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