> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP
As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP.
In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change").
The impression I've gotten is that piracy of nearly everything is widely felt to be OK here. Information wants to be free, yada yada.
About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity.
> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change").
I’ve read and participated in many such threads and I’ve literally never seen this take. Often what I see is complaints about having to learn different UI for different services/apps, no offline, ads injected into paid services, having to figure out which service a show is on, and generally terrible UI you can’t change/fix.
I don’t think I’ve ever really seen someone use the argument “yes it’s great today but they might charge more later”. Not saying people haven’t said that but it’s far from the main thing people say in my experience.
People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.
While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my brothers would share the comics together while my parents kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time. Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical properties of the object and not an inherent property of information to be consumed through one avenue at a time
The news on a website is paid for by someone, else they would not be in business. And I only have one screen, I don't share it. The difference is physical vs. digital copies. A physical copy costs $.10 a digital copy costs $.0000001 (made up numbers), the business can take a loss of numerous digital copies before hitting the cost of one copy of the physical paper.
The problem is really that their business model sucks. They are working with fewer and fewer advertisers and much more competition and expecting business like they had before. And so we have a business that is attempting to fix itself with paywalls which don't work 100% of the time, but good enough to get the found newspaper analogy.
BS, the reason we have sensational opinion pieces goes back before the internet. People are bored with mundane lives and love drama. Drama sells, 90s newsrooms found this out and cable news out competed established real journalism. The rest is a race to the bottom.
The internet simply exacerbated this as anyone could publish news on an equal platform to the big boys. Then we get paid-per-click, and that drives click-bait.
Stealing information absolutely is not responsible for that. People pay for junk, and that's the reason. We don't eat junk food because it's given away.
This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view business model of UfC.
For books, if it's a client reader software frustration, then you should still buy the digital version and then you can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is BS.
For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing. The whole point of copyright is to give someone the monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing power to incentivize them to create the product in the first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the format things are delivered in all you want (like the client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with pricing. And that's ludicrous.
In that case, just read a news article about the event. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able to be published without the consent of the copyright holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free without any justification for you're doing so.
Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources of the fight information. But if you want the recording with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has value to you over written recaps or social media coverage. And you are just arguing over price, which they are the copyright holder have the right to set the price.
The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the terrible DRM’d music the labels wanted to foist on us. We need to inflict the same pain for books.
Personally, I think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to the Books Trust or your local library.
> The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change.
Then don't consume it and don't buy it. If you stop paying the abusive publisher, they'll be forced to change their policies.
The fact that you don't want to fund what is admittedly a rather abusive industry does not magically make it right to consume other peoples' work for free. That's theft-adjacent. You're not entitled to any piece of entertainment without paying for it.
This is also along the lines of how I think about things. If you make it convenient enough (compared to the alternative of paywall bypass or piracy) and provide enough overall/general value then I'm happy to subscribe. At the point where the experience degrades, or seems beyond the point of what one person could reasonably subscribe to, I basically just give up.
Spotify hits this sweet spot where one subscription delivers almost all the music you'd want to listen to. Steam hits this for games where a couple clicks can play and launch almost any game with minimal hassle. Netflix mostly used to hit this, but most of the current streaming stuff feels overpriced if you want to get all content (unbundled cable bundle). News kind of feels similar to streaming where its unbundled, and there's a lot of interesting content out there, but there's no way I'm subscribing to 15 different newspapers, especially random local ones for cities I don't live in. If there was a news bundle subscription for a reasonable price I think I would pay for it.
I suppose part of the challenge here is that music and video content holds value much longer. Studios can invest in music and video content and see a return from the catalog over a long period of time as more enduring hits are produced and the duds fall away. But with news, they have to make the money on it now because yesterday’s news isn’t worth much no matter how expertly crafted.
The GPL was specifically written to lock code out of the proprietary realm, so if you hate copyright[0] you'll hate people using it as intended.
[0] To be clear, I know of few who actually like copyright. Tolerate it? Use it as needed? Sure. The only people who actually defend the current broken-ass system are large media companies which are built to optimally exploit it.
> About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity.
> "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"
Gonna gamble and call bullshit on this.
My speculation: the most popular reason HN'ers give for pirating: they literally cannot get the content otherwise.
2nd most popular: it is such a pain to either to purchase the content or get it to run on bog standard software (like Firefox/Linux/etc.) that otherwise paying fans are driven to whatever the current equivalent is for bittorrent.
In fact, I don't believe I've ever seen a justification for using bittorrent or whatever due to what someone's favorite streaming service might do in the future. I'm assuming you saw at least one based on what you wrote-- care to give a link?
>"subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change"
I'm not saying you've never seen anyone make an argument roughly like that, but I will certainly say that it is not at all representative of the argument that I see made. Complaints usually have to do with current behavior of the platform or the wider streaming ecosystem.
> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change").
If this is true, it should be easy for you to link to an example. Could you do so?
People are understandably angsty about someone stealing credit. A NYT article is going to be a NYT article, not laundered around and presented as someone else's work.
Plus, there's the angle of enshitification and ads being injected into a paid service, and so on.
Yeah, I don’t judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to explain how mining is good for the environment.
1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why.
2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide.
3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.
It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."
There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.
As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP.
In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial for me they might someday later change").
The impression I've gotten is that piracy of nearly everything is widely felt to be OK here. Information wants to be free, yada yada.
About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is piracy of open source software. When some company sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a crime against humanity.