But getting money through burglary, robbery, mugging, fraud, and theft isn’t “free”. You still have to work for that money. You still have to go out on a dark night with a gun in your hand and stick it in the victims face and demand the money and then run away afterwards. That’s quite a bit of risk and effort. And it turns out that mugging is a pretty difficult way to make a living, which is why most people prefer to work minimum wage jobs rather than become muggers.
If mugging were as easy as glancing at someone walking down the street and thinking “I wish I had all the money in that guy’s wallet”, then guess what, mugging would become much much more common, and it would become impossible to enforce.
Laws that are very very very difficult to enforce ARE wrongheaded laws unless the harm caused to society by the lawbreaking is very very very great. It’s very hard to track down a terrorist, but we do it anyway because we don’t that guy to blow up buildings. It’s very hard to track down a guy copying the latest Brittney single, and we don’t do it because the marginal harm caused by that extra copy is very very very small, less than one dollar’s worth of harm.
There’s nothing morally wrong with getting something for free instead of working for it, it’s only morally wrong when you deprive someone else of something they had to work for. And this is why theft isn’t a good analogy to copyright violation, because you haven’t taken anything away from anyone when you make an illegal copy of something.
Could somebody explain this to me like I am a six year old?
Other than the selfish motivation that you want something without legally buying it properly, why is this practice not cosidered as morally or legally wrong by you?
There are many things that I can have and experience without paying anyone. I can listen to music on the radio for free. I can borrow a friend’s CD for free. I can borrow a CD from the library for free. Many music stores have listening stations where I can listen to an album for free. I can go on Youtube and listen to music for free. I can go on pandora.com or accuradio.com and listen to music for free.
All these things are perfectly legal. But why aren’t these things immoral? Because I haven’t made a copy of the music? What’s so magical about making a copy?
The reason we’ve made “copying” such a shibboleth is because in the past it was not difficult to regulate copying. It required industrial processes and significant capital investment to make even one copy of a work. And so a law that granted creators exclusive rights to copy their own works made sense because it was enforceable and copying was a rough proxy for usage and therefore was a good way to advance the useful arts and sciences.
But an unenforceable law is a bad law. It creates a nation of scofflaws, it turns law enforcement into a joke, it undermines respect for the law. Uneneforceable laws are immoral.
Is it selfish to listen to music on the radio? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to borrow a friend’s CD? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to buy a used CD from a record store? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to listen to music on Youtube? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to borrow a CD from the library? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to rip mp3s from that borrowed CD? Why or why not?
Is it selfish to download the CD from a filesharing service? Why or why not?
What is the essential difference between these scenarios that makes some scenarios moral and others immoral? In every case you get to listen to music for free and you give the creator of the music nothing. What is the essential MORAL difference between these scenarios? I understand that some of these scenarios are legal and others are illegal, what I’m asking is why some are moral and some are immoral given that in each scenario you get music for free and pay the creator nothing.
If the law allows a person to do it, that is one thing. If we have a law which makes it illegal, that is another thing. If you do not like the law, please go through the process of getting your elected representatives to change it.
All the rest of it is just intellectual self serving crap to justify someboys selfish greed to posess something without having to legally pay for it.
Almost everybody who steals has a good reason for it. And it is still wrong.
Didn’t you read what I wrote? We ARE going to have to change copyright law, because the present system is totally unworkable. What is the justification for sticking with a system that doesn’t work?
And merely asserting that critiques of current copyright law are intellectual self-serving crap to justify selfish greed doesn’t make it true. Shouldn’t you try to, you know, demonstrate that what I’m saying is self-serving crap?
I like having new music, new books, new art. I think it is imperative that we have some system of financially rewarding the creators of new works. I think that our current system of copyright does not do a very good job of doing so. I therefore think we have to invent some other system. I have some ideas about what such a system might be, but I have no idea if they will work.
