

Why do many programmers defend/support intellectual property theft? - jrd79

Computer programmers and other people involved in the development of new technology generate extremely valuable IP on which most of them depend for their living.  Some depend on this directly by selling what they produce and others do so indirectly by selling advertising space or consulting services.  More than in almost all other fields (music and movies being clear exceptions), technologists depend on a proper respect for intellectual property to prosper.<p>And yet on Hacker News and most other technology-oriented forums and news sites, the overwhelming consensus seems to be pro-piracy.  This strikes me as childish and silly and I honestly don't understand how people - especially people who should be smart enough and thoughtful enough to think clearly on the subject - can have such wrong-headed views on something so important to them.<p>Piracy is immoral and corrupt (the Pirate Bay guys made a bundle off of other people's software, music, and movies), it discourages innovation and has strong anarchistic elements to it.  Other than selfish convenience for the pirate, what possible justification does it have?<p>Can anyone explain why they support piracy without resorting to misapplied notions of free speech?<p>We who create should be united in defending our rights to control and to profit from our labors.
======
celoyd
People who do math (in a large sense that includes programming) often have a
streak of Platonic realism: the idea that ideas are less _invented_ than
_discovered_.

Lots of important code boils down to identities:

    
    
        a^0.5
        == sqrt(a)
        == (b such that b×b == a)
        == (a certain line of x86 assembler)
        == (a certain line of python)
    

Or equivalences:

    
    
        Turing machine
        == lambda calculus
        == Java Virtual Machine
        == Haskell
        == Conway’s game of life
        == Excel
    

Or other relations:

    
    
        worst-case runtime of X ≤ worst-case runtime of Y
    

The notion of owning necessary relationships between concepts is at best
problematic. It’s not helped by the fact that a lot of pretty obvious ideas
get protection. The first one that comes to mind is US patent 4941193, which
covers doing fractal image compression in the way that any competent
programmer hearing the phrase “fractal image compression” would immediately
imagine. There’s no incentive to license that kind of patent to the little
guys, and the little guys don’t want to do the paperwork anyway, so a lot of
things like fractal compression have stagnated because someone _owns the
predicate_ that images are often self-similar.

This is obviously not the whole story. There are benefits to society, and
specifically to programmers, from moderate IP protection. But I think it’s is
a reasonable answer to your question. The default attitude for hackers seems
to be that anyone should be able to implement anything in the literature for
any purpose. If you have the technical ability to circumvent what you see as
immoral restrictions on knowledge of the structure of the world, you’re likely
to do it.

(I’m not trying to argue for this view in this comment, only to point it out.)

~~~
jacobn
The original question seemed to pertain more to copyright than to patents -
the patentability of software is very much debatable, but the copyrightability
of the works of science/art/cobbled together messes that we make seems pretty
clear?

~~~
celoyd
I’m not an IP scholar, but my impression is that patents and copyright have
basically the same intent; the only big difference is that patents are for
methods and copyrights are for expressions.

Where you draw the line between methods and expressions, or discovered and
invented things, depends on how much you like Plato’s style of thinking. We
can imagine people on either extreme of realism/idealism arguing (A) that 1 =
1 is an invention of our mathematical system, or (B) that _Girl with a Pearl
Earring_ is merely the discovery of the pre-existing fact that that pattern of
paint is pleasing.

Likewise, as things stand now, I can copyright a map. There’s an obvious
argument against this: I didn’t _make_ what the map shows, and I can’t _own_
the fact that land is the shape it is. And an obvious argument for it: it took
real work to research, design, and produce, and this deserves a reward. I
think that hackers generally tend to come down further on the first argument’s
side than most people do.

~~~
carussell
_it took real work to research, design, and produce, and this deserves a
reward._

That's not necessarily the US's position on copyright, either. See Bridgeman
v. Corel.

------
_delirium
I don't think the consensus here is particularly strong in any direction.

As for reasons, it varies by person, but a few common reasons for not being
hugely in favor of "intellectual property" despite working in an intellectual
area:

1\. Even if well-meaning originally, intellectual property may actually harm
innovation and innovators in certain areas (especially with the terrible state
of patent law, but also with very long copyright terms).

2\. Not everyone buys the analogy with property (many libertarians, for
example, don't). That doesn't mean copyright should be abolished (even if it's
not really property, it could still be a useful concept), but it does put it
in a different category.

3\. Objections to the manner in which governmental police and investigatory
power is used to enforce it. Unlike with normal property, fully enforcing
intellectual property laws requires quite invasive government powers, since
people can violate them without even venturing off their own property (copying
music between USB drives, say).

4\. Objections to the collateral damage caused by private-sector attempts to
control copying, either technical measures like DRM, or contract-law measures
like EULAs, especially since these restrictions tend to be aimed at stopping
even legitimate tinkering, which is important to many hackers.

I would tone down the language if I were you, though, if you want to have an
actual discussion (if this was just an opportunity for a rant, then never
mind). Your post comes off as condescending and belligerent, yet you don't
appear to actually have a strong command of the relevant issues or even
awareness of the arguments, which is a poor combination.

