
70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable - hoag
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-socially-acceptable-110228/
======
_delirium
Three big caveats that the linked article doesn't sufficiently mention:

1\. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking
at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud,
copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc.

2\. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was
on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70%
figure is everyone who answered _anything except 1_. But clearly a 2 out of 10
is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have
meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only
20% gave an answer >= 7.

3\. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal,
home use.

\---

From the report (rough translation):

 _Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies
without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for
one's own use._

 _Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in
2010._

 _In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a
scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for
personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no
circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%._

 _The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating
between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they
seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%,
rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy._

 _The views are different however for making money on illegal music
downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact,
three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve
pirated music online and resell it to friends._

 _The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the
average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on
the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7._

~~~
ecounysis
This sort of summarization (read manipulation) of scientific results by news
organizations to influence viewership is extremely bothersome. Most people who
read that article take it at face value, don't check the sources, and go on
with life having been misinformed. I know I would have. Irritating.

~~~
Silhouette
To be fair, the TorrentFreak article does mention this rather important detail
as well, but it certainly doesn't make a big deal of it and the headline is
clearly editorialised to the point of outright falsehood.

Looked at the other way around, more than 80% of those surveyed did _not_
mostly or fully accept that pirate copying is ethical (7+ on a scale of 1-10).

~~~
_delirium
Hmm, going back and reading it again, you're right, the article apart from the
headline isn't too bad. I could've sworn some of these details were left out
of it initially though. Any good way to check if the article has been updated?

------
InclinedPlane
As I've pointed out before piracy is a misnomer. Sharing has always been an
integral part of the way people are exposed to and consume art. There are even
institutions that have been built up to support such things for older media:
libraries, used book stores, radio stations, museums. We treasure and value
such institutions because they help to preserve and to spread our art and our
culture.

However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for
spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate
it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and
storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly
indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual
behavior).

To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and
museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how
would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded
legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting
influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and
Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between
ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing
institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat.

P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an
equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out
(current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given
record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible
(technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people
stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely
related.

~~~
bad_user
Selling used books is not comparable with putting an ebook on PirateBay.
Lending books and returning them when you're done reading is also not
comparable to putting an ebook on PirateBay. You also can't display the same
painting in 2 museums unless one of them is just a cheap copy and people don't
appreciate copies in museums.

All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws
of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be
even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical
references for which you can't find the original.

"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no
problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song /
creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be
quite substantial.

Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the
movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if
movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it
doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and
even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's
money" - how can you not be fine with that?)

    
    
          the onus is on producers to figure that out
    

And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA
for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to
build better mouse-traps.

So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal
frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the
situation is only going to get worse.

~~~
chopsueyar
_But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for
altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you
not be fine with that?)_

Are you saying the main motivation to create art is profit and/or recognition?

Human history has many examples of altruistic behaviors for art's sake.

You argue people will stop creating because there will be no profit for them
to do so (or "lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite
substantial").

I argue if someone is motivated enough and creative enough, that person will
find a way to manifest their vision into physical reality.

James Cameron's life during the creation of the movie "Titanic" was not one
motivated by profit for profit's sake...

<http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,290182,00.html>

~~~
bad_user

           Are you saying the main motivation to create 
           art is profit and/or recognition?
    

No, stop twisting my words.

BTW, that article about the Titanic is in total favor of what I said. To break
even, the Titanic needed ~ $400 million dollars.

I would totally love to see someone sharing that for free, for art's sake ;-)

    
    
          You argue people will stop creating because there will 
          be no profit for them to do so
    

I'm not talking about profits; I'm talking about revenu. I'm talking about a
book author that works on a book for an entire year, during which he has to
put food on the table, pay the rent, pay for his son's tuition and live in a
decent environment. In my country, the best poet we've had, a pure genius,
lived in inhuman conditions and died at 39 years old because of syphilis.

Are you by any chance suggesting that they are paid too much?

~~~
chopsueyar
Do you think the genius poet would have been inspired living in a mansion,
every need catered to by servants?

You validated my point. The best poet was not motivated by revenue, and
althought I do not know, was probably not worried of others disseminating
their work.

Creating art for art's sake, not to pay for the offspring's tuition bills.

