Really. Suppose you and I maintain farms on adjoining properties, and I divert a stream that you depend upon to irrigate your crops. You never had the water that I diverted, only the expectation of it. Nevertheless, it is clear that I have stolen something from you.
The example you quote is theft. It is not similar to a copyright violation. The farmer was deprived of the use of property. To make this analogy work you would have to put a copying machine at the point of diversion. Then both farmers would have have a stream of water. There would be no economic loss to the first farmer.
It is legal (in most places I am familiar with) to stand in a public place, and take a picture of your home, with or without your permission. I now have a an image of property you own. This is not theft, it is not even a copyright violation. There is still a public domain with some rights of its own.
Sure. See below.
Copying music has had a negative impact on music industry sales. Music sales had a strong peak to the year 2000, and have been in decline since. Perhaps 15% of this decline can be traced to music downloading. Interestingly though, the decline due to downloading has been the worst for the most popular established artists. Newer, less popular artists benefit from unauthorized downloading, and their sales increase. Downloading becomes a zero cost form of marketing to the artist. People will still purchase a song they have first downloaded because they value purchased music more than downloaded music.
Some of the other reasons for the music industry’s decline are:
So I would strongly argue with the contention that a downloaded album represents an album not purchased. It might represent .1 to .2 units not being purchased, but only because the music industry is still trying to defend a business model that is broken. Music artists that are offering their music for sale directly from their websites are having great success. Other industries which have copying such as the software, games and movies industries are growing in sales.
You’re making a big (and most likely incorrect) assumption with that logic. The only way to know the value of goods in trade is to actually execute a trade of goods/services for compensation. Then and only then will you know what the consumer was willing to spend.
If a person is willing to expend mental and physical energy to acquire something, and then continue to allocate mental and physical resources to enjoy that something, then it’s a pretty safe bet it has value to that person.
As to the question of theft: It is possible to steal information, right? That’s why we say “person X stole military secrets.” That could mean they stole the original or a copy, it doesn’t matter, they now have in their possession something that they don’t have any legal rights to.
That’s all fine, and may be accurate and true, but here is the deal: It is the artist’s right to choose whether to participate in a “free download” model or not. It is not the consumer’s.
No amount of arguing about the actual impact will change the moral, ethical and legal aspect of the situation.
You have a valid point, but the only real way an artist can maintain control of their art is by not releasing it. Once they have released it to the public it becomes part of the culture and will be used and adapted. Just as the artist’s work also used inputs from the culture.
Isn’t that like saying that the only way I can truly protect my car is to leave it locked in the garage?
Just because an artist releases their work, doesn’t give someone else the right to do with it what they please.
Okay, and do you have a link that actually answers my question? Nothing there says that it’s “statistically impossible” to see a 1:1 correlation between downloaded music and lost sales. The comparisons to the video game and movie industry don’t really prove anything. For one thing, it’s vastly easier to download an MP3 file than it is to download an entire video game or commercial movie. Most people don’t have that sort of bandwidth easily available. In addition, movies suffer much more noticably from the compression software needed to make the movie into a managable file size. While there is also a loss of fidelity with MP3s, it is not (in my experience) nearly as noticable. Lastly, differences in the market for these products might mean that all three actually are being effected equally by piracy, but the video game and movie industries are robust enough to be profitable despite this loss, while the music industry is not.
And not a damned word of that has any bearing on wether or not it’s morally or ethically acceptable for someone to pirate songs, games, or movies, to say nothing of the appropriateness of calling such piracy “theft.”
I agree, the current buisness model for the music industry is outdated and useless. That does not excuse theft. Just because a person is offering a good or service in a manner I find frustrating or inconvenient, does not give me a right to take that good or service without paying.
You seem to be saying, in essence, that because the record companies can’t stop you from stealing their music, you therefore have a right to steal their music. You are arguing, essentially, that might makes right. I do not think the ethical system under which you appear to be operating is viable.
When there is no executed trade, your assumption suggests that it’s impossible to estimate the value to the consumer. Clearly, if a person buys one album a month for ten years, discovers downloading, and copies 100 albums a month thereafter, I think we can assume he’s only taking the extra 99 albums because they’re free (or nearly free). To suggest that the labels are losing $15/album for 99 albums is ridiculous, this consumer has an established pattern of purchases, at most the labels are losing $15 for the one album per month this consumer used to purchase.
