There is no singular conception of The Social Contract, nor indeed of morality.
You’re making a point about how you feel about it without presenting an argument.
The discussion of harms or lack of harm from piracy has been raging for a long time. It’s not going to be solved by appealing to the idea of right and wrong. It’s not universal in this instance which is why the argument continues.
You would have a point if everyone agrees it is wrong but some people do it anyway. However, that is not the case.
It’s extremely well understood that the social contract covers “don’t lie to get stuff”, which is what pirates do to obtain the copy they then make available, as the social contract presumes those engaged in a sale of a copy of a work won’t turn around and give it away for free.
Pirates are thus “free riders” to the social contract.
Based on all the comments you left in this thread, I'm not sure you really want to engage this topic earnestly.
I think you are making the mistake of applying social contracts that can work well on a person to person level to person vs corporation situations. With the latter, one party has way more leverage than the other. On top of that corporations have proven again and again that they will mislead, lie to you and abuse you to the extent permissible by law, or even more if they think it's lucrative to so. On a person to person level that would be a very toxic relationship. They certainly didn't uphold classical inter-personal social contracts, so why should you?
Genuine question, did you fully read the article before commenting here?
I not only read the article, but I am familiar with Doctorow’s positions on this issue, and am fairly well versed in ethics.
The problem here is probably that most folks can’t separate what “is” and what “ought” to be. For example you’re discussing how corporations behave despite it being wholly irrelevant to the question of whether or not piracy is immoral. The argument is one of “oughts” and you’re trying to talk in terms of “is”, despite the gaping crevasse separating the two of them (Hume's Guillotine).
This isn’t where ethics is ambiguous or debated; it’s very obviously immoral to pirate, for a whole host of reasons, some of which I’ve already mentioned. From there you surely can concoct scenarios where a baby would die if it doesn’t hear a Metallica album or whatever, but the general point will stand.
I see your point. Based on your earlier replies it was not clear to me you were talking about the abstract concept in an unrealistic world. Might help to make that more clear.
In some kind of perfect world there would be no need for violence. Yet we live in a complex and ambiguous world, where the widely accepted moral view that killing is a bad thing is sometimes the "right" thing to do. Or would you argue the Ukrainian people should just roll over because the social contract says killing is bad? My point is, I don't see how the notion that piracy is bad in a world we don't live in helps this discussion. To me it feels more like an argument one could use to demand people stop doing this immoral thing now.
No, what? This is not about an ideal world, it’s about what ought to be in this one. Murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, and piracy is wrong, same kind of thinking (though hopefully it is obvious that one is worse than the other).
my friend had some old Cowboy Bebop DVDs he got from a garage sale way back. i bought them off him, and then visited a 2nd friend's place to rip them using her DVD reader, and having done so showed the series to a 3rd friend group next time i visited them. it was a hit, and after i left one of the friends wanted to watch the bonus features. so i gave him access to the FTP server i keep all my media on and he copied it off there.
by the law as media companies would wish us to understand it, this is piracy. but when and by whom was a contract broken during this chain of events? i shared the content with my friend, but my purchase of the DVD wasn't conditional upon any agreement not to, so it couldn't have been me who broke a contract. was the contract broken by the person at the garage sale who sold the DVD without verifying that the recipient wouldn't pass it on to another recipient who would then duplicate it? if so, doesn't that same logic imply the DVD manufacturer broke a contract? if this is how you imagine the contract to function, it would seem the existence of piracy _anywhere_ in this chain means that the entire industry is criminal.
this isn't a hypothetical, btw. there actually is a Bebop DVD out there with a chain of custody that complex (actually more complex by now).
There is a clear expectation in law for at least 100-200 years now that owning a copy of a piece of media doesn't allow you to copy or perform it. This is by no means a new concept, and you broke the social contract the moment you copied the DVD. This may not be printed on every book and DVD, but it is very clear - you own the physical copy, not the text.
There are other gray areas related to property and copyright. This is not one of them.
sure, i can identify the moment in this chain when copyright law may have been violated. it's the contract part i'm caught up with though: law is a thing which exists whether i agree to it or not, but contracts are agreements opted into. and i can't identify any moment where i reneged on any agreement, implied (the friend i bought that DVD from knew me well enough to understand what that meant) or otherwise.
Duration of copyright is separate from the principle. The current durations of copyright are obviously crazy. But that doesn't mean we should just do away with copyright entirely.
It’s actually very important that we agree on the structure of the social contract, and this is not “my” system at all, but a description of the system we both rely on to not get stabbed in the street for our lunch money.
There's nothing social about intellectual property law. It's been shaped by and to the benefit of corporations who would have us paying royalties to the descendants of the man who "invented" the wheel if they had their way.
It goes entirely against how humans think, strangling creativity and innovation. An artist is harmed far more when they're forced to spend years in court, debating whether their chord progression is too similar to a song written by someone who's been dead for 50 years.
Couldn’t disagree more; IP is the only way we could have found to properly compensate creators for the value of their work. To throw out intellectual property is to throw out art itself.
Throwing out intellectual property absolutely would stop the vast majority of the art made today from being made. We've had an explosion of art once we entered into an understanding that the creators of a work have control over how that work is used. Getting rid of that would kill film, television, and music. Would people still make these things? Yes. But not nearly at the quality or quantity we see today.
No, that's not an interesting point because the obvious answer is yes, more art is generally better than less art.
Either way, it's not up to you to decide utility arbitrarily. Besides, if the art is bad, why are you pirating it in the first place? The problem is that people want the art too much, and are willing to break the social contract in order to obtain it.