~~~
Nobido
In the arts, like in any field, you only get better by immersing yourself in
it and it's hard to do that when you have to treat it like a hobby rather than
a job.

Ask yourself what level of talent you would have right now if there was zero
money in coding or designing software, and you just did it on evenings and
weekends, when you were not working your full time job in retail or food
services to scrape by?

There is just something disturbing to me about this idea that people should be
suffering so that others can read better poetry on their comfy 100k tech
salaries.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"Ask yourself what level of talent you would have right now if there was zero
money in coding or designing software"

That's actually part of the reason why I find it so delicious that there are
people outside of Computer Science that are hitting it big in Web and mobile
apps; it's a validation that anyone can do the work of a CS grad just as
anyone can write a novel or paint a picture; it just takes time and effort and
acquiring skills.

------
wazoox
I've just read this in "Against intellectual monopoly" page 296 (
[http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm)
) :

 _Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially expert. Still, it is
a relevant topic: property rights are never enforced only by the law-and-order
system, or even by costly private monitoring of other people's behavior.
Broadly accepted and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one
is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality._

Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen :

 _Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce originator profits and
hurt innovation, but that is a utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical
concern is that whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the public
library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the author of the fruits of
his labor and participated in reducing the author's power to control his self-
expression. Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it
would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries are not illegal,
but the law's injustice would be no reason for a moral person to do unjust
things. The existence of children's sections would be particularly heinous, as
encouraging children to steal._

 _To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a considerable
amount of guilt on copiers, since legal enforcement of copying by individuals
is so difficult. To partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons.
First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while failing to deter
the target misbehavior. Second, it would reduce the effectiveness of guilt in
other situations, by pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral
reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring copying by
individuals, the increased incentive for creation of new products, is
relatively small. I thus conclude that people_
_should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.

~~~
davidw
So what do they propose to avoid the underproduction of "information goods"?

~~~
wazoox
Well, they made a whole book about this :) They argue that the "first mover"
advantage is actually large enough to take care of the problem in the case of
both books and pharmaceuticals; music isn't actually a problem as people
actually making it earn close to nothing from reproduction anyway; software
wouldn't be so much different than it is now, etc.

They take the quite extreme point of view that _all_ intellectual property
should be _completely abolished_. They make IMO a definitive point on the
complete uselessness of patents in general; the case against copyright and
trademarks is somewhat less clear.

~~~
kd0amg
What arguments do they make about patents that do not apply well to copyright?
Do they take any position on trade secret protections?

~~~
wazoox
Patents has been used exclusively to stifle competition and have a very bad
record of actually hampering progress. Even the canonical case of pharma is
debunked thoroughly.

For copyright, the case is quite clear too, though it may still be possible
that a short copyright (14 years, for instance) may still be better than
nothing at all.

Trade secrecy are treated page 188. Basically, it is much more used than
patents, so suppressing patents won't change things much. Revealing secrets
through patents is very inefficient anyway.

------
kingofspain
Are the AA's and their equivalents not shooting themselves in the foot?
Framing the argument in the way they have done (piracy is KILLING art) might
work for a while but sooner or later a thinking person will come to realise
that it really doesn't. Home taping didn't kill anything. Of course, if
everyone suddenly stopped buying and only used torrents then the system would
collapse, but will that happen? If everyone stopped paying taxes the country
would collapse too. No country has an army big enough to enforce that.

You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they
just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed
menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's
demonstrably untrue.

It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws
passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon.

No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than
virtually anyone in history.

~~~
towelrod
Look at something like this:

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01ebook_g.html?ref=media)

So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is
actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is
ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks
pretty good.

I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5
range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.

~~~
kingofspain
I can understand that, but I can also see the other side. Editors,
proofreaders, marketing, binding, printing, sales, distribution etc etc. The
author doesn't pay for those. With ebooks you can drop the binding & printing
but the rest still applies.

I'll concede there will be cases where the mark up is over the top, but you
aren't just paying for the actual words.

------
mistermann
Something that's always irked me is that the recording industry, and artists
themselves, seem to have this notion that every advance in technology should
benefit them, despite them often having no effort in the development of these
technologies.

Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like
watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes
forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If
they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in
return.

~~~
rick888
I doubt it. Most of these warnings and previews that you mention are the
direct result of piracy. I also don't think the movie and music industry are
going to play that game anymore.

in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they
pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and
because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies.

Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview
songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap).
Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own
music without a label.

Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why
can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just
want free music/movies?

