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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I’d like to solicit themotte’s thoughts on the ethics of piracy. Specificlly movies, software, and music.

Sharing copyrighted data has been a part of the internet landscape for as long as there has been networked computers. I know it traces back to the bbs days and likely even earlier than that.

Back in the early aughts I was involved in a forum where we would scan for unsecured FTP servers and then fill them with the latest movie music and software releases straight from the groups who actually created and distributed the files. The beauty of this is that you were transferring between commercial networks so the speeds were ludicrous.

This was not long after Napster popularized file sharing and typical online user was very much of the opinion that copying data and sharing it was not equivalent to stealing. Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media. The only reason one wouldn’t do it was that there you needed some minimal level of technical know how to find more than just music on p2p networks. The only folks opposed to it were media corporations, some artists, and a small amount of corporate shills.

Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online. If there was ease of access and a fair price, most people would be happy to purchase software. This sentiment is still common but I sense it’s become less prominent over the last few years. The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.

The point of this post is to suggest that people’s opinion on the ethics of media piracy is diametrically opposed to where it was for most of the internets history. The median online opinion that I see is that piracy = theft. Many of these people are young and have been thought from an early age that piracy is not ethical. I suspect that many have also changed their opinion as they age and perhaps are not working at software/medi companies where piracy not affects them directly.

From a personal perspective, I stopped pirating media when iTunes and steam hit the market because it was in fact easier to obtain things legally and I was happy to pay.

That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers. I am happy to pirate their software and steal their movies because the alternative is so distasteful to me. I will occasionally really enjoy something and find the creators to be acceptable enough to support. In those cases I will purchase something after the fact to support people that I agree with. I encourage everyone to do the same. Enforcement of file sharing these days is non-existent. You can pretty much use the the pirate bay without worry and ignore the occasional email from you isp asking you to stop. Though there are many other alternatives out there that don’t take long to find.

There's the question of what exactly the artists are selling. If you can hear the product for free with advertising, then the product is advertising. You're not stealing a Van Gogh, you're re-using a digitalized ad for a band being used to sell a digitalized ad for beef jerky or some shit.

If I hang a piece of junk mail in my living room, I haven't stolen art from the company that sent it to me. I've just kept their advertising for personal enjoyment.

This doesn't work if you're getting your music direct from artists, but that's a small section of the market.

TL/DR: Give me a good choice and I'll gladly pay for it.

Growing up music was inaccessible to me. CDs were expensive, mtv required cable (expensive), ... I could only suffer the whims of radio (nothing like getting laughed at while calling in a request). Then Napster came and I had the ability to listen to whatever I wanted, watch any music video, find bootlegs, and then to burn mix CDs! It opened new worlds for me. Like, I could actually listen to the music that influenced the bands I like!

I understood that it was hurting the industry but it's not like the bands I liked were getting any money and there was already plenty of critique of the recording industry. It's weird to ask me to act ethically when the entity I'm dealing with is not... And I was broke, I just didn't care.

Now I get most of my music through bandcamp. They treat the artists pretty well and I have some money to spend. I also try to go to shows and buy a tshirt (instead of a $12 beer).

That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers

They made it political, it was a choice made at a corporate level. Which is fine but it also makes pirating political. We are also not some anarchist punk band or something... These are large corporate entities employing a business strategy. Acting like pirating is hurting their artist expression is kind of silly. :marseyshrug:

It's entirely a pragmatic choice (in short piracy suits my self-interested ends better), but if I had to frame it as a matter of ethics I would say I have been presented with a choice of a) free as in speech plus as in beer, versus b) paying to conform and suffering artificial restrictions for the privilege.

The second order effect is that I have spent money on creative works that I absolutely would not have bought when I was buying other media. It could be argued that provides some justification for pirating but it's a hollow claim to virtue.

I'll confess that I pirate almost everything because I believe the money I'd pay will almost certainly end up under the control of powerful blue tribers who hate my way of life. As @Amadan said below, this isn't a principled stand, it's a "fuck you," and so be it. I rationalize this a bit because I donate a portion of my income to charity and send money directly to good ideologically-friendly/non-ideological creators whenever possible using Patreon, Bandcamp, etc. But it's still unethical I guess.

ETA: Another mitigating factor in my guilt could be that I don't watch or use >98% of the stuff I pirate. In the last two years, I've watched three TV series, one anime, and maybe 3-4 movies. I can't think of any pirated media I've watched this year, actually, except the last few episodes of Better Call Saul. So at least creators can take solace knowing that my stolen copies will almost certainly never be consumed.

Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media.

Was somewhere teenaged through to uni during the height of Kazaa/LimeWire/etc and then the golden age of torrents (when good private trackers were abound and you could actually expect torrents to be organically seeded for months/years rather than depending on either release groups themselves or one guy with a seedbox). IRC XDCC was still commonplace and Usenet was going strong (as ever).

Everyone in my social circles pirated. Not even just because it was free (which, granted, was a big deal) but because it was cool. The newness of the tech, the sketchiness, all added to the excitement, the glamour. But that's what you get when said social circles were literal children and teenagers, or at least under 30.

Our boomer parents weren't as excited, and weren't in support of it, but the internet was seen as the Wild West, then. Sure they had an little inkling that piracy didn't seem quite legal, but the ones with any computer exposure probably also downloaded a wallpaper or a MSWORD resume template at some point, and that was kind of the same, right? Mentions of piracy didn't trigger too many alarms, as with all things when you proclaimed "I got it from the internet", so long as it wasn't porn or something.

Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online.

I think more people claim this than actually believe it, if you rule out a fake-it-'till-you-make-it sort of phenomenon. Torrenting, the last and final bastion of casual piracy, had been losing steam for years before Netflix came along. Public and private trackers alike died on the regular, and came back weaker if/when they came back at all (TPB, KAT, etc fell in this category; also, RIP demonoid v1 and v2). Some were surviving better but just weren't getting uploads/seeds (iirc isohunt, torrentz, etc). I have a mishmash of other thoughts and observations about this period, but it's so much deeper into anecdote and speculation territory as to not be worth making sense of.

I will occasionally really enjoy something and find the creators to be acceptable enough to support. In those cases I will purchase something after the fact to support people that I agree with. I encourage everyone to do the same. Enforcement of file sharing these days is non-existent.

Likely a rationalization, but this is how I've always dealt with digital media. My capacity to consume and my capacity to spend are limited, but the former outstrips the latter by far. I'm also very particular, and somewhat stingy, at least in the sense of trying to be overly sure a purchase is "optimal" before I pull the trigger. So I'll buy the things I'm actively excited about up front. I'll pirate everything else, and purchase the best of the lot with any remaing funds. As far as I'm concerned, my spending hasn't changed; my money is going where it would have in a magical alternate universe that was identical save for piracy not existing. The only difference is that I'm personally getting more enjoyment from digital media than the alternate-me.

The median online opinion that I see is that piracy = theft

What part of online? Most of the internet I'm aware of, various parts of twitter, reddit, or discord, are generally neutral to pro piracy, especially the young people. Pirating anime or tv shows, or books, is frequent, and posters regularly lament that platforms don't allow direct links to pirated content.

Less common than pirating e.g. music are services like sci-hub and libgen. They enable access to humanity's repository of scientific and literary knowledge free for all, and that more than makes up for lost profits by independent musicians or movie studios, imo. That's a historical accident, of course - there's no fundamental reason cheap + good subscription services exist for film and music but not papers, but it's still true.

Even within the realm of music/TV, it's arguable that the combination of socially-sanctioned/legal paid access and socially-questionable/legally-gray pirated access is better than either in isolation. Creators still get most of the revenue, incentivizing them and enabling them to produce more, while a substantial part of the deadweight loss caused by the nonrivalrous but excludable good gets filled by piracy.

Well the big problem with the whole Piracy discussion is to transcend the discussion around ethics and get to the discussion of how much democracy we are willing to sacrifice in protection of Disneys profits... Personally I don't mind the concept of Intellectual Property but if the enforcement of that concept means that I can't have a private encrypted conversation online under the guise of I might be sharing a copy of digital work that someone should be profiting off, then we are going to have a problem!

The whole notion of that my internet connections should be disconnected if it is probable that I engage in piracy shows up in a "free trade agreement" like ACTA is not because Lars Ulrich is a greedy whiny bitch, it is to protect corporate profits of media companies like Disney and Warner. No thanks.

The most worrying thing is the convergence of people that are interested in disallowing private encrypted telecommunication guise of that I might be a kiddie fiddler(EU:s suggested chat control) or subverting US interests online(The Restrict Act). They are essentially reheating the piracy arguments with really morally reprehensible people in hopes of disallowing the plebs of discussing in private on Signal that might be a threat to the Elites power. But hey that Bud Light controversy was awfully conveniently timed to distract the Zeitgeist around Restrict Act.

Note to the reader: I don't have time to write better since I'm pressed for time hopefully I'll get time to give good replies.

I agree with those who say that piracy is unethical and all arguments that it isn't are rationalizations.

That said, "ethical" isn't a binary. Things are not either infinitely good or infinitely bad. Some things are more unethical than others. I think as a general principle, you should not pirate. But I'd judge you a lot more harshly for shoplifting from a store, since that actually deprives the rightful owner of physical goods they could otherwise sell to someone else.

I'll also accept some rationalizations, provisionally. Very poor people who literally can't afford to pay for legal downloads? Yeah, technically they are stealing, and if they wanted to claim virtuousness they should not pirate what they can't afford, but I'm not really going to begrudge all those people in the third world for their cracked versions of Microsoft Office and bootleg MCU downloads.

OTOH, I've read justifications from pirates who are basically privileged kids in the US complaining that they can't afford it 'cause they're starving students or unemployed or whatever. No sympathy for them. If you can pay for it and you won't, you're kind of sleazy.

"I don't want to give money to people who hate me." Well, okay, but acknowledge that pirating their works is not a principled stand. Not consuming their works would be a principled stand. Pirating their works is just a fuck you. Maybe you think it's justified, and my response is "whatever," but don't tell me you're a bravely sailing the seven seas to stick it to The Man, or JK Rowling.

The piracy is a principal and ethical position if you don't accept that there can be any intellectual property, that's it. I can write a book, which is my property and i can sell that particular book to anyone even if it's fully digital product. It becomes someone else's property. But just because i wrote a book, doesn't magically gives me any rights to ANY copy of my book in anyone's elses possession, digital or not. That's their property now, i've sold this product to them, that's when my right to the book ends. The product is a particular piece of information which after selling it is no longer mine. You can't sell thing and still keep possessing it, it's literally eat the cake and have it too!

