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.
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.
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?
Can anyone explain why they support piracy without resorting to misapplied notions of free speech?
We who create should be united in defending our rights to control and to profit from our labors.
Lots of important code boils down to identities:
Or equivalences: Or other relations: 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.)