a web site.
> It should be noted your alternative "file sharing enthusiasts" is at least as propagandistic, just from the opposite party.
Except I didn't use those terms. I used the proper one: copyright infringement. Sounds like a whole lot of nothing when put that way, doesn't it?
> it's just that computer geeks' overwrought stridency on the issue is obnoxious and obscures more than it informs.
So the copyright industry insists on using propaganda words like "piracy" purely to add weight to copyright infringement and make it seem more real than it really is but I'm the one obscuring the issue? Right.
Also, I can understand the downvotes, but why the flagging? You can call them thieves, but not parasites? I feel that HN has become quite censorship-heavy lately.
To elaborate on that, people often claim it's not theft because the owner keeps the goods. That's why it's more appropriate to consider it parasitism (you are eating at someone else's table without paying).
this is obviously bull though.. how do you even make a study like that? you'd need to associate each illegal downloader to his/her real identity and then to each of their legal purchases... that's ridiculous, and even if academics had the means to do it, it would be illegal. piracy itself is illegal in most countries, so if you don't report them you are literally an accomplice.
There was some study I saw, maybe even released by Spotify, that showed that a massive percentage (maybe a majority?) of streamed music was several decades old.
So they're raking in cash from rent seeking really. It would be healthier for music if what you said was true though.
Some people are more musically adventurous than others or they sometimes latch onto a new genre or artist. But the reality is that most of us largely default to what we listened to in school or maybe the decade after. I know I listen to relatively little music created in the past 20 years and don't really care if a streaming service is missing XYZ newish artist.
I actually have quite a large, somewhat curated digital music library and, with a few hundred dollars and a few days of effort, I could probably patch any particular holes I have among songs/albums I especially enjoy, but mostly I use streaming including a lot of curated playlists.
Not looking to out any underground trackers, but am curious as someone who wasn't ever on what.cd and hasn't ever replaced long "hiatus" then gone waffles.
Microsoft (zune) and then Google (music) have me not even trusting the convenience of paid subscriptions anymore.
Even if you keep some music, you lose useful history, playlists, etc. on a whim.
Even with the new YouTube music, songs I own, and added to a playlist last week are suddenly grayed out without explanation or ability to see details. Only right click option is to remove.
Yeah I guess Spotify is okay if you don't mind half of the back catalogue of your favorite artists either never being present on the platform, or just magically disappearing at some arbitrary time. It's hilarious, I canceled my Spotify service a year ago or something, and I hopped back on recently to check a playlist as I couldn't remember a song. So many tracks in my playlists are no longer available on the service. Had me feeling pretty good about my colossal archive of purchased mp3s/FLACs from Bandcamp.
Yep. Spotify had at one point completely eliminated my desire to torrent entire discographies, but my listening is starting to shift to Bandcamp and youtube-dl'd MP3s/M4As with Spotify getting increasingly worse both on the library front and on a technical level with its app.
It's hard not to recall Gabe Newell's "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". Steam and Spotify offer a really good service, and a lot of people find it not worth it to pirate stuff.
'specially as a linux user. Dealing with Wine/Proton on my own vs just buying it on steam and have it justwork^tm is worth it almost everytime, especially when using cheap steamkey stores.
If the corporation who owns the original IP, abandoned it for 10+ years with no way of legitimately buying it from them, then it means they don't want our money and they don't care about it, so it's fair game.
Sadly because the industry actively fights against it, and people can be punished for it.
Also "sadly" because it's not exactly a dependable process -- we're depending on people to spontaneously choose to preserve / share media widely enough there will be decent copies when/if they go out of "legitimate" circulation.
It'd be better if archiving & preserving copies were a mandatory step to being awarded copyright protection. (Which would not displace filesharing, of course...)
Another sad thing is the mentality of IP rightsholders. For abandoned songs/movies/works that don't make any money anymore, they'd rather expend the cost/effort to destroy them than allow them to be distributed for free, even though destroying them is likely more expensive. Totally malicious. Reminds me of grocery stores that throw out food at the end of the day and spend effort guarding the dumpsters so nobody gets food for free.
Pirates are just independent corsairs. The latter are pirates who work for the king, they are doing the same kind of robbery, but since the king profits off it, they are called "legal". That's what modern copyright holders are: pirates backed by the king.
This is wrong. Privateers, which is the more general class corsairs belonged to, were akin to modern PMCs and operated under similar constraints. They mostly obeyed the rules of war, were punished when they did not, and their conduct was similar to national ships in nearly every regard. They took prisoners of war and were taken prisoner in turn.
When one group is taking ships and killing every living thing on it then illegally selling the cargo and personal effects of the occupants, and another group is taking ships and dropping the occupants off at a POW camp then sending it to the admiralty to be legally sold, the latter is not doing the same kind of robbery. Arguably they aren't doing any kind of robbery at all.
I don't think pirates regularly executed the entire crew of a ship either. There's no monetary benefit in doing so, it will encourage reprisals, and future ships will refuse to surrender.
Once we drop the legality fig leaf, because that's a matter of who writes the law, we'll see an organized gang of pirates that follow some rules, wear an emblem, and have bosses on the land who sell things captured in the sea.