So after i sold it he can do anything with it - he can store it, he can throw it away, he can copy it and sell it as if he's still an author and you can argue that's not ethical as it's a lie. But if he sells or just gives it away without a claim that he's an author - it may deprive the original author of some potential profit but it's not unethical. His version of the book may add the value to the product - his version can be of a better quality, it can be better designed, it can be just cheaper or simply closer to someone who will buy it from him. He's not selling your book, he's selling his rightfully acquired product, it's no longer your book, you can't claim any ownershhip rights to it. You can claim author rights to it for what it's worth.

So it's not unethical at all. And even in terms of maximizing utility (i'm not utilitarian so it's not the main argument for me really) the alternative to that is strictly worse and highly dystopian imo.

Now the argument you can have is that the buying a book transaction isn't strictly speaking buying a book, it's entering the contractual obligations with a lot of points and asterisks describing what you can do with that book and what you cannot do with that book, so the book isn't really yours in any sense, you're buying the right to read it(not even the case for electronic book!) and you can't let's say resell it blablabla. If you think that's ethical - fine by me, i don't. And again it's extremely dystopian. Luckily for me I don't need to enter into those contractual obligations at all, i'm not buying this book, i'm just downloading it from someone anonymous on the internet and I'm not signing any contracts, thanks.

The piracy is a principal and ethical position if you don't accept that there can be any intellectual property, that's it.

Well, yes. And theft is a principled and ethical position if you don't accept that there can be any private property.

I am aware of the anti-IP arguments, and even have some sympathy for them on an ethical level, but you're still rationalizing.

I don't usually discuss intellectual property outside of libertarian circles because the starting points are usually two divergent to have a productive conversation. Intellectual property is like debates on abortions personal vs private property cutting to the very core of morality. As will quickly be noted intellectual property is just a social construct which will then be countered with property is just a construct. Then why does the construct of property even exist? To paraphrase Hoppe, original appropriation and private property are a solution to the problem of social order; a way of resolving and avoiding conflict. Why does conflict around property arise? Because stuff is scarce and rivalrous. If stuff was not scarce and rivalrous then why would why would there be disputes, why would the concept of property be needed?

As this video was used to point out how small of chunks of a songs pattern constitute an IP claim? You keep getting smaller and smaller until you're at basic sounds. I'm not a musician so my terms are going to probably be wrong, but in the same vein how much can one alter the pitch, tone, or even volume before you have created a unique enough pattern? The over arching questions: what is the level of uniqueness to gain and/or avoid an IP claim?

The sorites paradox isn't absent for physical property but it is much less. In the vast majority of cases physical property can be defined, boundaries can be set up, literal lines can be drawn. I'm not sure how that's possible with IP. IP dictates what other people can do with their property even if they have had claim to that property longer than the IP claim has existed - how people can combine atoms and organize 1's and 0's.

Then there's the utilitarian argument but I have not idea how you measure the gains vs the losses.

I suspect that IP does not really meet the requirements of "scarce and rivalrous." Or at least, duplication of information is obviously the exact opposite of scarcity and rivalry.

In fact, IP tends to be used more from the utilitarian side that you hint at, i.e., IP in practice is (in theory) a right to compensation for work. Information itself is not necessarily scarce and rivalrous, but mindshare arguably is, and your ability to extract moneydollars as your IP is spread to mindspace is a matter of conflict. We might think of this as the symbol-manipulation equivalent of the appliance industry running out of potential customers to sell TVs to.

Trademarks are rivalrous; I can build public trust in "True Juices"-brand product quality only if I and they can be sure that it's unlikely for a "True Juices" bottle on a shelf to actually be someone else's food-coloring-and-corn-syrup knockoff. I think even the most anti-IP libertarian would be happy with me asserting 'ownership' of the ability to label something "from the 'True Juices' brand created by @roystgnr on 2023-04-26", just as a subset of fraud, and the only disagreement would be how much and with what restrictions I can contract that awkward phrase into something short and memorable.

Copyright and patents are interesting, because "copies of an existing IP" aren't scarce at all, but "copies of a not-yet-created IP that many people will prefer to anything existing" are incredibly scarce and valuable. For anything being created you can say "look, it's not scarce afterward!", just like Parfit's Hitchhiker can eventually say "well what's the point of paying you now?", but even the worst decision theories know to pay the driver in an indefinitely iterated scenario...

From: The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression https://archive.is/qz0b8

I tried to to explain what fraud is, if it is to be considered a species of aggression (and to briefly debunk Child), in A Theory of Contracts (p. 34). As I wrote there,

The theory of contract espoused here demonstrates that fraud is properly viewed as a type of theft. Suppose Karen buys a bucket of apples from Ethan for $20. Ethan represents the things in the bucket as being apples, in fact, as apples of a certain nature, that is, as being fit for their normal purpose of being eaten. Karen conditions the transfer of title to her $20 on Ethan’s not knowingly engaging in ‘fraudulent’ activities, like pawning off rotten apples. If the apples are indeed rotten and Ethan knows this, then he knows that he does not receive ownership of or permission to use the $20, because the condition ‘no fraud’ is not satisfied. He is knowingly in possession of Karen’s $20 without her consent, and is, therefore, a thief.

In other words, for the libertarian, fraud is a type of aggression (namely, theft), just because it is a means by which one party receives or uses or takes the property of someone else without their consent–and there is failure of consent because the first party’s misrepresentation meant that one of the conditions to transfer of title was not satisfied. (I have elaborated on this in various articles and posts: see, e.g.: Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer, pp. 60-61, where I tried to explain how a coherent theory of contract and fraud does, in fact, support a type of fraud claim compatible with the non-aggression principle; my exchange with David Heinrich in Comments: debt and the trade against risk; my comments in Objectivists on IP; my exchange with Heinrich regarding “limited liability” and corporations in this thread (2); my exchange, again, w/ Heinrich, regarding fractional reserve banking, in the comments section of Randians go from Mises to supply-side economics)

Looking at fraud this way, it is clear that for there to be fraud–at least of the type that counts as aggression–there must be some victim who did not give genuine consent for the defrauder to use or take his property. There must be a victim of the fraud, and the victimization must be of a type in which there is an ostensible title transfer but which fails because of lack of true consent.

I basically reached the same position as you but three years ago and over covid. I have become very miserly because at the back of my mind every purchase recalls that those I'm giving money to probably wanted me falsely imprisoned by lockdowns and randomly stabbed by needles, if not worse for dissenting on these ideas.

I'm not seeing this discussed much so far, so I'd like to add that the global licensing clusterfuck routinely leaves hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people in the dark. Even living in a wealthy (but small) Western European country, the hand-wringing over piracy has never held any sway with me simply because services often don't reach my location, so this whole discussion often feels redundant.

I never felt invested in arguing about piracy simply because how unbelievably flimsy the whole idea of intellectual property is.

Utilitarian, practical angle: we use property claims, first and foremost, to avoid conflicts over scarce resources. Ideas and combinations of zeros and ones are not scarce. Maybe IP can be justified because it brings value by incentivizing creation? In the first place, I find it questionable that we should bring certain legal frankensteins into existence to maximize GDP per capita, but is this goal even achieved? How to price in costs of legal bickering over patents and lawsuits, big actors using IP to suppress potential competition? What about indirect consequences of curtailing individual freedoms and ever multiplying victimless crime legislation? Surely there's a better way to do this.

Deontological angle: Material and Intellectual property as similar things - intuitive at first glance analogy, after all we could say that creator makes a certain "thing" that he can then "own" because he made it. However, as mentioned before, IP is not scarce and IP holder loses nothing from piracy, and often gains in exposure and influence. Surely it's clear that this analogy doesn't really work. And how applying this ethical principle looks in reality? Is an Indian kid downloading a western textbook because he can't possibly afford buying western ip for dollars committing an ethically wrong act? Do people actually believe things like this? I imagine an IP advocate might bite the bullet and say that he commits a minor wrongdoing that is balanced out by him benefiting from the "theft" a-la a starving man being justified in stealing bread, but I find this whole thing laughable. Though not as laughable as I find calling breaking IP laws piracy. Ah, yes, sea-faring robbers and murderers is a very apt analogy for downloading certain combinations of zeros and ones. It's so absurd that I can't help but like it.

Edit: strongest argument in favor of IP was voiced by one of the other commenters - basically that by disregarding certain laws of the land, no matter what they are, we compromise our social fabric in an ever so small way. It's a real concern, though it would have more weight if our governments and laws were much closer to perfection than they are. I would rather put the blame squarely at legislators for outlawing mundane, victimless actions, making sure that a big chunk of the population will find themselves committing legal crimes at some point or another, which certainly doesn't benefit society.

Now excuse me, I have some torrents to unapologetically download. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Maybe IP can be justified because it brings value by incentivizing creation?

Um, yes? This is literally the entire and only reason IP exists, so the fact that you have it as one minor side point in your post suggests you've never actually thought seriously about this. A world without IP is a world without professional entertainment, software, or (non-academic) research. Capitalism doesn't deny you the free stuff you feel you richly deserve... it enables its existence in the first place.

If anything, our current copyright laws in America (and elswhere) arguably disincentivize creativity--you know how movie studios and game publishers keep milking old and beloved IPs instead of making new things? You'd think the small eternity of IP dominance given to creators by copyright laws would result in the security to make new things, but instead, the long copyright terms let them take an old IP whose time has come and gone and fart out some new insult to art in the name of profit--after all, they still own that property, and they don't have to worry about it becoming non-exclusive in the near-future.

On the contrary, beating back copyright terms to what they used to be years ago would encourage more creative freedom, since there would be less excuse to rest on your laurels.

Professional entertainment and non academic research existed for centuries before ip laws were created.

Really? Name the centuries-old historical counterpart to movies on DVD, music on CD, videogames, software suites, drug companies, ... I could go on. Sure, people used to go to live plays and concerts. Extremely rich patrons used to personally fund the top 0.1% of scientists and musicians. It was not the same.

It was indeed not the same, but it was still most certainly professional entertainment. I was going to go on to say that you meant they wouldn't exist in the form they do now, but I thought that would be putting words in your mouth.

Regardless, it is incorrect to say that professional entertainment wouldn't exist without ip laws. It would be different, but not necessarily worse. Take fan fiction - without ip laws they wouldn't exist. Instead we might have many shared universes akin to the star wars extended universe or the cthulhu mythos. They might even attain some oral history type qualities, with stories growing and changing for the audience and context. They wouldn't exist in the sense of fan fiction, but those authors were writing because they were inspired to, not for money, so I think they'd still be writing.

Anyway that's just one potential alternative to a world without ip laws, I don't think it's what would happen necessarily. Humans need stories, almost as much as we need air and water. So until we can get ai to write perfect stories, we will need storytellers of some sort.

Good points. I don't think we really disagree, then. I happen to really enjoy entertainment that takes hundreds of people to produce (AAA movies and games), and there just wouldn't really be any way for those to exist without IP. But music and fiction aren't like that, and it would indeed be interesting if there were no limits on fanfic. (Would people still gravitate to the original author - or their descendants - to add the "canonical" imprimatur to particular stories, a la Cursed Child? Or would the "oral history" aspect win out? I wonder.)

