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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
"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?
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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.
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