~~~
__david__
> Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses.

Has it? I used Napster to download tons of music. Nowadays I use iTunes (and
Amazon). I find it easier than poking around torrent sites or the awful
gnutella junk and the music is reasonably priced and DRM free. Things are
organized better and it makes my searching and downloading relatively
painless.

I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy
blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been
thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a
DVD player in 5 years.

Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and
I'll start buying in a heartbeat.

non-pain = lack of DRM + ease of obtaining + delivery speed + quality +
reasonableness of price.

If movie studios want to deal with piracy they _have_ to compete on all those
points. And they have to consider the whole pipeline from the internet to my
TV. These aren't excuses they're just the economics of the situation.

> Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and
> just want free music/movies?

Because that's just not the case.

~~~
rick888
"If movie studios want to deal with piracy they have to compete on all those
points."

Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves? The music industry
listened (as I stated in my post above) and piracy hasn't decreased. Piracy
will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates want
anyway, but refuse to admit).

"I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy
blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been
thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a
DVD player in 5 years."

You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

"Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and
I'll start buying in a heartbeat."

"reasonable" is relative to everyone. Since the pirates can download things
for free with little effort, even a penny is too much for many people.

"Because that's just not the case."

The problem is that there isn't any way to prove the case either way. Pirates
aren't going to admit they just want stuff for free.

~~~
__david__
> You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

That is untrue. DVDs had DRM well before movies were able to be downloaded
from the internet. DRM was preemptive paranoia from the movie studios. It has
never stopped piracy (only slowed it down temporarily) and it only increases
the view that pirated goods are of higher value than the DRM laden legit
versions.

> Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves?

Theft is a strong word. Copyright infringement is a better term. And the movie
studios have to compete with it because if they don't they will lose
everything, thoroughly.

> Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates
> want anyway, but refuse to admit).

You are casting an awfully wide net there. I've seen this attitude from people
before and I don't get it. Why do you think that $0 is the magical reason for
piracy? Can you not believe that people are more complicated than "OMG
Freeeee!"? Trying to find people's true motivations and ethics and then
working within those boundaries is the only way to stem piracy.

------
arethuza
Is anyone else sick of the use of the term piracy to try and make copyright
infringement sound more threatening?

~~~
motters
Yes, although alternative terms like "forbidden sharing" aren't quite as
catchy and don't have the associated glamour factor from dramatic
swashbuckling movies.

~~~
arethuza
What's wrong with "copyright infringement"?

------
reedlaw
Maybe that's because illegal copying violates no natural law and is in fact
allowable under a common understanding of property rights. If I own a hard
drive, I can store anything I want on it. Copyright limits that natural
property right by saying you can't store certain media or images that have
been designated as "copyrighted" on your own property. This idea is foreign to
most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.

~~~
forensic
>This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.

Which partially explains why most cultures and nearly all ancient societies
had little to no intellectual development.

Thinkers gotta eat or they won't exist.

Intellectual property feeds the families of most of the people on HN.

------
natch
I tried very hard to pay Oscars.com this year to get a stream of the Academy
Awards event. They would not take my money. I tried three different browsers
and two different credit cards. No go.

Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up
getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera
streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that
strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the
ticket to watching the Oscars online.

This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and
they learn.

------
petercooper
The term 'socially acceptable' makes the conclusion hard to pin down.

 _I'd_ say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people
would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies
illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's _right_ or that people _should_
do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable."
What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what _I_ believe
to be right.

~~~
hasenj
You could be of the minority that thinks X is wrong, but why should the law
enforce _your_ opinion on X?

~~~
gjm11
No one's suggesting that it should. He's just pointing out that if you ask
people "is X socially acceptable?" then the results may be quite different
from if you ask "do you accept X?", and they may well be less interesting or
useful.

Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and
60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this
society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do
you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is
goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because
everyone knows that most people approve.

Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly
accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there
are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the
result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the
"is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone
"knows" that most people disapprove.

(How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my
Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)

~~~
DavidSchor
According to the article the question was something I would translate to: "To
what degree do you accept piracy of music from the internet on a scale from 1
to 10. Not at all accepting = 1. Sceptical = 2-6. Accepts it = 7-10"

------
funthree
What happens when 70% of people are okay with something, in a country ruled by
the people?

~~~
praptak
_"[...] in a country ruled by the people"_

Name one.