IP is horribly abused in practice, the creators often get Pennie’s or less on the dollar especially in industries like print media.

The current model has many costs, and it's not obvious that the benefits are worth it or can't be achieved in other ways. More importantly, this would only justify a thin slice of what is subjected to copyright laws in practice, so it hardly deserves more than a passing mention in this context.

Yeah, IP law is almost certainly not perfectly optimized for its intended function. Like so many other laws, it's a mess. It doesn't help that we allow corporations like Disney to have outsized influence on the legal process. If copyrights lasted for a flat 20 years (like patents) I think it'd still do fine at incentivizing creation. (And, more generally, if we had a political system that incentivized simple and straightforward laws, that'd be nice too...)

Piracy is good because digital media is a non-rivalrous good and the rights-holders in Movies and TV are almost universally bad: fuck them.

I try not to pirate things from people who aren't bad, usually small creators.

This should also apply to games, but as Gaben prophesized, Steam is just too convenient (there is also a higher proportion of rights-holders who aren't very bad in Gaming than in Movies/TV).

Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online. If there was ease of access and a fair price, most people would be happy to purchase software. This sentiment is still common but I sense it’s become less prominent over the last few years. The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.

It's also so easy to rip the media. Every song is on youtube now, and you can rip the audio easily. 20 years ago this used to be harder.

This doesn't seem right to me. 20 years ago, you still had physical media, which was somewhat trivial to rip from. Sure, if you can't get the physical media, then this doesn't matter, but I'd say it's harder now compared to then, when you didn't need constant internet connections.

Constant?

It's almost effortless to grab things from youtube nowadays. I've even made a habit of ripping entire youtube channels, ripping the audio, and keeping them on my phone to listen to a la a podcast(mostly because alot of youtube channels would do better as podcasts, but...)

So, yes, it's much, much easier today than it was even ten years ago.

This is my vice. I am addicted to the availability of just about any movie or tv show I can think of. I have 29 TB of bittorented media (not counting music, which I get through Spotify now, but that's probably another couple TBs). And I've spent a lot of time rationalizing it. As someone who has spent god knows how much on legal media over my lifetime (50-ish now), I'm no one-dimensional freeloader. I used to be the guy who would buy every DVD edition of Boogie Nights, and had bookcases of CDs and records. And I continue to pay to go to movies, pay for multiple streaming services, buy the occasional physical media (as recently as placing a Bluray order last night), etc. I have moral qualms about it, but mitigated somewhat by the fact that most producers and creatives I steal from have or will have gotten money from me in some manner in the past/present/future.

So why do I download? One, I want my own copies. Just last week I went to watch a movie at a friend's house where Netflix was the only option. We watched Hitchcock's Psycho, which looked like it was ripped from a high-quality VHS tape. Astoundingly bad visually. If we had been at my house, I could've switched to my Plex library and enjoyed it in beautiful HD. I also like to cut out clips from movies and make GIFs from them. Two, my download sites have become my news sources. I check in almost nightly and discover things I never would have heard of otherwise. I have lots of new favorites that I only know about because it cost me nothing to watch them. Sometimes I also get them early. I watched Under the Silver Lake almost a year before it hit theaters. I watch a lot of indie and foreign movies that never get U.S. distribution. Three, I have a very strange media diet and it would be logistically difficult if not impossible for me to satisfy it via legitimate channels. I might get in the mood for vigilante movies. I go to Letterboxd, do some research, make a list, and within a day or two, I have 20 different vigilante movies to watch, all in one place. Pirating is, frankly, easier for me. Four, there are some things you just can't get otherwise. One of the movie podcasts I listen to covers a lot of obscure movies that haven't been heard of since the VHS days. I've been able to find and watch all but one of them so far. Five, I am a glutton and am not rich enough to support a glutton's appetite.

Online music piracy became commonplace precisely because no one ever had any ethical concerns about it. Taping albums, radio, videocassettes, television programs, and the like had been commonplace since consumer grade technology permitted it. No one in the '90s had any ethical concerns about taping The Wizard of Oz off of television so your kids could watch it whenever they wanted to. Hell, when I bought CDs in high school my own parents would sigh and tell me I shouldn't be spending money on something I could download off the internet. The reason kids these days take a view of copyright infringement that's more in line with the actual law is because the media environment makes it cheap and easy to avoid resorting to piracy. Ironically, this environment owes its entire existence to the piracy of the early '00s; the music industry would prefer the 20th Century way of doing business, and they only switched to streaming after they were effectively forced to (actually well past the point when they were forced to). If streaming services disappeared and the only way to legally have unlimited access to the latest pop hit was to pay $35 for a CD with 12 fixed songs, most of which you have no immediate interest in, the younger generation's attitudes toward piracy would change in a heartbeat.

Even today, no one really pays too much attention to the letter of the law when it comes to copyright infringement. The people who would tsk tsk you for pirating a movie off of an illegal stream because you didn't want to pay for it probably wouldn't be too concerned about whether your use of Dilbert's picture in a presentation for work was properly licensed, or whether their local bar was signed up with ASCAP and BMI so some guy at open mic night can play "Midnight at the Oasis" in public. Hell, Netflix recently announced plans to crack down on sharing accounts, which is both widespread and technically illegal.

Piracy is ethical in the same way that shoplifting is ethical.

Ie: it isn't. It is stealing plain and simple. There is no ethical justification for piracy, including yours. If you don't like the politics behind a product, simply don't consume it or accept that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

But! You could consider a certain rate of shrink to be a part of the market and write it off.

There are more people that want products than there are people that can afford products, and there are (sometimes!) more products produced than people that can afford to buy them. If that percentage cancels itself out to zero, it is a legit victimless crime.

Once piracy starts cutting into the share of shit that would ACTUALLY get sold, is when there is a problem.

Do you think using sci-hub to pirate papers, instead of paying the journal $50 - where the authors paid to submit to the journal and won't see any of the $50 - is unethical?

Piracy is fundamentally different from theft. If I steal a loaf of bread from a store, the store has one fewer loaves of bread to sell. If I pirate a song, the record label doesn't have reduced stock.

Additionally, copyright (and intellectual property in general) is a legal fiction created by the state. Meanwhile physical property rights, while largely enforced by the state, are near universally recognized across all cultures in the world throughout the entirety of history. Copyright has only existed for a few hundred years in western countries, and for even shorter periods in the rest of the world (and even then only due to globalization of trade, cultural exports from the west, etc.).

Yet physical property rights are also a fiction, which have only existed for a couple hundred years out of the thousands of years of human history. Up until the 1700's ish, all property was defacto owned by the king.

There is nothing stopping the Viking a'reaving up your coastline on his long ship but social pressure and the monopoly of violence; property rights are not physical law.

That said, if you want to argue the socialist de-commodification of all human endeavor, I won't stop you. That shit would be tight, if it could be made to function.

Bruh, there were laws against theft as far back as humans have records (i.e. Hammurabi's code). Private property absolutely was a thing, believing in socialism doesn't magically change history to match your worldview.

Yet physical property rights are also a fiction, which have only existed for a couple hundred years out of the thousands of years of human history. Up until the 1700's ish, all property was defacto owned by the king.

I pretty sure the concept of "theft", meaning one non-king taking property owned by another non-king, has existed in every significant polity since before the invention of writing, so this claim makes no sense. There's numerous references to it in the Mosaic law, for example, which clearly predates 1700. I'm pretty sure Hammurabi had stuff to say about it as well.

I'm hardly a socialist, but it's hard to make a case that scarcity is better than non-scarcity, all else being equal.

What is with this thread?

I mean, yes, but theft was defacto fine up until the birth of the modern state, because you could just roll into town and kill whoever you wanted, enslave the rest, take there shit to birke or wherever and sell it then go back home to be raided yourself.

The thing that makes a crime a crime in practice is not the law, it is the certainty of consequences.

Edit: Also I AM a socialist, I'm arguing devils advocate/ what is rational in the current model.

I mean, yes, but theft was defacto fine up until the birth of the modern state, because you could just roll into town and kill whoever you wanted, enslave the rest, take there shit to birke or wherever and sell it then go back home to be raided yourself.

"plunder" and "theft" are easy to distinguish, because one happens within a community, and the other happens between communities. The idea that you owe obligations of mutual good-faith to those you live with that are not owed to strangers or foreigners is a pretty common one throughout history, and it seems pretty defensible to me. The fact that social groupings didn't recognize property rights outside their community doesn't imply they didn't recognize them within the community. Similarly, when laws were invented, people recognized that they applied within the communities that enacted them, and were not universal to the whole world. Law does depend on enforcement for much of its validity, but more than that it depends on a concept of justice, which starts out localized and moves to the universal, rather than the opposite.

But then couldn't I define my community as limited to my family and excuse myself for stealing from everybody else?

What is with this thread?

I've been arguing philosophy around intellectual property for over a decade and this is pretty standard in a space with thinkers like The Motte. Some of the biggest fights I saw among AnCaps were around Intellectual Property. This look a little familiar?

It's an issue like abortion, it gets at the very foundation of philosophical concepts that the vast majority take for granted. Like most things people come up with post hoc justifications for what they want, the smarter the person the more clever the reasoning.

I don’t think most early-Internet pirates thought it was particularly ethical. They just didn’t care. Stallman-style ideological opposition is and was rare compared to “haha free music.”

Consider speeding. How many speeders do you think are making a principled opposition to the concept of speed limits, or even to a particular speed limit? No, they’re more interested in getting to their destinations, and would prefer to use their judgment of safe speed. This trades off against the expectation of getting caught, and the equilibrium is a bunch of people speeding just a bit.

Pirates would like to have something that belongs to someone else. That is obviously unethical, violating the rights of the creator or license-holder. It is also easy to rationalize, since any harms are very diffuse. But it is still a harm.

You are literally stealing the fruits of their labor because you don’t like their politics. It would be strictly more ethical not to consume the tainted product.

I am not necessarily against copyright in its entirety. I am against DMCA, Sonny Bono act, etc. etc. and I am excited for the blighted Mouse to start slipping from under copyright at the end of this year (250 days left as of today!). I think a base of ~7 years, with possible exponentially costed extensions, would be a good enough solution.

I don't pirate games - I probably would if I were more of a retro player, but these days I have over 800 titles on steam, and that would probably last me multiple lifetimes on its own. I don't pirate books - I have a library within walking distance, and I read less than I'd like to so I have a substantial reading backlog as well. I sometimes pirate movies, because I decide on what I want to see first, and only then check if it's on netflix, and pirate otherwise. I think this one is a generational divide, with most people younger than me launching $STREAMING_SERVICE first and then browsing and deciding. Which brings me to my main point: presentism.

