"Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not to steal it."
EXACTLY. Yes, downloading a movie isn't exactly stealing, but it's still taking something without permission and it should be frowned upon just as much as stealing is. If a person pirates a movie they're taking something without reimbursing the rights owner with what they want. People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! When someone steals a DVD from walmart nobody says "Whoa, you stole $9.99 worth of product! You should be ashamed!" they say "You stole something you weren't allowed, you should be ashamed". Why online does it suddenly become about the cost?
it doesn't matter how ridiculous their demands are, if Disney want $100,000 per copy of their latest film, that's their choice, if you disagree then don't buy it that doesn't mean you should just take it.
The whole idea behind this website is self entitlement, nobody is entitled to someone else's creation and the idea that this website is doing the content creators a favour is laughable. If someone creates content (or someone owns the rights to created content) it should be their choice how people consume and acquire it, whether that's free, $9.99 or $100,000, that's their choice and we should abide by it. Pay what they want or don't have it.
> People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral!
I'm not sure it's as simple as that. One could always ask: "Why is it immoral to steal?" and the answer usually revolves around how stealing deprives the owner of something he had a legitimate claim to, etc. etc. That's how our moral intuitions have evolved over thousands of years.
The fact that this age-old intuition no longer seems to apply online is exactly why piracy creates a moral conundrum. You can't resolve the conundrum by fiat. Copyright infringement is a different crime from stealing, and rightly so, because piracy has different moral and economic implications than stealing has.
I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.
If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.
Whether or not you deprive the person of money is a side issue, the idea of ownership matters more, to me at least. If I own something through purchase, creation or inheritance it's still mine and you have no right to take it, whether or not it deprives me of it, it's still immoral.
In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70!
The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."
$10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.
If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00.
That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.
Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances.
Think of a film as a performance caught in time. The actors, directors, grips, etc. were all fronted money by the studios for their performances. In doing so, the studio has assumed all of the risk for putting on the performance. Therefore, when you copy a movie you are essentially sneaking into a concert without a ticket. You are stealing services.
In a traditional theft of services, the service is only performed because of the promise of a thief. I.e., a taxi will not drive across town unless I promise to pay them - thus, the driver is deprived of that time/effort. In contrast, both movie pirates and people who choose not to view the movie made no promise to a movie studio.
Sneaking into a concert without a ticket is trespassing.
People who choose not to view the movie are irrelevant to the discussion. Don't try and attach pirates to that group. One group is moral, the other not so much.
Taxis say "I will drive you across town if you promise to pay".
Movie studios say "I will show you this performance if you promise to pay".
The promise is implicit in the act of watching/riding. You don't get in a taxi and explicitly say "I will pay you to drive me around". No, you get in a taxi and say "Take me over there". The promise of payment is implicit.
Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances.
Bob is in the business of making blickits. Bob has given his time and money in order to produce blickits in the street. Bob is entitled to recompense from people for them seeing his blickits.
Really? "Entitled"? You want to have that generalization around? Everything from blickit=crazy rant to blickit=fart? This seems like the opposite of a clear foundation for morality or legality with known and known good implications.
In Bob's case, he's now busking. He's doing something in the public space. He's essentially forcing his performance on others or gifting it to passerbys with his actions.
Movies do shoot on location, and people do watch when movies are shooting in their area, and the studio doesn't charge for that.
Now, if Bob were to either record his performance and sell it on the street or build a box around himself and charged people to enter to see him blickit, the situation becomes analogous. You're trying to essentially paint me as saying that a baker can force you to buy a loaf of bread by shoving it in your hands. I'm not.
> $10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.
He has lost something of value only if he was going to sell that loaf of bread to a paying customer. How can you be sure that anyone was going to buy it? If no-one bought it before the end of the day then it would just be waste anyway, right?
You'ce still robbed him of the right of disposing of it as he sees fit.
Here in the UK we have a chain of sandwich stores called Pret, at the end of the day they give their food away to the homeless - so by stealing something even if it was due to be given away, you're harming someone.
> You've still robbed him of the right of disposing of it as he sees fit.
Sure, but do you not see the parallel with copyright here? You are assuming a priori that the baker has a right to dispose of his goods as he sees fit, and that taking that right from him is a bad thing even if the disposal would have made him no profit anyway. I see no ethical problem with such a position, but you can apply much the same argument to intellectual property as to the physical kind.
Do you not see the implicit assumption you are making here? Why should anyone have an automatic right to control something just because it is in their possession at that particular time?
The entire concept of property is an artificial convention, which most societies have decided is beneficial and therefore worthy of respect/legal protection. But physical property is no more "natural" an idea than intellectual property. Both are just social agreements that we choose to value.
As a relevant aside, many societies/cultures throughout history have chosen not to recognise the concept of personal property and instead to hold that everything belongs to the group. In most cases, this has not worked very well on a large scale, which is perhaps why most modern societies have collectively taken the other view.
I don't think this is really a common pro-piracy argument. Most of the arguments I see stop at "it costs them nothing for me to copy it" and completely ignore the lost sale side of things. Those that address the lost sale aspect just say that they wouldn't have payed for it either way.
Personally, I sit somewhere in between. I consider piracy immoral but not as bad as actual theft.
I wouldn't pay for it. Most Hollywood content is so bad IMHO that I feel that they should owe me for my time having watched it. I never rent movies and very rarely will go to them and get ripped off for the popcorn.
On the other hand, if movies were plain files on my computer and as accessible as, say, the anime available on bittorrent, I would be happy to pay a small amount to obtain it initially. Maybe even a monthly fee for getting new stuff. But only if it were in an open standard format with no DRM.
I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.
So if you work harder at stealing something than the previous owner did at making it, it's not wrong? That actually meshes pretty well with the popularity of heist movies. :)
If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.