~~~
benjiweber
Switzerland

~~~
benohear
Snap :-)

------
ahrens
At first I saw the source (torrentfreak) and thought it would be a survey of
their users... But it actually seems like it is a viably study with a good
spread of the subjects. I am actually not that surprised. First of all, it's a
Danish study. As I am myself living in the south of Sweden, I know that we and
the danish have similar views, and that piracy is pretty well accepted here.

Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread.
Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the
opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into
the selection of the group that answered.

The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily
in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use,
is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The
rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use.

Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on
the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.

------
saw-lau
Sometimes I feel I'm the only person left in the world who a) still buys
media; b) doesn't mind doing it; c) thinks it's wrong to pirate things; and d)
doesn't consider it my right to be able to consume any media I want, and the
only reason I'm not doing it is because it's priced too high - IMHO, DVDs,
CDs, etc. are luxury goods.

Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't
surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.

~~~
tluyben2
You are not the only person; I buy when I can. But the emphases on can here;
in Europe where I live, you get, via the web, news about every new tv show,
movie, game and book immediately after it comes out. And then you have to wait
for ages (depending on the popularity) before you can watch / buy it here.
Digital products like ebooks, games, movies and tv shows should not have a geo
limiting factor to them; they are digital. As long as they do, I don't see how
copying can be prevented.

Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in
the EU. Lame.

If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a
long time after release _and_ if everything was easier to use, I believe
copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go
to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the
same time US citizens get it?

(I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from
other countries I _can_ immediately buy, but that might differ depending on
your taste.)

------
Bvalmont
Everyone is copying media. _EVERYONE_. How can it NOT be socially acceptable ?

The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and
selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an
internet pirate is doing.

~~~
mistermann
Lending a game is not exactly the same thing as piracy, in that case there is
one copy that is being shared. When you pirate something, two people have a
copy and can use at the same time in different locations.

~~~
jasonlotito
Thought game.

If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay?

If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the
copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to
have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after
accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

What if it required a password?

Note, I'm not trying to push the agenda that piracy is right. Rather, that
piracy isn't as easy as saying someone copied a file.

Edit: I really want to stress I'm not trying ot make a point. Even I can't
answer all these questions easily.

~~~
aplusbi
>If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay?

Ethically I believe this to be equivalent to lending a book/cd/whatever to a
friend (this has been done, actually, as a protest/stunt. A guy attempted to
sell an mp3 from iTunes on eBay).

>If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the
copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

Distributor, generally. I feel this is similar to receipt of stolen property.
In most places you are only liable if you knew it was stolen.

>If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them
to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but
ignorance is rarely a successful defense.

>Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after
accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

Why wouldn't you be?

>What if it required a password?

How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes
the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part
of the problem. There is (seemingly) no way have one without the other. If I
want the ability to lend an ebook to a friend then I must also have the
ability to give a copy to my friend. There are some systems in place to
attempt to reconcile this, but they are either limited (you can lend it x
number of times) or take away some other right (for example, it might take
away the right to have a backup copy).

~~~
jasonlotito
> Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but
> ignorance is rarely a successful defense.

Their was no intent. Someone was merely able to gain access to the computer
without my expressed knowledge and download a file (hypothetical, of course).

> Why wouldn't you be?

I guess your assuming I've given them explicit access to the FTP server.

> How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Sorry, I tried to state the conditions. In the previous question it was merely
that, I setup an FTP server, I don't password protect it, but I don't publish
that the site exists.

So, yes, in the last question: someone guessed the password.

> Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes
> the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge
> part of the problem.

Agreed, which was the point of the exercise. We infer so much from simple
actions. Intention is important, as you mentioned.

