from Hacker News

Ask HN: If SOPA isn't the answer, how do you eliminate online piracy?

by DilipJ on 1/12/12, 8:19 PM with 20 comments

• by noonespecial on 1/12/12, 8:27 PM

  You don't fight piracy with laws. You fight piracy with products.

  Most piracy is more about convenience than price. Thousands of smarter people than me have written reams about this. Its like fighting obesity. You don't just take a drug and get a quick fix, it takes a different mindset that causes the patient to live a different kind of life.

• by armaanahluwalia on 1/12/12, 8:26 PM

  Let's all be clear here. SOPA is less about piracy and more about censorship.

  The internet has evolved into becoming our only defense against people in power ( be they governments or corporations ) conspiring to keep the status quo by keeping information from us. SOPA is their attempt at confiscating this wonderful tool we have for organisation and spreading information.

  This discussion is part of a larger debate as to the balancing act of affording unchecked power to a selected group of people. Keep in mind, the ideal of democracy allowing the replacement of these powers DOES NOT WORK in real life. THIS is the real root of the problem. This entire debate reminds me of the Lokpal bill debate going on in India. Essentially asking – How do you police the police?

• by clueless on 1/12/12, 8:54 PM

  How do you stop drug trade? How do you stop illegal activities in general. I'm not sure you can ever eliminate these. Most you can do is to curb them.

  In the case of online piracy, as some have already said, part of the issue is convenience. But that is only a part of the issue (and this where netflixes, spotifies, and steams of the world come in). But you will never be able to stop people who rather pirate (either for financial reasons, symbolic reasons, etc.).

  Now the question is, are you willing to give power to people who may abuse it to stop something that may be unstoppable or would you rather work on other means of curbing the issue.

• by rythie on 1/12/12, 8:23 PM

  You can't eliminate it completely, though companies like Nike, Apple and Microsoft are able to continue being profitable despite widespread pirating of their goods. In part the problem is that piracy is easier than current methods of getting content and partly that businesses haven't adapted to the new business models needed.

• by Avenger42 on 1/12/12, 8:48 PM

  Actually, I don't agree - to my mind, the DMCA (as much as I disagree with most of it) already provides a mechanism for the situation to be handled: if we find our content on your site, we send you a notice; to be eligible for "safe harbor" status, the site must take the content down.

  We've already seen that this law is often misused by large-scale content creators (see: Warner and Hotfile, various music labels issuing takedowns on files uploaded by their own artists). I don't know why I should expect that giving additional power to those most likely to misuse it is a good idea.