[QUOTE=Digital Stimulus]
First off, to engage in an honest debate, you need to get your analogies right. Similar to what I pointed out to ArchiveGuy, if I took an apple from a grocer’s cart, but told him that I took an orange (that cost exactly the same amount) and the grocer rung it up as an orange, then I think we have an analogous situation. And I only bring this up because I pay attention to your posts as being well-written, informative, and enjoyable. So, I’d be flattered if I could contribute to making them even better.
Now, as a movie-goer (which I’m not; I haven’t been to a movie theater in years), I pay to a see a movie. To be honest, I don’t give a shit about what happens to my money after I pay for my ticket. I feel that my ethical obligation is to exchange money for a service. The theater receives my money, I get to watch a movie. That’s it. Once the money leaves my possession, it then falls into the purview of someone else’s business decisions (and thus, their ethical obligations).
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Your ethical obligation is to exchange money for the service agreed to at the time the contract was made. If I buy a plane ticket to Chicago but end up in Phoenix, I’m going to be rightfully indignant regardless of the airline clerk telling me, “You got a flight, didn’t you?” Similarly, when you buy a ticket to a film at any modern cinema, you’ll find the name of the film and showing time printed on the ticket. This isn’t just a suggestion; it is what you have paid for and what you’ve agreed to do, and from that, how they distribute the gross profits they make. It may be no difference to you where the money goes to once you’ve paid, but the fact of the matter is that the distributor and filmmakers make money based upon the sale of record for viewing. When you elect to see a film other than what you have paid for, you are abrogating your agreement with the cinema, and by extension, their agreement with the distributor, ad nauseam. To correct your analogy, it would be as if the grocer were working on consignment; for every apple he sells for fifty cents, he owes the orchard owner thirty. When you tell him you’ve purchased an orange (for presumably the same price) he may not be impacted, but the orchard owner has lost revenue.
Making the claim that it doesn’t matter because a film is not a “real thing” and therefore it isn’t stealing (alteratively “they were going to show it anyway, so they didn’t lose anything”) is spurious as well; it may be true that your actions have not resulted in any real cost, but nonetheless you violated the agreement that was made, and the revenue expected in exchange for the experience of viewing the film lost. On this basis one might equally elect to purchase one ticket and view four or five movies throughout a day.
I fully agree the harm is minimal (at least, if done only by a small minority of the viewing public) and that this isn’t behavior that leads to fascism and puppy mutilation. But in terms of individual ethics–that is, agreeing to an exchange and living up to that agreement–we can agree on one point: there is no ethical question here; it is clearly and definably a violation, however modest and practically insignificant. If you disagree so strongly with the politics or views of the filmmakers and don’t wish to grant them any revenues, there is a simple way out of this conundrum; don’t go and see the film.
Honestly, I don’t really care if anyone does this. The film making and distribution industry is so convoluted and innately corrupt that this isn’t even a drop in the bucket. What bothers me is the unwillingness here to simply admit, “Yeah, I do it, and I know it’s (marginally) dishonest, but it doesn’t really matter to me and I don’t feel guilty about it.” Any other justification for this (it’s the cinema’s problem to enforce viewing, the filmmakers don’t deserve my money, I wouldn’t have paid to see it anyway so nobody is losing anything, I paid Paul so that makes it good with Peter, et cetera) is just rationalizing away the central action of not paying to see the film that you watch.
Stranger
