Hacker News

points by Forgeties79 15 hours ago | 0 comments

When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?

Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.

I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.

[–] NooneAtAll5 15 hours ago

you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers

[–] Forgeties79 14 hours ago

You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that

[–] davkan 13 hours ago

Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.

[–] Forgeties79 12 hours ago

I was (mistakenly) talking about what motivates people, not the benefits of piracy. The vast majority of people engaging in the practice are doing it to get free media. If someone isn’t even practicing basic 321 I don’t want to hear the word “preservation” or “archive” lol

In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.

As for people who make it possible, that’s another thing entirely and I agree!

[–] davkan 10 hours ago

Agreed! Although i will say i believe you are meaningfully contributing to preservation when you permaseed torrents, especially in private trackers. These are geographically distributed copies available for others to grab and contribute to keeping safe.

Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.