~~~
netcan
Intellectual property is an interesting issue because of what it says about
people and how they approach things.

(a)Your opinion is your own. There isn't a political left-right position here.
If you have a position climate change, nationally provided services and
welfare, etc. that are associate with a political camp you can't derive an IP
position from this. It's also hard to derive an opinion from fundamentals. A
person's opinion here, is more than on other issues, his own.

(b) It's very easy to know enough to be dangerous. Understanding why 'patents
encourages innovation' or 'IP fragmentation' discourages innovation. But,
issue is multifaceted and hard to reduce to a manageable number of parameters.
Even the most theoretical advocates of one side or another generally talk
about balances (tweaking patent expiration, fair use laws) rather than
fundamentals. Knowing enough to sound smart is easy. Knowing enough to have
what is a well thought out position is pretty hard.

Put these two together and it tells you about how a person thinks. For
example, if one has a lot of knowledge, some interesting insight but still
doesn't have a strong opinion that tells you a lot about them.

------
marssaxman
Violating the terms of a copyright license by making an unauthorized copy is
not the same thing as theft. If I steal your car, I have one car and you have
none; if I copy your data, I have a copy of your data and so do you. You have
not been deprived of property, so there is no theft.

If you offer to sell me a copy of your data for $X, but I decline, then choose
to get a copy of the same data from someone else for free, I have stolen
nothing, since you still have your data. What you have lost is the opportunity
to offer me a lower price, which I might have accepted. This is not the same
as theft, and I am far less sympathetic to this vaporous loss of potential
than I would be to an actual loss of goods or services.

As far as your belief that intellectual property can be extremely valuable, or
that people involved in the development of new technology necessarily depend
on it for a living, that is commonly claimed but does not correlate well with
my experience. My career only took off when I started giving my software away
- I made more money selling my consulting services than I ever did by selling
licenses for my software, and freeware gave me a better reputation than
shareware ever had.

Conversely, for a stretch of about five years not one line of code I wrote
actually shipped, because the companies that owned the rights to my code
changed strategy, went out of business, or simply lost interest in the
project. I have heard similar stories from other developers. Think of all that
work gone completely to waste, because it was all locked up behind a wall of
"intellectual property!"

As far as software patents go, they have only negative value: they are worse
than a zero-sum game. Patenting a software idea is a great way to make sure no
software developer will ever read about it, since nobody wants to be liable
for triple damages due to willful infringement. The only value a software
patent has to anyone is the opportunity to sue a large corporation.

In summary, I don't agree that intellectual property necessarily has
significant value, and I don't agree that violating pointlessly restrictive
copyright licenses is necessarily harmful. Nor, for that matter, do I think
"strong anarchistic elements" are a bad thing.

The justification is that making it easier for people to get what they want is
generally a good thing. Violating the artificial gatekeeping privileges of an
arbitrary rightsholder in order to increase the general happiness sounds like
it is probably a good thing most of the time.

~~~
Tycho
If you look up what property really means, it is not a physical
object/possession, it's an abstract _right of disposal_ over something. If you
steal my car, I cannot dispose of it how I choose, and if you take my data
without permission, again I can no longer dispose of it how I choose. So you
have, in fact, deprived me of property in both cases.

~~~
chc
It doesn't matter if you reframe it that way. You can _never_ dispose of
mental things how you choose. The mind doesn't work the same way as physical
things, which is why pretending that "intellectual property" is the same thing
as physical property is a non-starter.

------
pg
Precisely because they understand "intellectual property" well enough, for
example, not to uncritically accept that violating license terms = theft.

------
iwr
Intellectual property is a misnomer, or at least a weaker form of property.
It's not about free speech, but rather about the particulars of owning an idea
which may reside in another mind. Calling it theft outright is framing the
question. Of course people are against _theft_ , but if their ideas of theft
are different, they are referring to different things.

Furthermore, there are three distinct cases where IP is understood
differently: trademarks, copyright and patents (I suspect you are referring to
copyrights). Some people may be against only one or two forms of IP, while
accepting the others.

~~~
mooism2
IP refers to database rights, too (most similar to copyrights, but distinct
from it).