It certainly has value, that’s not the issue. The issue I was on was the financial impact, the concept that a downloaded album = an album that would have been bought in a store. A person may be willing to expend mental and physical resources to get music because they have no money to buy it. If they have no money, there’s no way the labels would have gotten paid for the music, so the illegal copying doesn’t take money from them directly.
I agree that ease of download certainly increases the amount of downloading vs what the consumer is willing to spend. So I agree that the record company numbers are higher than what would have been spent without downloading, but that is really irrelevant. The number represents the value of the items taken, and because there is an established price one must pay for the downloaded music, it’s the correct calculation from a legal perspective.
In summary:
- I agree the record companies would not have made that amount under normal circumstances
- But it is the correct amount to collect from those that have downloaded
Ture, the work will become part of the culture, but that can happen without the free downloading part.
What property have I stolen? Are you suggesting the farmer owns the water in the stream before it gets to his land?
I was responding to a specific comment about a person not being deprived of something he never had. The farmer never had the water before it reached his land. Therefore, it cannot be said that I have deprived him of it.
Facts:
- Illegal downloading hurts record sales.
- The amount of dollars lost to illegal downloads is almost impossible to quantify. As Cheesesteak accurately pointed out, if something is free, people will take it. If they have to pay, thats a different story. It is misleading (at best) to simply calculate the number of downloads and directly translate that into dollars lost.
- The technology behind illegally downloading music (really any digital media) is simple enough that it isn’t going away anytime soon. If I made a living in an affected industry (and I do), I would invest a great deal of time and money coming up with a business model that accounted for this. If I were a musician (and I am not), I would probably focus on touring and making my live show an event that will draw people and charge extra for it.
Personally, I don’t think debating definitions of the word “theft” really get at the heart of the debate on this issue.
But I don’t think the reverse is true, because a person with the financial means to buy that album may still choose to get it for (illegally) free, instead, and use that money for something else. (like beer)
The ease with which the illegal goods can be gotten (especially concerning getting caught and prosecuted) make it somewhat more likely that a consumer may choose to get it for free. (Admittedly, that “somewhat more likely” is hard to measure and quantify…)
Also, the difficulty in measuring the impact on the artist and record company make it appear to be a “victim-less” crime. This argument has been advanced in this very thread by several posters. “Noone was hurt, so quit yer bellyachin’.”
So, if someone were to kill you, they have not deprived you of the rest of your life? If your car is stolen but is recovered and returned a week later, can it not be said that you have been deprived of the use of the car for that week? In both cases you are being deprived of something you never had. Just like content creators are being deprived of that money owed them for that copy of their content that was taken.
When someone illegally takes something without paying for it, they are presumed to have taken the full sale value of the stolen item. The economics of the non-sale that may have occured had the item not been stolen are irrelevent. A car thief cannot avoid recrimination with the statement, “Well, if I’d had to pay for the Porsche, I wouldn’t have got it.”; why should we accept the identical statement if the stolen item is the content of a CD?
Illegally copying digital content without reparation is like stealing food right before it’s removed from the store shelves and discarded: either way the seller ends up with no less than he otherwise would have had no transaction occured at all, but you end up with more without paying for it. Either way, whether or not you deprive someone as a result, acquiring something with a cost while avoiding paying for it is stealing.
But what if I had a machine that made exact duplicates of cars out of thin air. Then I walk up to someone else’s porsche, run the machine on it, and ride off in my exact duplicate porsche while the original porsche remained for its owner, completely unscathed. Have I just stolen a porsche?
Actually, I like the dumpster analogy. Downloading music is like scrounging thrown out, yet still perfectly good food from the dumpster. And when you take the food, the store complains that you stole the value of the food…because if you hadn’t taken the thrown out food you would have had to go in the store and pay full price for it.
But of course, the dumpster divers wouldn’t do that…the reason they dumpster dive is because it’s free. If they had to pay for it, they wouldn’t take it.