Are you aware the earth is older than the last few centuries? How can you even make a claim like this with a straight face? Copyright is rather new, art is ancient. Corporate meddling doesn't help the small indie artists, it boots them out of theaters to fill seats for avengers 7
Most authors of published work fall over themselves to provide links or sources to their material.
I suspect you are either not proud of your published work, or providing a link or examples would diminish rather than strengthen your position in this debate. It's easy to argue about morals and social contracts if you've published a literary work; less so if, for example, it winds up being a fan DnD extension module on DriveThruRPG.
Someone is querying your credentials to learn about you, where you're coming from, what perspective you have, what skin you have, so to speak, in the game. Dodging behind some notion of having to "earn" your credentials when you have taken a very strong and contrarian position is disingenuous.
I'm intentionally anonymous on this account for reasons that have nothing to do with you or this topic. To reveal anything about what I've made would reveal details about my life I'm not comfortable sharing, least of all to someone who is clearly an Internet troll begging for attention.
What you must earn is my respect, and the person I replied to has lost that.
>IP is the only way we could have found to properly compensate creators for the value of their work. To throw out intellectual property is to throw out art itself.
Umm you do realize that some of the greatest works of art were created LONG before "IP" was a thing right? The patronage system did pretty well....
If those are all the greatest works, why does anyone bother pirating movies and TV? Oh right, because they're infinitely more entertaining and cost millions to make.
Since you seem to be a stickler for rules and agreements I'd urge you to re-read the guidelines for posting comments on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) as looking through this thread you are definitely flirting with the edges of them.
I'm not sure why piracy is the internet hill you've decided to die on regarding arguments but I'm going to choose to disengage, give zero cares to your views on my morality, and use my own best judgement on when it's moral to pirate or not.
That's fine, but your own judgement will either bring you back to some form of what I've been saying in this comment thread, or your judgement will be wrong.
Besides, nobody asked you to reply to me in the first place. You engaging/disengaging was always at your own impulse. Nobody was requesting you say anything at all, so returning to that state concerns only you.
No, that tort specifically relates to depriving someone of, otherwise damaging their property.
We've agreed it's not stealing. We've agreed that not all piracy is immoral, for some definition of immoral.
I think we can agree that this specific tort does not apply.
Which specific thing in the social contract, some simple verb such as "stealing" are you equating piracy with. Then we'll have something concrete to discuss I think.
We don't have to discuss anything if you don't like, you replied to me.
Also that's not what trespass means. You don't "deprive" someone of their land when you walk on it without permission, and you don't "deprive" someone of their song when you pirate it.
Apologies, I wasn’t suggesting i was closing down the conversation. I am trying to find a specific thing in the social contract that you feel is violated. We agree it’s not stealing it seems.
Re trespass, that’s not what the specific tort you referred to means. A chattel is a moveable form of property. You’re talking about the colloquial version of trespass. Happy to talk about that conception of it.
Is the idea of trespass the specific thing you feel is being violated in the social contract? If not, what is?
I was simply using the word feel as a synonym for the word believe. No injury intended.
You still have not answered the very simple question though, and i might be a bit slow off the mark but i don’t see it answered elsewhere in this thread.
No. No you haven’t, at least not a singular unambiguous answer.
A lack of trust is not a reasonable reason to refuse to state a single verb or noun. Trust isn’t really a part of this - we are strangers on the internet.
I don’t believe that you are engaging with the discussion honestly because this is an extremely simple question to answer.
I believe this is because you have realised that you cannot defend the position you have taken.
It's a common tactic used to diminish the value of a person's argument to equate it to their feelings or opinions, rather than accept the argument as strong. Further, he's asking a question that's easily answered by actually reading what I've written.
So when you look at a comment that clearly a) is intended to diminish your position and b) seems to completely ignore what you've actually written, it's not "perceived hostility" it's simply bad faith engagement.
I don't know what working definition of social contract you are using but classically the social contract is a set of rules between individuals and a state. Crucially whenever these rules change, e.g when DRM modifies the idea of ownership to a weak form of lending, the individuals are entitled to diverge from the contract.
No, the social contract is a philosophical concept where people agree implicitly to behave a certain way in order to maximize the value of interaction. Part of that involves consenting to governance, but that is merely one aspect of the social contract.
Since the assumption is that "the media broke the terms of the social contract" wouldn't my obligation to follow their terms be suspended? (Much like our social contract not to physically harm one another can be suspended while they are actively trying to physically harm you)
>If so, that'd be vigilante justice and still immoral.
Also I don't want to get to off topic, but I want to challenge your premise that vigilante justice is always immoral. (Is it immoral for a parent to punish a child for jaywalking instead of calling the police?)
> No. Someone violating the social contract doesn't give you permission to violate it yourself.
At what point does a party become free from the obligations of their social contract with the corporate media company then?
>And I didn't say it was always immoral, I said it was generally immoral. One should assume "generally" rather than "always"... in general.
My apologies, based off your previous comments I assumed you were taking a firm ethical stance here. With that said then, I just want to point out that the claim "vigilante justice is immoral" is far from being ethical consensus among philosophers. (Communitarians vs Forfeiturist)
Ultimately this is outside the scope of our conversation so I'd rather not get hung up on it... the tone of your claim just struck me as oddly bold.
When a person no longer benefits in any way from the social contract, that person is unbound by it. Almost always, this means eliminating all contact with that society.
And I am taking a firm ethical stance; it's just not an absolute ethical stance.
You’re making a point about how you feel about it without presenting an argument.
The discussion of harms or lack of harm from piracy has been raging for a long time. It’s not going to be solved by appealing to the idea of right and wrong. It’s not universal in this instance which is why the argument continues.
You would have a point if everyone agrees it is wrong but some people do it anyway. However, that is not the case.