------
WorkingDead
If copyright laws were reasonable then people would not find it acceptable to
break them.

~~~
rick888
If tax laws were reasonable, then people would not find it acceptable to break
them.

------
cabalamat
Piracy is socially acceptable, but politicians are passing ever more draconian
laws in a futile attempt to prop up the music industry's obsolete business
model.

If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate
Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.

------
robryan
Interesting thought, if piracy did manage to put a big dent into say the
profitability of books, would we then see a lot more projects popping up on
sites like kickstarter which would probably be very popular given the
diminished choice in the market for readers.

------
kgtm
Socially acceptable or not, anti-piracy advocates fail to realize that if i am
pirating something, i had no intention to buy it. They really, really fail to
see this. You can inflate the amount of money you are losing because of me all
you want, the reality remains.

And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me
pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest
and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my
face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money.

Go Minecraft.

------
slavak
This reminds me of a quote from Penny Arcade[1]:

'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and
he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from
your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I
suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to
warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would
hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books
are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital
"book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing
that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'

The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as
big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe.
What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to
chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where
products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being
rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than
licensing the words in that book for reading.

[1]<http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/>

~~~
forensic
If you ever thought you owned the words in a book, you were mistaken.

~~~
Helianthus16
in certain ideologies subscribed to by some anti-imaginary-property
proponents, this statement applies to the author of those words as well.

------
spacemanaki
This was a Danish study, does anyone know the size of their sample? Did it
include other Europeans, anyone from North America, Asia? I would imagine it
would make a bit of a difference in the results, and would be interesting to
compare.

~~~
sesqu
My Danish isn't too hot, but I make it N=1146, Danish only.

------
njharman
"best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to
pirate"

No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing
something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some
replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.

Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.

Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They
actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with
downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more
bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.

------
bena
I hope this highlights the fallacy of using consensus to determine what is
ethical:

"70% of the public finds rape socially acceptable"

Would we be having the same conversation?

~~~
wnoise
That would be a reasonable counterpoint if 70% of the public did find rape
socially acceptable.

------
sigzero
Really? Almost none of my friends finds it acceptable. Maybe they are skewing
the data to support their position. That never happens though.

~~~
natch
Maybe you live in a bubble. That never happens though.

But more seriously, maybe none of your friends have had the experience of
buying an LP, then later paying again for the same music on cassette, (and
maybe 8-track and minidisc) and then again on CD.

And then maybe they weren't aware that the industry conducted a huge PR
campaign to let people know that when they buy music, they are just paying for
a license, not for the physical artifact. Of course they only did this after
people had already switched to CDs. If we had known this before, we could have
asked for crossgrades of the license from
LP/single/tape/8-track/minidisc/whatever to CD.

And maybe your friends didn't hear about things like "Plays For Sure(TM)",
Microsoft's DRM scheme that tricked millions of people into paying for music
which Microsoft then decided would not play any more.

For those of us who did hear about these things, after paying for the same
music three times, we're ready to just download our fucking songs that we
already paid for.

------
kstenerud
Wow... I didn't expect these sorts of tabloid headers to occur on Hacker News.
That's usually a Reddit thing.

Shouldn't Hacker News be a cut above, where people first read and understand
an article, and then post it to HN with a succinct, relevant, and most
importantly TRUTHFUL title?

------
fields
Did Apple keep the other 30%?

------
s00pcan
I really doubt that software piracy would be illegal if put to a public vote.

------
hernan7
It's not surprising that piracy is becoming more acceptable, since for much of
the world the opposite of "piracy" is "giving money to the US".

(Independently of how much the numbers in this particular poll were
manipulated.)

------
iterationx
How do you do a poll? I'd be more interested in:

X% of HN finds piracy acceptable

------
rick888
The taxes are so high in Denmark, I'm not surprised. Most people don't have
that much money left over to spend on things like music and movies.

~~~
rtp
Do you have a source on that? I live in Sweden, have an average wage, and we
have pretty high taxes, yet I could potentially buy a lot of movies and CDs if
I wanted to, and I gather Denmark doesn't have that much higher taxes than
Sweden, so that is why I'm asking.

------
saturn
Only 70%? In my social circle it would be 100%, and has been for years.
Ironically I still spend more on media than anyone else I know, piracy or no
..

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's hardly ironic at all, it's merely counter-intuitive if you accept the
notion that sharing == piracy (see my other post). If you reject that notion
then the idea that greater enthusiasm for media by way of sharing should be
correlated with greater media expenditures follows quite logically and
directly.

------
libpcap
I find it acceptable. eMule, PeerBlock, and verycd.com have always been my
friends.

------
smogzer
piracy is the opiate of the youth.

------
ancymon
I hope it won't discourage people to become sailors…