A significant part of our shared culture, mostly form the XXth century, is under assault by a baptist and bootlegger coalition. The bootleggers are the megacorp copyright holders and streaming owners: Disney, Netflix, etc. They want you to not care about the things that are old, because the might have unprofitable or tangled licences for it. They want you to view Current Thing only, because that's how they make most of their profits. Don't ask questions, get attached to the brand not the specific story, consume product.

The baptists are the culture warriors. Sensitivity readers who strangle books in the crib. People who lobby for some Dr Seuss books removed from circulation, for Roald Dahl books to get bowdlerized. People who get into translating Japanese media to try to oust the current western anime audience from it. Simpsons episode getting removed because Michael Jackson had a minor voice role. And so on and so forth. The baptist wants you to watch and read only the Current Thing because only the Current Thing has the correct amount of representation, of course only until it's supplanted by the next Current Thing.

(And sometimes people get worse due to sheer incompetence, like old TV series getting cropped and zoomed in to fit widescreen, because someone along the chain of command thinks that zoomers will die of confusion if they encounter letterboxing).

With that in mind, even if pirates have ulterior motives, they offer a valuable service to the culture: media preservation in the face of encroaching censorship. If you don't want your children to live in eternal Year Zero of culture war full of extruded movielike product that makes current MCU look like Bergman, you should probably buy persistent physical media and/or pirate too.

I think, and have always thought, that piracy is stealing. I don't say this in a sanctimonious way, as if I'm somehow above it - I used to pirate stuff quite freely in my younger days. I regret it now, but I absolutely stole that software/etc.

That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers. I am happy to pirate their software and steal their movies because the alternative is so distasteful to me.

The alternative here is to not consume it at all, not to pay for it. IMO what you're doing is no different morally than seeing a restaurant whose owner you dislike, so you dine and dash rather than paying the bill. I get why you're saying you aren't willing to countenance paying them money, but I don't see how that justifies theft. It's not like you need this stuff to live or anything.

People are correct to dispute the notion that piracy is the same as traditional theft, since copying doesn't deprive the owner of the original. However, one thing I don't think any other reply has discussed thus far, and which I'm interested in hearing takes on, is the idea that pirating deprives the owner of the money you would have paid had you not been able to pirate.

For example, I wouldn't have any qualms about pirating some multi-hundred-dollar piece of software I only need for one little fun project that I wouldn't otherwise purchase the software for. But I do pay the $20 here and there for various pieces of software that I derive great value from, and I know I would do so even if I could pirate them.

is the idea that pirating deprives the owner of the money you would have paid had you not been able to pirate

I don't think such opportunity loss is sufficient cause for complaint. Besides, it's often not even true; perhaps if the pirate weren't able to pirate they would have bought some cheaper substitute good or simply done without.

Piracy might be morally wrong, but I've always felt like the attempt to compare it to "stealing" is incorrect. It's in a separate category. If I steal an apple, the merchant doesn't have the apple any more. If I pirate a movie, no merchant has been deprived of a DVD or anything like that - there's just one more copy of that movie in the world.

Imagine I had a matter duplicator. I walk up to your car, duplicate it, hotwire the copy and drive away. Did I steal your car? The only moral violation I think I might have done there is violating your privacy, depending on what was in the car when I copied it.

Now, I acknowledge that in a world with widespread matter duplication, the government might impose limitations on the use of matter duplication, so that creators are incentivized to create and innovate and produce new products. But I almost think this is getting the obvious funding model backwards. In a world where it's easy to create a copy, but hard and resource intensive to create an original, it's foolish to stop the creation of copies. Money needs to enter the system somewhere, but the distribution step isn't the most obvious place for that to happen. Instead, it makes sense to me to use a patronage/crowd-funding model.

Car companies would put together a proposal that says, "We'll create a car with features X, Y, and Z and we need to collect $A in order to make it worth our while." Then people who like their cars can pay into the crowd-funding scheme, and after car is created, people can use their matter replicators to make perfect copies of the car.

I feel like media companies have resisted moving to funding models that are a better fit for the world we live in, and trying to stop the creation of new copies when literally every person has the means of creating a copy in their pocket is Quixotic at best, whatever it might mean for morality.

Piracy might be morally wrong, but I've always felt like the attempt to compare it to "stealing" is incorrect. It's in a separate category. If I steal an apple, the merchant doesn't have the apple any more. If I pirate a movie, no merchant has been deprived of a DVD or anything like that - there's just one more copy of that movie in the world.

This is the usual argument that piracy is not stealing, yeah. I've never found it persuasive. IMO the salient thing which defines stealing isn't that it's zero-sum, it's that you're taking something which doesn't belong to you. So it doesn't matter that you are just copying bits, it's still stealing.

I feel like media companies have resisted moving to funding models that are a better fit for the world we live in, and trying to stop the creation of new copies when literally every person has the means of creating a copy in their pocket is Quixotic at best, whatever it might mean for morality.

I mean, yeah I agree that media companies are being idiotic. They have resisted new methods of doing business at every step of the way, right up until their hand is forced and it turns out they actually make more money the new way. But that doesn't mean it's OK to just steal their shit, nor that the law should turn a blind eye to it. Kind of like I was saying in my post above: if companies are retarded in their business practices you should by all means not do business with them, but it doesn't justify stealing from them.

Let’s say you’re JRR Tolkien and you’ve written the Lord of the Rings. It’s your unique creation and without you no copies could exist.

From my perspective, that means that you have a right to own the creation as a whole in perpetuity. This is why the argument that because copying doesn’t remove any given physical iteration of the work nothing has been taken from the owner never made much sense to me. This is also why I don’t think you should be able to buy or contractually obtain (as opposed to lease) copyright from someone. You are attempting to appropriate the rights of creatorship without being the creator.

(This is the maximal scenario for me. Lots of circumstances can reduce the author’s rights morally and in practice. For example, if the work was created by many people cooperating, like a TV show, if you take TLoR and just change a couple of the words, if the author is dead and the copyright is held by their great-grandchildren who despise him, etc.)

The reason theft is wrong is because you are depriving someone of their property, the use of said property, and indirectly the time and effort put into creating/obtaining that piece of property.

This is why the matter replicator thought experiment is salient. If someone came up to me and said, can I have your car for free, I'd say no. However, if instead they wanted to merely duplicate it perfectly at no cost to me, I would instead agree.

The reason theft is wrong is because you are depriving someone of their property, the use of said property, and indirectly the time and effort put into creating/obtaining that piece of property.

Bolded for emphasis. If someone invests money into creating something, it doesn't matter if it's replicatable on a massive scale.

I'm unapologetically a pirate of a lot of media (if it's not provided to me in a DRM-free format at what I consider to be a fair price). But I won't try and wriggle out of the question of if I'm stealing or not. I definitely am.

If someone invests money into creating something, it doesn't matter if it's replicatable on a massive scale.

Except this again ignores that copying some copyrighted work does not deprive the person who created it of anything.

The reason theft is wrong is because you are depriving someone of their property, the use of said property, and indirectly the time and effort put into creating/obtaining that piece of property.

I disagree. Theft is wrong because taking something which doesn't belong to you is inherently wrong. As I said, that's why I don't consider the copying distinction salient.

You're not even correct by the points of your own argument, though.

When I copy a photograph, what have I taken?

Nothing, I've taken nothing. The original item is still there as it always was, yet I also have a copy of it.

If nothing is taken, there can be no "taking" of something which doesn't belong to you.

Further, the idea that one can own a particular pattern of matter or bits is seems mistaken.

Even the US Constitution acknowledges that you can't own "intellectual property" in the Copyright Clause

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Clearly acknowledges that we're conferring a limited right for a specific public purpose, not that there is an inherent right of intellectual property.

Theft is wrong because taking something which doesn't belong to you is inherently wrong.

"Taking" harms someone due to deprivation of the old owner, not possession by the new one. Copying is not taking in any meaningful sense. There is no moral case against copying in and of itself; you can argue that since we have laws against it, those laws should be followed, and you can argue that creating and enforcing these laws is net-positive for everyone, but the act itself is clearly net-positive in its first-order effects.

If you look at the right of property ownership, a useful way to conceptualize it is as a bundle of collateral rights. 'Intellectual property' is a wonky case, because some of the analogies to physical property don't hold up--as you say, if I copy a work that you created, I have not removed the original from your possession. But some of the other collateral rights do hold up in analogy: in this case, the 'right to exclude.' If I own a piece of land, I generally have the right to exclude others from it--if you want to get from one side of my property to the other, you need to go around, otherwise you are trespassing. If there is an easement that generally lets people cross a corner of my property without being liable for trespass, that is one stick out of the full and complete bundle of rights that I'd otherwise have to the property.

IMO, the maximalist positions both ways have flaws; I think there's something to the 'intellectual property is a form of property' position, but it's a substantially non-central example of such.

But some of the other collateral rights do hold up in analogy: in this case, the 'right to exclude.'

This seems to still derive from there only being one physical piece of property, which allows only one sort of use or occupation at a time. I need to keep others off my land because their use impinges on mine. If someone could create a functionally-identical piece of land that they could occupy and use without impinging on me, up to and including contiguousness with the surrounding terrain, we'd be right back to the situation where there's no obvious harm to doing so.

I don't recognize a moral right to exclude other people from ownership and participation as such. I recognize a right to exclude because such a right is necessary to prevent obvious harms from squatting, but duplication obviates those harms and thus the necessity for such a principle. Artificial scarcity for its own sake seems innately perverse.

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You're playing silly semantic games with "taking". To take something does not require deprivation of possession, but even if it did that's a poor hinge for your argument. You're nitpicking my word choice, not offering a substantive objection.

  • -11

You are using the label "taking" because it has strong negative associations. It has strong negative associations because central examples of "taking" cause harm. Duplication of data very clearly does not cause harm in these ways. This is basic logic, not "playing silly semantic games". Stretching affect-loaded labels to cover highly non-central examples of what they're supposed to describe, on the other hand, pretty clearly is playing silly semantic games. I can't stop you from calling duplication "taking", but I certainly can point out that doing so is dishonest. But hey, don't take my word for it when you can consult the sacred texts.

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I would disagree and say you are the one playing a semantic game here.

Taking implies that there is some thing (item) which you now have which no one else can now have because you have it.

That is simply impossible in the case we're talking about.

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Since the phrasing here seems to be causing a lot of confusion, I will offer a potential clarification. Is it your position that posession of something that doesn't belong to you is immoral regardless of how you came to have it? Therefore quantifying harm done to the original owner is irrelevant?

