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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.
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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