So just because the thrown out food has a price tag on it, you can’t say that the dumpster divers have stolen the value of that price tag from the store.
The economics of copyright just make no sense any more. Complaining about stealing is well and good, but it’s like screaming about the immorality of jaywalking or driving 2 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Your average musician makes much less than $1 from every album sale. My suspicion is that most people have a certain amount they’ll pay for entertainment per month. So if they budget $30 for music a month, they’ll buy 2 CDs. But what if you could pay $30 to download 29 albums, and each musician got one dollar, plus one dollar in transaction costs? In that situation the “music industry” is exactly the same size…but musicians make 14.5 times as much. And even if the person lowers their budget in response to lower costs, if they spend more than $2 per month, artists STILL come out ahead. And even if they download the music for free, and pay for no recorded music, but instead pay $30 to see live music, musicians are STILL way ahead, because they get a larger cut from live music than they do from recorded music.
Yeah, it’s unethical to break the law. But I’m not advocating breaking the law, I’m advocating changing the law into something that benefits both consumers and producers. Downloading doesn’t have to hurt musicians, it only hurts musicians because of our outmoded industrial era copyright schema. Sputtering that it’s God’s Will that we pay $15 for a CD, and anything else is stealing and unAmerican and sociopathic is just nonsense.
Our intellectual property and copyright law is not designed to benefit artists, authors and inventors. It was not handed down on Mount Sinai, and any change is heresy. The purpose of copyright law is to advance the useful arts and sciences, and not suprisingly it turns out that a very good way to advance the useful arts and sciences is to financially benefit those who create those arts and sciences.
So focusing on who “owns” what sequence of ones and zeros, and the morality of copying and erasing those ones and zeros, and why God will strike you down if you dare to make a copy of a CD, why not figure out a way to compensate artists and innovators that takes advantage of the technological advances of the digital age. Computer technology makes the distribution of music, art, political rants, everything, EASIER. Yet artists–or rather, the corporations who make money off of artists–scream how it will destroy them. I don’t think so, I think we’ll see that easy copying and distribution of digital information is the best thing that could possibly happen for creative people, giving them more money than ever before. But not with our current scheme.
So just like the invention of the printing press made the creation of the notion of copyright a good idea, so does the invention of computers make the total overhaul of copyright a good idea, if we want to advance the useful arts and sciences rather than cripple them.
Perhaps you have just lowered the resale value of the Porsche by making an unauthorized copy? It was more valuable when there was only one of it, but if you can come along and duplicate 100 out of thin air without authorization you have reduced the value of the original.
Is that theft? Piracy? Legal? I don’t know, but it certainly can have an impact on the owner of the original.
No, you stole the rights to make use of a copy of the porsche, assuming you do not own those rights in the first place. If you do not already own the right to copy and use that porsche, and that right has a particular dollar value on it (ie: the sale or rental cost of the porsche), and you excercise that right without paying for it, then you have committed a form of theft, equal in magnitude to the cost you avoided paying.
Now, you might want to quibble semantically, defining the word “theft” to mean something different from common usage. Let’s examine that with a more unambiguous example, which even avoids the question of permanent ownership.
Suppose that you hop a fence at an amusement park. This park charges a fee per ride; you rode without paying the fee. Now, having ridden that ride without paying, have you “stolen” from the park? Did you “steal a ride”?
Even if the word “steal” does not apply, do you think you had an ethical right to ride that ride without paying?
If you are caught after riding one ride, how much do you think you should be made to pay?
a) The full price of admission to the park?
b) Nothing, because you wouldn’t have paid for the ride at the posted price?
c) Nothing, because it’s too hard to calculate the cost to the park of a single ride?
d) Nothing, because you’re a godlike being who’s entitled to things for free?
Suppose there were still empty seats on the ride even with you on it; that is, nobody at all was deprived of access to the ride because you were on it. Does that change the above answer?
How do you think the park would answer these questions? A paying customer to the park? An unaffiliated bystander?
If this is an incomparable situation to making use of illegally copied digital content, why?
I quite agree. My example was intended to counter the argument that “taking something someone never had” is not theft. Clearly I have stolen from the farmer by divering the water.