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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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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.
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.
Except this again ignores that copying some copyrighted work does not deprive the person who created it of anything.
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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
Clearly acknowledges that we're conferring a limited right for a specific public purpose, not that there is an inherent right of intellectual property.
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"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.
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.
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,
(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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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