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Whether it's "stealing" or not, I think that, in some cases, there is no moral obligation to respect copyright. Copyright is a truce, an agreement, to encourage certain productive behaviors that are otherwise difficult to incentivize. As the US Constitution says,

[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

(emphasis mine). To the extent that copyright etc. accomplishes something useful, then it makes some sense to respect it. But calling it property (as in, "intellectual property") is a lie, a legal fiction. If an agent is abusing copyright law to oppose its intended use--which large music companies and ticketmaster do, for example--then I see no reason to respect it. They are violating the agreement, not as written, because they used their ill-gotten gains to lobby lawmakers in a twisted Kafakesque circle of theft, but certainly in spirit. I certainly don't see a moral requirement to pay a middleman who exploited legal loopholes rather than the actual creator.

you're taking something which doesn't belong to you

But you don't, you're not taking something which doesn't belong to you. You're making a copy of something which doesn't belong to you. The original item still belongs to the original owner.

In fact that owner can be happy for you to do that. So if my friend bought a CD and gave it to me for me to copy - is it still stealing? And if yes, from who?

No, you're taking it. The semantic game you're trying to play is silly.

  • -14

The semantic game you're trying to play is irrelevant. Nothing is missing, no damage done, but it's still somehow stealing. What you can say if you want to actually somehow formalize your intuition - there's a potentially lost profit for the company which originally created the product. But they sold the product and the owner is fine for me to copy it. You need to squeeze your eyes really hard to make it "stealing". The owner of the product you're supposedly "stole" it from is fine.

The difference between "taking it" and "copying it" is not just semantics, it's an objective difference. Which can lead to the weird situations when your "stealing" can miss the victim. So is it still stealing at this point? Obviously it's still is pattern matching by your intuition to stealing, fine. I think you're kind of replacing the damage which is no longer done to the owner of the "stolen" object with the potential indirect damage done (in the form of lost profit) to the original author. Which my intuition matches to not stealing.

IMO the salient thing which defines stealing isn't that it's zero-sum, it's that you're taking something which doesn't belong to you. So it doesn't matter that you are just copying bits, it's still stealing.

But are your moral intuitions completely in line with the law on all points of what things can be "owned" as intellectual property?

As a simple example, clothing designs can't be copyrighted in most of the world because clothing is considered utilitarian.

If I make a knock-off dress, that's completely legal. Do you consider me to be morally as bad as a person who has pirated a movie? Do you think the law should be changed to punish people who copy clothing designs as well?

Or what about board games? Game mechanics and rules are not copyrightable.

It is perfectly legal for me to make a clone of Monopoly, as long as I use my own names, art, presentation of the rules, etc. for everything. Do you think if I make such a clone that I'm "stealing" something not currently covered by law from Hasbro?

Don't get me wrong. I understand your position to a degree, but I find it highly suspicious when a moral position is identical with the law. How do you morally deal with situations like the UK granting perpetual copyright on Peter Pan, because the copyright is owned by a hospital? Do you think I'm stealing, if I download the original Peter Pan stories from Project Gutenberg in the United States, even though there's someone, somewhere in the world with a claim to ownership over that intellectual property? What about if I make my own original Peter Pan stories, since he's public domain here? If it's morally okay for me to download the original Peter Pan stories or make Peter Pan fan ficiton in the United States despite the perpetual UK copyright, is it okay to pirate copies of other works in countries that aren't party to the Berne Copyright convention?

I think one thing one needs to clarify here is that not all violations of copyright are the same. For example, copyright should not allow someone to claim a monopoly on the characters and fictional world they created, just the specific stories they wrote (or at minimum that kind of monopoly should be very sharply limited).

So with that said, no I don't think all of the examples you listed are stealing. I also think that it's unreasonable for some of them to be covered by copyright law at all. I would never say that the state of copyright law (or IP law more generally) is perfect. I wouldn't even say it rises to the level of "acceptable". IP law is in many cases quite immoral, and is in dire need of reform.

If you agree that downloading the original Peter Pan in the US isn't "stealing" despite the perpetual UK copyright of that work, then do you agree that a person can morally object to the length of copyright terms in a country, and morally pirate all works older than a certain age?

For example, if I decide to live by a self-imposed 28-year "moral copyright" code, where I only pirate things older than 28 years old (the original copyright term in 1790 in the United States), do you think I am stealing when I download a work from 1993? (If you think 28 years is too short, substitute some arbitrary time less than the 95 years of modern US copyright.)

Mmm, I'm not sure. I can't really say yes or no with confidence. I guess if I had to pick one or the other I would say no, that isn't stealing, because at some point the law has overreached what is moral. I'm not sure where exactly the age would be though.

Cars and matter duplicators aren't a great example because the primary value of a car really are the physical assets involved, from the raw materials, to the processing, to the machining. That's where the costs of production lie. If the physical assets became effectively free and the main cost of production was people doing design work, I would indeed regard people ripping off the design ideas of others without paying them whatever trivial compensation could be commanded for the features as stealing IP. This would be particularly true in a world where there were near limitless sources of freely available car designs, but someone insisted that they just need to get the newest, coolest one and refused to pay the designer the $50 that it was priced at.

Instead, it makes sense to me to use a patronage/crowd-funding model.

Free-riders are going to be a significant problem with such a system.

Cars were at one point patented though right? Which is also IP law? So it seems to me that it is a spectrum of similarity. So a portion of a car's value is in its IP, but maybe most of it is physical assets.

If the physical assets became effectively free and the main cost of production was people doing design work, I would indeed regard people ripping off the design ideas of others without paying them whatever trivial compensation could be commanded for the features as stealing IP

What did you mean by "becomes"? It sounds like you're saying:

  • Since cars have so much physical value, I can build my own car and don't have to pay for the IP.

  • Since media has no physical value, I need to pay for the IP.

What if the physical assets of a car become cheap? If I can build a car at no cost to myself (or copy) now I have to pay for the IP? What? That makes no sense to me.

My guess is we want to give lots of status and respect to people who invent things (like cars) and if people can cheaply build their own (or copy) we intuitively see this as a breach of fairness, and so we come up with IP.

Free-riders are going to be a significant problem with such a system.

No, in a system where everything is paid for ahead of time by patrons, there are no "free riders." Or at least, people are free riders the same way that people who get a free game during a promotion are free riders.

I'm a huge fan of Pathfinder's business model for media going forward. They make the actual rules of their game available for free. I played Pathfinder legally for half a decade, without paying Paizo a dime, and then because I was thankful for the experience I went back and bought a bunch of books from them. I was a "free rider" until I wasn't one.

I prefer that infinitely to WotC's business model for D&D, where there is no legal way to purchase PDF's for the modern books, and the only digital formats available are on proprietary websites where there's no guarantee that content will always be available. (See the recent kerfuffle with Modenkainen's Presents, where they errata'd a bunch of information out of Xanathar's and MToF and then made it so that it's impossible to buy that version of the content anymore going forward.) I would pay WotC for PDF's if I could, but they don't make the format I want to use available. So I buy the physical books, and then pirate the fan-scanned PDF's without a shred of guilt.

Personally, I don't really think of piracy as an ethical issue at all. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that exists for the purpose of incentivizing people to create more and better works of art and inventions, for the betterment of society. This is accomplished by restricting most people's right to speech - their right to transmit certain strings of 0s and 1s to others (which are usually representations of certain strings of letters or certain grid-arrangements of pixels) - while granting other people (i.e. the rights holders) the privilege to express that speech. Like all rights, the right to free speech isn't absolute, and this, like true threats or slander, is one of those exceptions that exist as a compromise to make society more functional and generally better for everyone. But I don't believe there's some sort of natural right that is ethically granted to creators and rights holders to restrict the types of 0s and 1s that 3rd parties are allowed to tell each other.

I do think there are more general ethical issues about simply following along with the prevailing legal norms in society; breaking those, no matter what they are, involve some level of unethical behavior, due to its degradation of the structure that keeps society running. But most people do agree that laws and ethics aren't the exact same thing, and sometimes breaking the law can be ethical; I think most times, piracy doesn't have a sufficient counterbalance to make it, on net, ethical, but sometimes it could. But either way, I don't think the ethical right for rights holders to restrict how 3rd parties transmit 0s and 1s to each other is part of it.

I do think the mainstreaming of digital media over the past couple decades has made it so that the younger generations of today take intellectual property rights as a sort of default correct thing more than younger generations of before. Of course, books, cassettes, and CDs were all real and all copy-able before the 90s, but they were still generally considered physical objects that needed physical action to copy. But the internet has caused the concept of entertainment media to be almost completely decoupled from physical material, and so kids have grown up in an environment where "intellectual property" exists as a concept and is enforced through restricting how 3rd parties communicate to each other is the norm. It'd be natural for them to come to believe in the ethical right to that in such an environment.

For my personal behavior, I used to pirate heavily 10+ years ago for basically all of my digital entertainment. The advent of Steam and more specifically its improved ease-of-use with its central marketplace and library, along with its cloud saving, made it so that I basically don't pirate video games anymore. I also personally get a little value out of knowing that I helped, even in some minor near-imperceptible way, incentivize the creation of more video games similar to the one I purchased. For films and TV shows, I still primarily pirate through torrents, though I try to watch through my Netflix subscription when it's available that way; it's usually just more convenient, and I keep my Netflix subscription primarily due to momentum. For music, I don't listen to music for the most part anyway, and the advent of YouTube as a near limitless free music resource has meant that the few times I do want to listen to music, I can freely access whatever I want. I do think the bit about convenience being the solution to piracy has a lot of truth to it in my behavior.

Something else to add: If by "piracy" you mean "things involving intellectual property that are against the law", remember that the list of things that are illegal is far beyond just "copying a video" and includes such things as derivative works (fanfiction is illegal), and breaking technological protection measures. Many intellectual property laws are hard to defend from any point of view other than just maximizing profits. We're at the point where "you should obey the law, so don't pirate" is a dead letter and at most you can try to figure out for yourself which laws you should violate and which ones you shouldn't.

One particularly egregious example is that subtitles are under this umbrella.

So you're a pirate if you download .srt files.

I will definitely agree that IP law has gotten completely out of hand, and has long passed the point of being fair. Not only is the US basically letting corporations write IP law for their own profit with no regard for the public interest, we enforce our idiotic laws on the rest of the world through treaties. It's completely bonkers and in dire need of reform.

(fanfiction is illegal)

The Organization for Transformative Works would disagree. That's the non-profit that runs AO3 and was pretty explicitly created to make sure AO3 can be run as a non-profit legally. The community is pretty aggressive about making sure fanfic they host is not even getting close to edge of "not for profit" (e.g. I see posts telling people to not mention on AO3 if a particular piece was commissioned and not to explicitly mention accepting donations), but they're pretty sure fanfic is legal even if charging for fanfic is not. Of course, there's plenty of sites that host derivative works that have ads that haven't gotten sued, so who knows where the courts would actually draw the line.

It has nothing to do with price and everything to do with transformation. You can't use someone else's copyrighted material unless you're using it for commentary or satire. Most fanworks aren't doing that. A 50k Naruto x Sasuke smut fic is not commentary or satire in 99% of cases.