~~~
iwr
What are database rights?

~~~
_delirium
A form of copyright on a collection of facts. In the U.S., the famous
"telephone books aren't copyrightable" case ( _Feist v. Rural_ ) held that
mere compilations of facts aren't copyrightable, because they aren't a
creative work, and copyright is intended to protect only original, creative
works. Collections with some degree of creativity in the selection and
arrangement might count, but an alphabetical listing of all people in an area
code with their phone numbers was held not to possess any creativity.

Other countries have more of a "sweat of the brow" view of copyright, that
it's intended to protect any work that took effort to produce, so even a
compilation of mere facts could be copyrightable, if it took a lot of effort
to compile them. The EU now has a separate pseudo-copyright for databases that
wouldn't otherwise be copyrightable
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive>).

The main people pushing that are, as you might guess, those who have amassed a
lot of data that isn't protected by normal copyright. For example, stock-
ticker data is not copyrightable (it's just a mechanical listing of facts),
and the companies that make a lot of money licensing it aren't happy about
that.

~~~
iwr
Thanks, I was not aware of that aspect.

~~~
bediger
Which basically proves the point that "Intellectual Property" isn't property:
not everybody has even a similar view of what the phrase denotes.

------
gdl
A large part of the issue is that many major copyright owners have proven
themselves to have very little regard for law or morality themselves. When the
RIAA blackmails people (with very little evidence against them) and forces
them to pay a few thousand dollars for a settlement or be sued into oblivion
by a battalion of corporate lawyers, the masses will hardly defend the RIAA.
Or when they try to write laws to spy on and censor the entire Internet for
their direct gain, many people get very upset at the implications. When game
publishers sell games that are so heavily DRM'd as to be difficult to play
legitimately while still trivial to pirate, people shrug and get the pirated
copies if they want to be able to play.

On the other hand, there have been lots of stories where creators have open
discussions with pirates, without reflexively making them the enemy, and are
rewarded by respect and increased sales. Pirates are people too, and many act
with a higher moral compass than you might expect, though it may differ from
your own.

I think it's not so much that piracy is seen as good, but that it's not as
evil as some would make it out to be, and the other side makes themselves so
unsymphathetic that nobody cares about them.

------
megaman821
I don't think the majority of people are pro-piracy, it is just that they are
"hackers". Hackers try to figure out how to hack things to their needs.

Online music started with Limewire and ended with iTunes. I feel this is the
fate of a lot of other forms of media. A frustrated group of hackers will
thwart the current system until there is a viable market option. Most people,
if given the chance, will pay for what they want.

------
whichdokta
I'm sorry people copy your stuff.

I'm not one to tell someone else how to run their business but could it be
that relying on fragile concepts such as "Intellectual Property" are not a
good method for gaining the ability to control and profit from your labors?

Personally I've always relied largely on the reputation I've built up for
being able to solve the problems of my clients but your mileage may vary.

I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really
hard at something and get nothing back for your effort.

~~~
MoreMoschops
"I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really
hard at something and get nothing back for your effort."

That implies I could spend a year writing a million godawful poems and it
would be unfair not to pay me for them.

~~~
whichdokta
I'm sorry you feel that your poetry isn't any good yet.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who said that everyone has about a million
words of garbage in them they have to get out before they can write well.

------
makecheck
There are many things in the world that can be used for good and bad, and
supporting the existence of those things does not mean that you're in favor of
the bad parts.

Some companies that sell content have decided to use a heavy-handed approach
(DRM), demonstrably punishing their _paying_ customers. They are not looking
for new ways to make perhaps even more money in the Internet age; they are
only trying to preserve what is arguably a dying business model. They ignore
legitimate questions like, "if I can't afford this and you give it to me for
half price, and I can easily share it with 10 of my friends, will that
generate sales you wouldn't have otherwise seen"?

The "pirates" are a bit like a rally to restore sanity: they provide what
people actually want (which is NOT "free movies"), and frankly content
companies have been too stupid to realize this outcome. Not everyone cares if
a download is free. What they _really_ want is freedom from the bullshit that
is digitally shoved into DVDs these days (like previews you can't skip,
commercials when you've already paid for content, and other restrictions on
what you can do). They want to play something they've bought on one device,
and not have an error box come up when they shamefully try to play it on
another device that they also own.

If you're wondering why artists don't see much money, take a look at the
insultingly small percentages they get from their rich overlords.

~~~
carussell
_which is NOT "free movies"_

I call bullshit. That's exactly the case, as I've heard it plenty of times.
Freedom from the joke that is DVD + "Digital Copy" is what _I_ want freedom
from. Not so much the case with the bulk of other people. Plenty like to pull
out these types of oh-so-plausible ideological rationalizations when pressed,
but p2p is largely accounted for by "I want it and I don't give a fuck."