I don't think most pirates would disagree, properly defined. It's just that if Tony gives Uhuru an mp3 copy of his latest single for $10, and then Uhuru makes her own copies and sends them to her best friends, the pirate would say that the copies Uhuru made were hers, and she wanted to share them for free.
You're not insane. I think the near-victimless nature of this crime makes it easy to compartmentalize away. Arguments such as "zero distribution costs," "it's just numbers," and "don't call it stealing!" tend to oversimplify the discussion in the hopes of avoiding the vast moral chasm that exists between enjoying media, compensating creators, and being part of a sometimes exploitative system.
Contrast the easy-going attitudes exhibited towards major IP rights holders ("it doesn't matter if I copy this movie...") toward the furor incited when a company is found using modified GPL code, but they didn't release the source modifications. The exact same infraction is occurring in both directions. Yet, in the first scenario, the "companies had it coming" and the media is "too expensive." In the second scenario, "each offender must be punished severely in order to prevent widespread neglect of the GPL."
Sometimes, the tone of each post says more than the post itself.
A problem with these discussions is that people use common words as if everyone had the same understanding of their meaning and application.
If I download a movie, I'm not taking that movie. And what I end up with is not a thing; if I then move it over to another drive, no thing has moved, yet the movie can be watched.
Now, in the end, this action it may or may not be wrong or immoral or whatever, but arguments based on physical notions of "take", "thing", "own" are putting the cart before the horse.
taking doesn't have to be negative and it's not a word associated with either side of the discussion, it's just a word. I can take $10 from my mum to pay for dinner, or take a magazine from a shop (after paying for it), it's just the opposite of give. You can take with permission, that's why I stated take without.
When you take $10 from your mom, your mom no longer has that $10. When you pay money to buy a magazine, the shop no longer has that magazine and you no longer have the money. Taking in the usual sense is moving.
But pirates insist that they can "take" without depriving the owner of anything. That's copying, which is a different kind of taking. It gets even more complicated if somebody first purchases a legitimate copy of a song or a movie, and then produces more copies to share with other people. You run the fallacy of equivocation when you use the word "taking" in both senses.
Your actual argument depends on the sense of the word "take" that you use.
(a) It is a well-established norm in any modern society that it's immoral to take (move) something without permission.
(b) It is not well-established -- or at least, pirates would like to say that it's controversial -- that it's immoral to take (copy) something without permission.
(c) It's even less well-established that it's immoral to take (purchase) something with permission and then crack the DRM or produce further copies to share with other people.
Nobody disagrees with you about (a). But you're extrapolating that view to (b) and (c), and that part of the argument seems to hinge upon an equivocation of the different senses of "take".
Content producers have a shaky argument because they want to use the "moving" sense of the word "take" to argue that (b) is immoral, while using something like the "copying" sense of the word "take" to argue that (c) is immoral. (If ownership of the movie was actually moved when you purchased it, it's none of their business what you do with the DVD you now own!) Don't make the same mistake of equivocation. This is not an argument that piracy is OK. I'm just trying to point out that there are good and bad ways to argue against piracy.
I would counter that it isn't necessarily always morally wrong to steal. Suppose I need some medicine to survive and I have neither the money for it nor the ability to get the money legally. I would argue that since I will die if I don't get the medicine, it's then morally acceptable to either steal the money necessary to purchase it or to outright steal the medicine itself, provided doing so doesn't have the foreseeable consequence of putting the victim of my theft into a similar life-or-death situation.
Would you agree that in this one situation, theft can be morally justified? If not, then say there were 10, 100, or 1000 people in need of the medicine; is it OK to steal to get it then? If not, is there a particular N such that it's OK to steal to save N people? It's just not that simple, and saying "stealing is immoral" doesn't cut it (IMO) as an argument against piracy, even if you buy the argument that piracy == stealing.
Your comparing a life and death scenario to one regarding obtaining an entertainment product. It's a silly comparison and not terribly relevant to the topic under discussion.
But even within the logic of your analogy, you're confusing a moral argument with an argument centered around practical necessity. You could argue that stealing a life saving medicine is necessary, as you would die without it. But that still doesn't make the act of stealing it a moral one, even considering most people would sympathize and likely agree with your actions.
Related: poorer nations flout IP rights on some drugs, arguing that poorer people can't afford to pay the full price in order to get access to the drugs they need.
"....in developing countries, especially Africa, counterfeit products were commonly available to treat life-threatening conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, it said."
(Not a great article, there are better ones available to go into the issue further. But it does illustrate the point somewhat.)
The issue of the morality of "theft" becomes decidedly grey when lives are on the line, but using this argument doesn't help us tease out the pros and cons of the original argument - the morality of flouting copyright on movies. Using the example of medicine is an edge case where piracy/stealing/copyright infringement is concerned.
EXACTLY. Yes, downloading a movie isn't exactly stealing, but it's still taking something without permission and it should be frowned upon just as much as stealing is. If a person pirates a movie they're taking something without reimbursing the rights owner with what they want. People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! When someone steals a DVD from walmart nobody says "Whoa, you stole $9.99 worth of product! You should be ashamed!" they say "You stole something you weren't allowed, you should be ashamed". Why online does it suddenly become about the cost?
it doesn't matter how ridiculous their demands are, if Disney want $100,000 per copy of their latest film, that's their choice, if you disagree then don't buy it that doesn't mean you should just take it.
The whole idea behind this website is self entitlement, nobody is entitled to someone else's creation and the idea that this website is doing the content creators a favour is laughable. If someone creates content (or someone owns the rights to created content) it should be their choice how people consume and acquire it, whether that's free, $9.99 or $100,000, that's their choice and we should abide by it. Pay what they want or don't have it.