But most fan works, as a matter of practice, are not really hurting the original product. Fangames, maybe, but AO3 is, if anything, probably keeping people's interest in the fandoms that they write about.

but AO3 is, if anything, probably keeping people's interest in the fandoms that they write about.

But also harming the perception of the IP by associating it with pornography.

No, not really. If you go to AO3, you basically know what you're getting into in the first place. To the extent people get disgusted by it, it's an in-joke within the community (you'll have poetic titles with tags for anal fisting or A/B/O mechanics).

The mainstream fanfiction sites are fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, etc. Younger fans are probably going there, and insofar as there is porn and sex, it's basically findable everywhere.

As far as I can tell, their stance on fan works is mostly wishful thinking.

I think with the legal concept of derivative works, they're clearly in the wrong. I also don't agree with modern copyright law on derivative works.

I'm fine with a regime where, say, "Star Wars" is a trademark, and where the specific, fixed form of the movies and books is intellectual property of Lucas Films or Disney or whoever. But I believe very strongly that someone who writes a 500 page book with Han Solo should be legally able to profit from their creation. The world doesn't benefit at all if a 500 page Star Wars fan fiction, becomes a 501 page work where all references to Star Wars IP have been scrubbed, and one page of boilerplate has been added trying to establish who San Holo our completely unique main character is.

The problem there is that you end up with a bunch of competing products that dilute the brand. Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars if the film's initial success spurred the creation of 500 "Star Wars" films ranging from big studio productions to low-budget garbage. Studios already try to leech of of other projects by putting out similar movies as other studios to beat them to the box office (Volcano and Dante's Peak, the two Capote movies, etc.); could you imagine what would have happened if Columbia put out a different Episode 5 in 1979 without George Lucas's involvement? Do you think audiences at the time (who were mostly children) would have cared that the film wasn't an "official" release? Your scenario probably wouldn't happen without copyright protection because Star Wars would have been a successful film from 1977 that spurred a number of cash-ins and was quickly forgotten after Fox couldn't make any money off of it due to the brisk competition in Star Wars products, not to mention the oversaturation of inferior media. The idea of Star Wars fan fiction existing today would be akin to the idea of Ice Station Zebra fan fiction existing today.

Eh, Lucas Films would still be the only ones with the Star Wars trademark - and thus the only ones with a movie called "Star Wars", and if they had the right contracts with their actors they would be the only ones with Luke Skywalker played by Mark Hamill, Han Solo played by Harrison Ford, etc. While my proposed copyright regime would allow for unauthorized sequels, I think they would tend to do about as well as those cheap knock offs like "The Little Panda Fighter" and "Ratatoing" do already, or all the Star Wars knock offs of the 70's and 80's. Do you think any of those would have magically been better if they had been able to use the name "Luke Skywalker" for their characters?

Plus, I think people are naturally snobby enough that people would look down on knock-offs. Look at what happened with Pokemon and Digimon in the 90's and 2000's. They're actually very different franchises with different origins (Pokemon started as a video game, Digimon started as a tamagotchi-like virtual pet), but kids on playgrounds got into endless arguments about whether Pokemon or Digimon was better, with many sticking up their noses because Digimon was supposedly a cheap Pokemon rip off. The same would happen with Columbia's Star Wars knock off, which couldn't even be called "Star Wars" due to trademark issues.

I just don't think the risk of a rival studio "scooping" a rival studio's block buster movie is a very big risk of my proposed copyright regime. I think the bigger risk would be how my proposed regime affects the "little people" of the entertainment world. Imagine a big movie studio learning about popular web fiction like Worm or Unsong, and deciding to make their own unauthorized movie version of these works. While I do think social disapproval can be a slight salve for this kind of anti-social behavior - as it is in our copyright regime with cases like the creators of Superman being given good will "royalties" by DC decades after they had sold the rights for pennies, because DC wanted to maintain the good will of the fans - and it might be the case that some companies will cut deals with small creators even when they're not strictly, legally required to. There's also the possibility that an unauthorized Worm or Unsong movie would give the authors of those works the ability to leverage the copyright they do have, and make money from the original product. However, I think it's not unlikely that at least some of the time under my proposed regime small creators would put a ton of work into something only for the big players to use their idea without any payment, and they'd never be compensated by any other means.

Except they wouldn't have had a trademark in 1977 because titles aren't eligible for trademark unless they're part of a series, and Lucasfilms couldn't have demonstrated that they were part of a series because they weren't. So when Columbia gives Mark Hamill a boatload of money in 1978 to star in their Star Wars sequel, they'd have no problem using the title (and all the various ripoffs would have no problem, either). By the time Empire gets made in 1980 trademark protection is off the table because by that time Star Wars is in such common use that it isn't eligible.

Alright, then they make it "Lucas Film'sTM Star Wars", and people would know the genuine article is Lucas Film's until the franchise got off the ground.

And a lot of this is solved by actor contracts with a clause that says, "You agree to give us first choice for sequels involving you playing this character for the next 10 years", or whatever the closest legally enforceable version of that is.

There would still be possible loopholes, I'm sure. Like Mark Hamill playing an unnamed character who is suspiciously like Luke Skywalker in every detail, but that would have been possible in our world with current copyright laws, and that didn't happen.

Combine this with the Coming AI Apocalypse™ by way of deepfakes. The normal version of this concern is manufactured scandal. But what about manufactured bootlegs?

It’s going to get easier and easier to make high-quality imitations of media. Official channels will credibly have the original, unedited versions, but pirates and secondhand purchasers are more likely to end up with changes, unauthorized sequels, who knows? Intentionally seeding with subtle variants would be hilarious. Imagine Stars War, except for every movie. “The torrent claimed it was the Disney+ version, I don’t know why they let George Lucas do another round of edits!”

If someone stops writing music/painting things/writing novels/invent anything because of the piracy - i think that's great. There's no intellectual property, there are thoughts, ideas, music and so on, but if its not an object it can't be property, it's silly.

The world is full of useless crap anyway, everything will be fine with less of that, in fact everyone will be much better. People will do art not because of money but because they love it, seems like a win-win. Good musicians will still live luxuries lifestyles because they'll earn tons of money on life concerts. There will be less crap to consume sitting on the sofa the whole day, great! A lot of people will lose their jobs - fine, it wasn't doing anything anyway.

It was my opinion at the start of internet and it didn't change since. The moral arguments against piracy are usually going in the way of "it's not fair" and then showcasing the case when some poor guy creates something genius and he is still poor and unknown, while some huge corporation makes billions out of his work. And i agree - it doesn't feel fair, that corporation which makes billions abusing intellectual property rights shouldn't exist at all.

Looking at the whole humans history there's plenty of various famous people in any type of human activity, despite the fact that there wasn't any intellectual property rights at that time. Somehow Mozart was rich and famous despite the fact that literally anybody can play his works without paying anything to him. No doubt there were plenty of people who died poor and miserable despite creating something great, but it's still the case now. Maybe Mozart could have been much richer with the intellectual property laws, sure, but why is it "more fair"? A random historical person who invented let's say cheddar cheese and couldn't patent it at that time - he surely has all the possibilities to benefit from his invention even without property rights. He probably wasn't a billionaire because of that automatically, so what, why is it fair for him to be one?

This all falls apart rapidly on works that require actual spending to make. Good luck funding the millions of dollars it takes to produce a AAA video game without the possibility of ROI. Not everything can be a one man operation that can afford to live lean.

It's totally alright even if there won't be any AAA video games anymore, people were playing pacmans and supermarios with no less pleasure than AAA games. Humans are made the way that the amount of pleasure is always scaled up or down to some more or less constant level. Hoop rolling is an amazing game if it's the only game you know. And if you have 100 AAA games a year it just deflates the amount of pleasure you'll have from each one, to the point when you're just bored of all of them. It's programmed in human nervous system. The same for everything else. People before computer games weren't any less happy just because they couldn't play them.

Besides, there's always a crowdfunding which as practice shows can support anything - from couple of developers for the whole life(Dwarf Fortress) to half a billion of dollars for promising a dream(Star Citizen).

I find it hard to view a world with less and lower quality art/media but all of it is free as better than a world with higher quality art/media but only most of it is free and what isn't is easily affordable to someone with a very achievable income.

The former seems clearly better to me. Profit motive is very poorly aligned with what we admire in artistic expression.

Then feel free to exclusively consume art created by anti-capitalists who distribute their works for free. You'll have much more than in the past. What right do you have to the works of people who have specifically decided not to go with this model? Why do you think you're entitled to free ride off of those of us who support greater works?

I personally find that the framework of some kind of "rights" you guys like to use is full of nonsense, to the point when i'm not really sure why do you like to use it.

But if you want i can tell you which right - i fully support the right of private property, when if you bought something - it's yours. Like fully yours, not asterisk yours, you know what i mean? So if someone bought the game let's say and wants to share it with anyone he wants - he can do it. And i can download it from him and someone else can download it from me. I'm fully aware that some(SOME!) artists and much bigger cohort of businessman don't like that simple copyable nature of digital media and they don't see it as fair, but you know what - tough luck.

I understand that it leads the world towards the model of "you're not buying it but renting, it's not fully yours, you just bought the right to play it for your eyes only" and i applaud it, that would be a hilariously amazing dystopia when the common sense is completely forsaken in favor of Moloch.

The system we have is set out to solve a very difficult problem. There is substantial upfront cost to produce some information and in order to incentivize that production of data the prospective producers need some way to capture some of the value produced by the upfront investment otherwise there would be no upfront investment. Those options are as follows:

  1. government sponsored investment(A.K.A. everyone is forced to pay whether they want to or not)

  2. intellectual property rights to the fruits of the investment

  3. some scheme where people who want something to be produced pool their money and are just fine with the free riders

  4. the information is simply not produced

There is no secret extra option where there is upfront investment but nobody needs to pay. You can't have people do #2 and then decide that you're going to pretend they did #3 because you still want to be a free rider.

And it's all fine and good to scoff at like pop media or whatever but this problem becomes very real when the thing the upfront investment is in is some cancer cure that you're going to die without. You very very much do not want that to end up in the #4 trap and that the only place it can end up with your beliefs.

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The world with "lower quality art/media" is basically the whole planet Earth before the second half of 20th century, roughly. The claim that we're now living in a high quality art time comparing to any previous times isn't obvious to me. There's definitely more art, but not better. The effect of "more art" on people is the subject of severe diminishing returns i would say.

The fact that the intellectual property system incentivizes people financially to create "art" purely to sell, and not when you're passionate about that so you CAN'T NOT write/paint/sing/etc leads to various things like producer projects(99% of modern movies/AAA games, which don't have anything to do with creating art, just with pleasuring proles after careful testing/probing whether it'll be successfull or not). It's not exactly art.

You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.

Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it.

That's nice. Have I agreed to that? I don't think I have. If I have not, then regardless of whether or not they make those works, I am not bound by that condition.

That's nice. Have I agreed to that? I don't think I have. If I have not, then regardless of whether or not they make those works, I am not bound by that condition.

Someone who purchased the content and then copied it has violated the agreement, you are an accessory to the violation of the compact. And you know damn well when you do it that you're participating in violating this compact. People who knowingly fence stolen goods are behaving unethically.

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No, the current system doesn't seem good or fair to me so i want it to change. You sound like the only "ethical" thing to do in the world is following contractual obligations no matter what they are, "well, if you don't like it - don't participate in it". No, it's not so simple, the alternative is not always unethical and it's not how it works in practice, luckily.

Then advocate for artists to freely give away their content, a model like patreon where you support artists and get minor perks seems viable. But you have no right to the works of people who are not operating on that model. They have produced their works on the condition that you pay for them and do not copy them, breaking that condition is unethical.

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Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it.

Some artists have. Other artists have demonstrated that people will willingly give them money for things they make even if they don't require it, merely out of admiration of the work and admiration of the artist. Others will pay them up-front because they're a good investment. I observe that most of the artists I admire and care about are in this later set, and a lot of the artists in the former range from terminally boring to actively toxic.

The arrangement you describe isn't a moral fact of the universe, but rather a social construction. As with most social constructions, it exists while people agree to maintain it. If people don't want to maintain it any more, it goes away, and the people who benefited from it are out of luck. Copyright protections are of immediate advantage to artists, but deriving advantage from something is not the same as having a right to that thing. I would derive great advantage from everyone paying me significant sums of money in exchange for my assessment of their individual moral character. I do not have a right to such payment, do I?

Some artists have. Other artists have demonstrated that people will willingly give them money for things they make even if they don't require it, merely out of admiration of the work and admiration of the artist. Others will pay them up-front because they're a good investment. I observe that most of the artists I admire and care about are in this later set, and a lot of the artists in the former range from terminally boring to actively toxic.

Cool, consume their art and let the rest of us plebeians pay for art.

The arrangement you describe isn't a moral fact of the universe, but rather a social construction

A social construct indeed and even more than that a contract, an agreement between people that you advocate for wantonly violating. Other neat social constructs we have are the ones where you have to pay at the store before leaving with goods, not committing random acts of violence and not cheating on medical board exams.

I would derive great advantage from everyone paying me significant sums of money in exchange for my assessment of their individual moral character. I do not have a right to such payment, do I?

you would have a right to one if I had an agreement with you that I'd pay you for such an assessment. But we don't, and as such you can either give it to me for free or keep it to yourself. Someone in the chain of piracy has violated such an agreement.

If we just ignore all the obscurantism this is a very simple system:

  • someone produces something and is willing to let you have a copy of it on the condition that you don't copy it

  • You want this copy

  • you or somebody else breaks the compact and copies it anyways

I cannot fathom how you have convinced yourself that this is ethical.

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Pirates want something, but not enough to pay the asking price. What gives them the right to skip it?

What gives you the right to control who has a copy of an arbitrary collection of bits?

Assuming I am the one who originally figured out how to arrange them in a specific format, I have an interest in the fruit of my labor.

If I were spending all my time doing literal charity, I would rapidly starve.

And do you think that this is a good description of more copyright situations?

Not…particularly. OP asked why people thought it was unethical to pirate. I answered:

Pirates would like to have something that belongs to someone else. That is obviously unethical, violating the rights of the creator or license-holder. It is also easy to rationalize, since any harms are very diffuse. But it is still a harm.

In today’s world, piracy does little harm, and may even be a net gain. This does not justify piracy in general.

I don't need any right to skip it, i can just skip it. What kind of right is that?

To skip the asking price?

Then i guess my right is called a free will.

This was not long after Napster popularized file sharing and typical online user was very much of the opinion that copying data and sharing it was not equivalent to stealing. Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media.

I agree and I think that has changed over time. Some reasons.

-- I've swung towards paying for some things as I age. Part of this is that I am richer than I was as a child, and I consume less content and what I do consume is more obscure, so it is easier for me to pay for it. Part of it is that I can see content I like disappearing from the world. When I was a kid Borders and Barnes and Noble were everywhere, counting the Walden Books sub brand there were at least 5 corporate bookstores in my town. Now I think there is one Barnes and Noble left a couple towns over, and even that location is a shadow of itself. I shop for books exclusively at one of two local bookstores, if they don't have the weird book I want in stock they order it for me. When I was a kid, not buying a book at Borders was just saving money and avoiding giving it to the corporate villain from You've Got Mail or later to Amazon; now I'm very aware of the possibility that if the small bookstores go under I won't be able to get new books anywhere but Amazon. As a result I feel a certain responsibility, as a book lover, to buy new books from the small bookstore. This goes equally for small time bands whose albums I buy directly at concerts where before I'd pirate it, for blogs and podcasts where before I'd get it for free, for local independent movie theaters that show obscure films where before I'd sneak in, for all kinds of things. I used to take it for granted that there would be music, movie theaters, bookstores, books, etc. I've come to realize that if I don't support the things I want, they won't happen. I used to feel like some sucker would always pay for the things I wanted to exist, I've realized that might not happen. Is my singular effort futile? Probably, but what isn't?

-- Piracy used to be easier than doing it legally, now it is more difficult in a lot of cases. I only really pirate things if I have trouble finding them legally. There is more legal content than you can possibly make use of if you have an Amazon Prime subscription and a Spotify subscription, why bother illegally streaming? Moreover, the guy who was super into piracy and talked about it used to seem cool and in the know, he had access to things I didn't, I had only my paltry CD collection he had a library of millions of songs and movies. Now we both have access to millions of songs, I just pay a half hour a month in wages to have access to it all whenever I want. Now the guy who is still super into piracy strikes me as kind of annoying and hectoring, closer to a coupon clipper or the guy who refuses to pay for parking than to a guy who is getting one over on the system.

These are the situations where I endorse piracy;

  • There is no reasonable way I can purchase the media in question such that any profit at all would go to the original developer or IP owner. Yes, I could pay hundreds of quid for a secondhand console and game copy to play whatever retro thing I fancy that hasn't been ported... but the developer doesn't get any of that cash, so why should they care if I just... don't?

  • There is some kind of unreasonable caveat that means I don't feel comfortable engaging with terms as presented. "Free trial" software that wants my payment info anyway before I can use it? Anything at all that demands my phone number for verification before I can use it? No dice, I'm getting a cracked version.

  • There is no physical version available and I don't trust the developer/publisher's intentions for the future. Always-online and servers could go offline at any time? Pirate. Chance you could remotely "update" my books to censor them? Pirate. (This one has become more relevant in recent days.)

  • If the DRM noticeably degenerates the quality of the product (crashes, nukes the framerate, disables mods, etc).

Chance you could remotely "update" my books to censor them? Pirate. (This one has become more relevant in recent days.)

What is this referring to?

Presumably changes to Roahl Dahl books in a recent edition. Amongst other things, 'sensitivity' readers have removed words including "crazy," "fat," and "ugly" from the books.

I'm guessing the recent Roald Dahl edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controversy

There is no reasonable way I can purchase the media in question such that any profit at all would go to the original developer or IP owner. Yes, I could pay hundreds of quid for a secondhand console and game copy to play whatever retro thing I fancy that hasn't been ported... but the developer doesn't get any of that cash, so why should they care if I just... don't?

I hear this justification a lot but I don't think it actually holds up. The original developer of the IP sold that IP for money or in some other way profited from the assumption that the IP would continue to be paid for. That's all part of value chain. If that breaks down it has the same basic impact as not paying the original developer.

I mean the example given was secondhand sales, not a transfer in ownership of the IP, for a reason. It literally doesn't benefit a developer if I buy a secondhand copy of something off ebay for an exorbitant price.

If I purchase a copy of The Adventures of Scrimblo Bimblo for the Atari Jaguar in year 1995, most of the value that I consider that game to have is my own enjoyment, but a (very) small part of that assessment is the resale value that I will get later on. The publisher of the game knows this, and sets the price of the game—and the compensation paid to the developer—accordingly.

I am skeptical that the publisher is going to set the price in 1995 taking into consideration how much it will sell for on ebay in 2023.

If you were totally unable to transfer ownership would that really not reduce your belief in the value of a game at least on the margin? If it took zero extra effort for me to get a version of a game on steam that was able to be resold over one that wasn't I'd definitely take the transferable one, I'd probably pay some increased amount for it.

Basing one's price based on the possibility that someone will invent a whole new way of selling in a couple of years is like setting a price now based on the possibility that it might get bought by space aliens in 2051.

Also, copyright extensions aren't accompanied by price changes.

Basing one's price based on the possibility that someone will invent a whole new way of selling in a couple of years

huh? This was not present in the hypothetical.

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I also think it's ok if the product is very unreasonably priced (usually applies to really old products that are still under copyright for unfathomable reasons, or stuff you already bought at some point) or to trial a product.

These rarely apply anymore though with the advent of right of return on steam and subscription models for media (that usually have trial periods anyway).

I would add another big one: Old things that are only copyrighted because of copyright extension. The worst case is old time radio; it's all copyrighted because of weirdnesses in the laws about sound recordings.

I should have noted that I’m mainly curious about the meta commentary on normies changing opinion on piracy.

Commercial interests seemed to have convinced the median online person that piracy is not ethical. Given that pirating media is quite easy to do and quite easy to rationalize, how were they so successful? We’re they successful, or is it just that social media moderation is so tight that any pro piracy voices are silenced.

I should have noted that I’m mainly curious about the meta commentary on normies changing opinion on piracy.

Commercial interests seemed to have convinced the median online person that piracy is not ethical.

Let me throw in another possibility: Young people today are used to everything being easy to access. Piracy can insert a little bit of a learning curve. Us Gen Xers had to figure out the internet and we learned enough about how our computers work and how to configure our routers and tinker around with Napster/eMule/Limewire to figure out how to get the good quality files as opposed to the shitty files... Nowadays, kids just look at what's on Netflix and click. I have three teenage kids. I think only one of them would bother to figure out how to set up a Roku, which is comparatively easy. If I showed them how my torrent system works, their eyes would glaze over in seconds.

Yeah, the decline (and possible revival) of piracy can be summed up as "Newell Was Right:" ease of service makes piracy less attractive. However, put up too many barriers and the effort-dollars of piracy look less intimidating.

I think a big part of it was that internet piracy (as opposed to, say, buying bootleg VHS tapes) was pretty new. Just look at the debate above on whether piracy is stealing on not: everybody was in that boat, and for teenagers with limited funds piracy looked pretty great so most of them didn't try to settle the question too much.