------
tgflynn
I haven't seen any evidence that people here are "pro-piracy" but concerning
your first paragraph I'll argue one reason for why many software developers
may not be terribly thrilled with the current notion of "intellectual
property".

The majority of software developers are employees of corporations. As such
they typically receive only a small fraction of the economic benefit derived
from the value they create. The current economic system simply does not
allocate benefits proportionally to created value. This fact will worsen as
technology continues to increase the efficiency of labor. By the 20's millions
of people will be losing their jobs to automation (probably not programmers,
that will take a few more decades) and labor, the primary mechanism society
has for distributing wealth, will essentially cease to exist.

I don't know what will happen at that point but it is clear to me that the
current system is unsustainable.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
_The majority of software developers are employees of corporations. As such
they typically receive only a small fraction of the economic benefit derived
from the value they create._

If I choose to work for myself, then usually I am accepting a much higher
degree of risk. Maybe I am developing a new product, and I don't have a
portfolio of other products to fall back on should my idea fail. Maybe my
business is too small to take advantage of certain economies of scale.

If I choose to work for a corporation, there is a good chance that the two
risks above, and many of the risks you may come up with, have been mitigated
to some extent. Also, chances are I probably work in a large team. So the
economic benefit is divided among more people. Furthermore, the mitigated
risks warrant less return.

It's all about the trade-offs that economics so wonderfully covers. I have to
disagree with your statement.

~~~
tgflynn
Sure there are trade-offs but it's very difficult to quantify how much you're
giving up and how much you're getting in return. A corporate developer is
constantly building up the IP portfolio of his company, but how good an idea
does he have of the long-term value of his contributions ? If you knew that
the value to the company of your work was 10x your salary would you still want
to accept the trade-off or would you start looking for other options ?

------
indrax
Can you support copyright without resorting to the misapplied notion of having
the right to control and profit from your labors?

There are long established rights, 'natural' rights if you want, that pertain
to things like being able to do what we want with the things we own and the
information we have.

Copyright is a government granted monopoly, which is supposed to be temporary.

The right to control and profit from your labor does not extend to restricting
the basic activities of other people.

If you have valuable skills, you can charge for them. The market for services
doesn't evaporate when copyright is eliminated.

One problem with long term copyright is that it disconnects _doing_ creative
work from _profiting_ from creative work, the opposite of it's original
intent.

Piracy is morally neutral.

------
epynonymous
the answer is simple, developers are typically analytical so it's easy to
calculate the opportunity cost of getting something for free versus buying it.

i think people kind of block it out of their heads that it's illegal because
everyone does it, it's plenty available, and nobody you really know gets sued
for it. there's some high philosophical reasoning perhaps behind it as well,
i'm just consuming the content, i'm not making money off it. so there are
various things at play here. i don't think any developer, when it comes down
to it, agrees with piracy for profit or not giving authors credit for their
work, i think most people would agree it's wrong when put under the fire.

i think in terms of defending our rights, the code we write is often times not
completely our rights, i.e. if you work at another company, or any said group
of open source software that you may bundle e.g. GPL, LPGL, etc. so there's a
lack of ownership and therefore a lack of being able to identify with IP like
someone writing a song or book.

i think to say that piracy is immoral and corrupt, that's another topic since
morals aren't universal. who's to say that some aggressive marketer isn't
brainwashing you or using some tactic to pluck your hard earned money and
putting lots of red tape between you and your artist? who's to say your
favorite artist isn't turned on by greed and fame, two things that i would
consider immoral and corrupt. the point is that i don't think morals apply to
this argument.

------
JesseAldridge
I don't think the attitude is so much pro-piracy as anti-regulation and pro-
getting-stuff-done. Hackers tend to be naturally averse to the two traditional
means of combating piracy: government regulation and DRM. Government
regulation requires bureaucracy, which hackers hate. DRM creates obstacles to
getting stuff done, which hackers also hate.

I agree that piracy is probably a big enough problem to make the
aforementioned potential solutions a lesser evil. But I doubt there's any way
the hacker community will accept that.

~~~
bediger
_piracy is probably a big enough problem to make the aforementioned potential
solutions a lesser evil._

Got any particular citations for that? I happen to think exactly the opposite,
that we've already gone way to far to mititage an almost non-existent problem.

