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.

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.

[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?

[_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.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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."

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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".

[stupidsignup]

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