Now we've had several decades to culturally digest the idea of digital piracy, and we're starting to develop mores and ethical norms. In 2002 if you asked me whether the cracked copy of Giants: Citizen Kabuto I copied off of some guy at a LAN party was stolen goods or not, I would have not known what to say. It didn't feel like stealing, it felt like a friend sharing something with me. But it is illegal. But are all illegal actions immoral? At this point, your average teenager would shrug their shoulders and forget about it. I know I did.

Now it seems that the culture as a whole is coming down on the side of piracy being stealing, or at least morally wrong. So younguns today get taught by their elders that they shouldn't pirate, just as they get taught that they shouldn't steal. So for them it's less of a moral conundrum.

So I would say that the lack of novelty is certainly driving some of the change.

At least as of about 10 years ago, the classic example (by commons/piracy advocates) of rights-holders starting to target propaganda to children was the MPAA working with the LA Boy Scouts to make an anti-piracy merit badge, the "Respect Copyrights Activity Patch" around 2005/2006.

I haven't really followed the arguments in some time, but definitely noticed the same shift in younger normies on reddit over the years. It's hard to imagine that dorky propaganda was so effective, but I'd guess it makes a difference what you're hearing from a young age.

edit: And almost surely the huge victory was successfully getting people to lump copyright/patent/trademark law together under the name "Intellectual Property" since the nineties, which completely does change how you think of these. Thinking of 'property' gives people an intuition about stealing, whereas 'temporary government-granted monopoly publishing rights' doesn't. Seems like when broken down, most people strongly favor trademarks, strongly disfavor patents, and have mixed feelings about copyright.

As an aside, having multiple of my first 10 comments on this site related to Richard Stallman...well that was unexpected.

I would suggest that rather than people changing their minds, it's that the pool of people acquiring software and media online has changed. When it was kind of tricky and not much more effort to pirate than acquire legally, the pool consisted of tech-savvy youth that were more likely to think pirating was a pretty good idea. With it being easier to buy things legally, the pool of downloaders and streamers has expanded massively and now consists of people that treat downloading the game as similar to buy a CD from a store.

I agree. Copying a cracked video game from a friend during a LAN party sure felt a lot different than going down to GameSpot and buying it. It seemed unrelated: you wouldn't shoplift the game from a brick and mortar, after all. Now that you download games when you buy them, pirating games seems like an apples to apples comparison.

I am broadly against piracy and believe it is usually unethical, even in your scenario where you want to withhold your financial support to companies you find abhorrent you have a reasonable option there to simply not consume their media. I believe piracy is acceptable when there are no other reasonable ways to obtain the software. I think media that is only available through streaming and thus can't reasonably be use offline is fair game. Also if a service like steam were to go under and you were to lose legal access to your software I think it would be ethical to pirate the software you paid for.

Being a poor Third Worlder has engrained in me habits of almost never paying for digital media if I can help it. Seriously, a $60 game is easily a tenth of a junior doctor's salary! And imagine growing up with pocket money around the order of 2 or 3 dollars a week and see what you can afford.

Even after accounting for the targeted discounts given by Steam to some regions as a form of price discrimination, video games are still expensive, leaving aside that hardware costs are unafforable for the majority. I have a pretty sick gaming pc, but if I had to buy both that and the majority of games I play on it, then I'd have neither. There's a reason people here gravitate towards mobile titles or less demanding F2P titles, everything else is niche.

When I buy a game, it's usually because of better mod support or multiplayer, very little else, or perhaps there being a killer sale that drops the price into the realm of an expensive lunch.

As for non-gaming media, if it's on one of the subscriptions my family has, all well and good, or else I'm sailing off.

This is largely orthogonal to ethics, because the median Third World pirate would otherwise never even pay for the product, leaving the loss from piracy much much lower than the full price.

After I finish moving abroad, I'll actually have the money to not be so stingy about things, but that day is not today. Seriously, you Mottizens simply can't grok how poor most of the world is.

My journey has been similar to that of many people my age. I try to stay true to my convictions by not supporting creators who don’t share my values. This means that I sometimes miss out on new entertainment, but it’s a small price to pay.

However, I don’t have a problem with accessing older content that is being withheld by companies that don’t share my values. For example, I’ve watched the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons even though Disney, the current rights holder, has made decisions that I don’t agree with.

I also enjoy old Star Trek series like TNG, DS9 and Voyager. The current rights holders have made choices that I don’t agree with, but I still enjoy the older content. I either access it through unofficial means or buy used box sets on eBay.

I have a collection of old PC games and prefer to buy used copies on eBay rather than digital copies. This is because some of the companies that hold the rights to these games have made decisions or hired people that don’t align with my values.

This approach also helps me combat the planned obsolescence of digital media and the complex web of software and hardware needed to access entertainment. But that’s a topic for another time.

The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.

Really? In the case of audio, Spotify runs $10 a month for access across literally every device I own, including a sport watch for running. This is unfathomably cheap and accessible relative to the CDs I grew up buying to listen to music. I guess television and movies are fractured in the sense that there are many services that include various non-overlapping content, but each of Netflix, Hulu, and so on provide easy access to more content than any person can watch without being a TV junkie.

Either way, my moral intuition was always that it was pretty obviously stealing to pirate music, movies, or software. Whether I was willing to engage in that stealing or not depended on my own financial position, ease of paying legally, and how sympathetic the target was, but I don't think I ever tried talking myself into the idea that it's not stealing. I genuinely have trouble crediting the position that other people hold that it's not stealing as anything other than a rationalization for why they should steal things. To be blunt, I think it can only be sincere in the case of people that are simply too slow-witted to grasp the concept of intellectual property. Most people would have no trouble discerning that theft of their intellectual property is still theft.

Either way, my moral intuition was always that it was pretty obviously stealing to pirate music, movies, or software.

So when I steal something, I have taken something from someone else. They no longer have that item. When I pirate media, what is taken? What have I deprived someone else the use of?

This has been addressed repeatedly in this thread and isn't an original or interesting sentiment. I don't think you would have any trouble identifying what has been stolen were it your intellectual property.

Well it comes back to intellectual property being a bankrupt concept. It’s an land grab by corporate interests in what is intended to be a limited right to encourage the arts and sciences.

This is a bad comment. If you want to equate copyright infringement to theft, you should put in the effort to prove it, or at least link to another comment (which you claim exists) that does.

It's pretty obvious from the dictionary definition of theft (“the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”) that copyright infringement is not theft. It might still be bad for other reasons, but the burden of proof is on you to support that claim.

The just fruits of their labor/ return on their owned capital.

Are people owed a return on their capital? Because that seems to me like something that is not a right.

For games, major publishers like Ubisoft and Epic have created competing storefronts and pulled software from Steam. At one point, Netflix was a one stop shop. Now there are dozens of competing services. Prices are increasing. Catalogs are thin. Give it some more time for music.

To your other point. I don’t think it’s strictly a matter of rationalization or low iq. Though that is the case for many. There is a sincere group of people that believe data should be free and shared are widely as possible Almost as a terminal goal in and of itself. It may seem ridiculous to us who are steeped in capitalism, but this mindset exists.

And finally, I’ve read plausible explanations that privacy has minimal effect on sales. In most cases, if piracy were off the table, the person would simply just not consume the media. With zero marginal cost to produce an additional product, there is no economic loss.

There is a sincere group of people that believe data should be free and shared are widely as possible Almost as a terminal goal in and of itself. It may seem ridiculous to us who are steeped in capitalism, but this mindset exists.

I don't know that they're wholly incompatible: I enjoy capitalism because it is observably a local maxima in improving quality of life over most command economy alternatives. But in practice this usually means efficient capital investments producing supply-side gains by reducing prices: I can afford a nicer car than my parents had growing up (largely because even entry-level modern cars have better features than a 1993 Honda Civic), better computers (my phone can run circles around a 386DX), and even better media (even terrible streaming platforms are better than 4 fuzzy over-the-air channels).

It's not an immediate goal, but I personally think that anything resembling a post-scarcity society looks on a long time scale like capital investments in scale and efficiency driving prices towards zero. For media in general, the marginal cost of an extra view is effectively zero already, but I look askance at publishers who push mass-market media and aggressively target high profit margins. While Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is interesting as a piece of art, I find its business model pretty repugnant.

If some children in india pirate a book, movie or game, it’s a utility gain for humanity. If you would never have bought the pirated thing because you’re poor or cheap, you can pirate as much as you like. It’s commensalism: profit for you, harmless for them. For them to stop this process is petty and immoral.

IP is only a way to encourage the creators of new arts & sciences by guaranteeing them a modest share of the utility they contribute. The desired endpoint however, is still for everyone to pirate. You don’t want to have to send Edison a check every time you turn the light on.

If you would never have bought the pirated thing because you’re poor or cheap, you can pirate as much as you like.

Which, of course, encourages people to declare that they're actually morally righteous in their theft because they weren't going to buy it anyway.

Are we in agreement on the basic morals then, if he tells the truth it's fine ?

Not really, no. I'm not a utilitarian. I'm not all that interested in heading down that road though, because we're presumably going to disagree at a base level about whether utility-increasing theft is morally permissible, and that's not likely to be a bridgeable disconnect. I'll grant that if I accept the framework that utility-increasing theft is permissible then theft of intellectual property that one would never have otherwise purchased is even more permissible and is actively morally righteous. My point in the above post is that such a framework encourages rationalization and that people are very good at self-delusion; people who certainly could buy something and apparently do want to consume it can find that they wouldn't have been willing to pay for it, so grabbing the pirated copy is fine.

In the case of the proverbial poor Indian kid, I still think they're stealing, but I sympathize much more with their behavior (as they'll be deprived of the experience and have no path to compensating the owern of the IP) than the middle-class American that just doesn't want to pay for other people's work when they can steal it instead.

This is my view: That poor Indian kid is stealing but I don't give a shit, and am suspicious of anyone who does.

Do you believe that utility-increasing DMCA violation is morally permissible? If so, why, given your stance on piracy? If not, I'd like to hear your justification for why not.

I think DMCA violations are basically just stealing in the same fashion as piracy. Whether any specific example is permissible is contingent on more factors than just whether I think its stealing or not, with utility certainly being one of them.

Okay, but if you don’t want to get into the weeds of moral justification, you can’t accuse the pro-pirating side of being slow-witted and lacking justification. As to rationalizations, there’s not much to be gained from such arguments: I’m sure those who depend on IP are largely incentivized to increase their power and wealth beyond legitimate moral concerns.

The thing about theft is that usually after you do it, the person you are stealing from has less of whatever it is you stole. Theft is just theft, and piracy is piracy. Given how easy it is to ethically get free media though (libraries for books, youtube for music, etc.) I don't see much of a reason to pirate.

Ideally copyright durations would be shorter though. When a great piece of media captures our hearts and minds and is then copyrighted for ~150 years, it's almost like it's holding part of our culture hostage.

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