I'm dreading the day when I can't use "bittorrent" to download the latest
Slackware distribution, because using "bittorrent" automatically makes you a
theif.

~~~
JesseAldridge
> Got any particular citations for that?

[http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/index.htm?postversion=2010020309)

Making the pie smaller ultimately leads to lower quality.

I am virtually certain people will argue that this argument is invalid for
whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure that'll be more indicative of the bias
seen among hackers than anything else.

~~~
bediger
CNN? Really, seriously?

That's almost certainly CD or album sales, from a source at least as reliable
as CNN:
[http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/archive/2010/01/07/704350...](http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/archive/2010/01/07/704350.aspx)

But it looks like overall, sales are up:
[http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/...](http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/Will%20Page%20and%20Chris%20Carey%20\(2009\)%20Adding%20Up%20The%20Music%20Industry%20for%202008.pdf)
I will grant that's for the UK, not worldwide, but still, a good indicator.

Further, in a competitive market, the price of a good tends to fall to the
marginal cost of production. That's Free Market Econ 101, and we're all Free
Marketeers, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The cost of producing
(in an economnic, not artistic sense) has fallen to almost zero. Why wouldn't
we expect revenues to fall like that?

Also: >I am virtually certain people will argue that this argument is invalid
for whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure that'll be more indicative of the
bias seen among hackers than anything else.

Then why bother to ask the question? You've just stated that you're not going
to listen to answers, except maybe if they confirm what you already believe
("bias towards piracy").

------
wladimir
I'm not pro-piracy, but I don't see it as an offense as serious as stealing
either.

In my opinion, copyrights and patents are the things that discourage
innovation, not 'piracy'. They make it unnecessarily difficult to do anything,
especially for smaller companies, because almost everything is encumbered in a
complex web of cross-licensing. This makes it no longer about leading in
technology, but about hiring tons of expensive lawyers.

Invention is not about protecting what has been. It's about staying ahead.

------
prodigal_erik
> our rights to control and to profit from our labors

I'm all for profiting from socially useful work for hire, when nobody was
going to volunteer to provide it. But you can't control your IP. You can only
control _other people_ while they're using it. And that I find odious, an evil
which isn't necessary. A system that successfully prevents copying is too
intentionally crippled to be a tool worthy of human beings.

As it happens, I'm going to a mashup show at jwz's club in a couple of hours.
They're using art as the ingredients for new art, which of course imposes a
tenuous existence in a legal grey area, when it's the kind of innovation we
should never have granted authors the power to prohibit (rather than merely
profit from).

------
vorg
Physical things aren't copyable (though their brand logos are, but product
imitation is another story). Perhaps currency is the only thing that really
needs to be protected against copying for an economy to function, and many
governments are the main culprits in "copying" (i.e. inflating) currency.

------
drallison
James Besson of the Boston University School of Law has studied the economics
of software patents and intellectual property. His Research on Innovation web
site, <http://www.researchoninnovation.org/>, has several interesting papers.

------
bumbledraven
Maybe because they realize that "intellectual property" isn't really property
as we usually understand the term. It's just a clever phrase coined to
influence the way people think about the issue, like "cyber bullying".

------
indrax
You know, when a bunch of people you think ought to be intelligent and extra
logical take a moral stance that seems to run counter to their own interests,
that should _really_ make you think they're on to something.

------
stupidsignup
I think jrd79 doesnt care, he just wants to boost his carma

------
earl
Speaking only for myself: I strongly support people sharing as much music and
whatever else as they want because the RIAA / MPAA are thieves. Those
organizations have strongly supported making people pay _per device they own_
which is just fucking ridiculous. If I buy a CD, I should be able to listen to
it in my car, on my ipod while walking, on my computer at work, and on my
stereo at home. Until the RIAA/MPAA/artists start advocating for reasonable
laws, I just can't be bothered to care. Not to mention their insistence on
DRM.

Frankly, I view this as a solved problem -- itunes has demonstrated that as
long as prices are reasonable and the service is extremely convenient, most
people will just pay instead of bothering with p2p stuff.

Since I largely view Congress as owned by Disney et al, I view p2p effort /
thepiratebay et al as a more than justified counterbalance.

~~~
carussell
_Those organizations have strongly supported making people pay per device they
own which is just fucking ridiculous. If I buy a CD, I should be able to
listen to it in my car, on my ipod while walking, on my computer at work, and
on my stereo at home. Until the RIAA/MPAA/artists start advocating for
reasonable laws, I just can't be bothered to care._

There's the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. Your argument does nothing to
justify use of p2p for what you haven't already purchased; I'm going to go out
on a limb and guess that the occurrences of "I bought that album last decade,
and I'm not paying for it again." account for a stupidly small portion of p2p.

