I don't what's worse about your comment - that you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with having pirated music, that you admit to having done so in a public forum, or that you are so blasé about it that you did so with your (presumably) real name.
I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well - presumably that has no protection from your urges to accumulate.
I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.
I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well
A lot of people do all these things- I thought that was relatively well known. Not that I am condoning it, but if we're talking about drawing the line... it's very far away from where you're discussing it. I suspect it lies somewhere near "is a real physical item".
I find that most HN contributors are well-off, don't make too many movies/songs and contribute under their real name. Put those facts together and you can easily get a hivemind reaction of "piracy is extremely evil with zero justification ever for anyone".
Weird, I have the exact opposite impression, I always thought the common HN hivemind mentality was EXTREMELY pro piracy, usually rationalized with one of the following justifications:
1. "I wasn't going to buy it anyway so the author isn't losing a sale"
2. Zero incremental cost!
3. "If I like it I'll eventually maybe buy it" (if only I could use that defense after stealing a Porsche)
5. They should just sell T-shirts/concert tickets/support plans instead
6. Art must be performed for free, otherwise it's commercial crap
I think whether HN is pro piracy depends very much on which comment thread you look at: If "DRM" is part of the title, the mood will be very different from "Show HN: My New Book", in my experience...
I have illegally downloaded music, movies and tv shows for more than half of my life. I was using HotWire and 14.4 modems. This is my real name. I don't really care...
Look at the size of the original iPod. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fill one of those up with legal music. How many iPods have been sold?
The music industry has been dealing with institutional piracy since the Internet became mainstream.
I'm not him, but I'm from Sweden, where even people who work in television have tweeted "I love mondays!" with a instagram photo of a torrent client window of american TV shows[1] (that won't come to Sweden for a year at least, if at all). He got reprimanded, but only by colleagues because he actually worked in media. Media piracy is completely normalized.
...It is pretty easy to normalise piracy of media that's coming entirely from a different continent. I bet the Chinese aren't losing much sleep when they download Hollywood movies either.
>I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.
I would guess that's because me, a good deal of my friends, both online and in real life, and a number of acquaintances (YMMV) consider "intellectual property" to be a rather unintuitive (and by extension, stupid, not deserving of respect, and many other similar terms) concept.
No respect, no "moral authority" required.
The actions of industry lobbies which are acting, ostensibly, at the behest of its members, are not serving to increase that respect. An institution which society at large does not respect is doomed to fail.
See also speed limit laws on any major highway in the USA. Sure there's a law, but it's enforced haphazardly, most people have no respect for it as a law, (indeed, studies would suggest people drive at a comfortable speed for them regardless of what the sign says), and we're a better society for it.
You could make the same argument for piracy, given the use of sampling in the music business, to the revelation that pirates actually buy more media than non pirates, and quite possibly others I could think up were I not fresh out of bed.
I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well - presumably that has no protection from your urges to accumulate.
I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.