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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.
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.
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.
"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.
There's also value based on scarcity. If I own a piece of real property near Disneyland, the value of that property is not merely based on the utility of being-near-Disneyland, but also the reality that this proximity is rare--if you could create "a functionally-identical piece of land...including contiguousness with the surrounding terrain" then the value of my property would be markedly reduced, even though the baseline utility of being-near-Disneyland hasn't changed.
Yes, but I would argue that no one has a right to the preservation of such value. If you own the property next to Disneyland, Disneyland doesn't need your permission to close down and move, and if you own the highway to Disneyland, you don't have a right to quash air travel.
Your right to that value is contingent, not innate. We grant that right because not granting it would have other, worse effects, not because granting it is good in itself. If we could deny that right without those other harmful effects, we'd be better off doing so even if the result is the loss of the value you held. Enforcing artificial scarcity may be a necessary evil in some rare cases, but it's still evil and very often not even necessary.
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