All I know is that unlimited free music everywhere is going to happen. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to pay artists for their creations. Maybe we won’t. But since human beings can, as you say, rationalize anything to serve their selfish greed, filesharing is going to become ubitquitous and the current distribution methods are going to crumble. You can’t stop it, any more than you can stop people from picking up hundred dollar bills dropped out of a helicopter.
This may mean that in the future it will be impossible to make money from recorded music, and people will only record music for fun, or as an advertisement for some other money-making scheme. Go on Youtube and you’ll see all kinds of amatuer musicians playing all kinds of music along with the professional music videos. Maybe that’s the future. Hopefully not. But if you don’t like the idea of amatuer-only music, perhaps you should start thinking about alternate methods of rewarding creators rather than dogmatically defending the current system.
We already have a method for rewarding artists for their creative work. Just because you willingly participate in the subverting of that very method does not mean you have to invent something new. If you stop subverting it with your illegal behavior then the problem is solved.
OK, you’ve convinced me. Now, how do you convince everyone else?
Simply repeating over and over and over that filesharing is stealing, and stealing is wrong, therefore you shouldn’t fileshare hasn’t seemed to make much of a dent in the problem, has it? Is the answer to keep repeating it, but louder next time?
Yes, we already have a method for rewarding artists for their creative work. But yelling at people to stop pirating doesn’t work, does it, because as you say people are greedy and would rather get something easily for free than something that requires effort and money. So yelling doesn’t work. Yelling harder doesn’t work. What will work? Lengthy prison sentences? Fines of tens of thousands of dollars?
Severity of punishment is not a good deterrent. Certainty of punishment is. Except what we have now is a system where there is a near zero chance of being punished for copyright violation. So we have to rely on the moral sense of the individual violator, but the problem is that most violators don’t think it’s a big deal. How do you convince them it is? You can’t. Therefore the current method doesn’t work. QED.
Death penalty would work. But we probably do not have the collective stomach for it.
So then I would go back to each person simply doing the right thing.
Look, it obvious you are smart and bright and not a jerk who is just out for themselves. But lets also face it, if everybody did this, then in a short time there would be no reason for any artist to create work that they cannot get money for and make a living from.
Yes, its really neat that you can hop over the fence and help yourself to Farmer Jones crop and avoid paying him for it at his fruit stand in front of his house. But it everybody did that and nobody went to his fruit stand, then poor Framer Jones would only be poor and not Farmer anymore. And you and the others could not even get your free food anymore.
So that is not a good asnwer for anyone is it?
Of course, the usual answer in these discussions is “well but everybody does not do it and enough suckers still pay so its fine if I do it”.
But its not fine at all. You are doing something that is wrong. It is enough for me that you as a person of integrity would stop your behavior.
That’s what I just said. If everyone did it then we’d have a problem, and since everyone is doing it then we do have a problem. And we can’t rely on each person following their conscience and simply doing the right thing, human nature doesn’t work that way. If it did, we could rely on creators releasing their work for free for the betterment of all mankind. The reason we granted creators a copyright in the first place is because we realize that these creators are greedy bastards who wouldn’t lift a finger to create a work of art unless there’s something in it for them. Since we realize the creators are greedy bastards, we shouldn’t be suprised to find that consumers are greedy bastards as well.
Since we can’t rely on each person to simply do the right thing, we have to rely on some other method. What might that be?
One way would be to charge everyone an extra dollar a month for their internet access. The money is put in a content fund. Users can listen to any music, watch any movie or TV show, read any book, all easy to find and organized, like how all the South Park episodes are available on southparkstudios.com, or how thousands and thousands of video clips are on Youtube. You just type what you want into MicroGoogleZon and it plays. But when the users play that music, it ticks a little counter at MicroGoogleZon. At the end of the month, you divide the total money from the content fund by the total number of ticks, and send the money to the owner of tick. If your song got played just once in the month, you’d get less than a penny. If your song got played a million times in a month you’d get a decent amount of money.
The primary risk of such a scheme isn’t the ordinary user subverting it, since there’s no reason to try to avoid ticking the counter when you play something. It would be creators trying to generate false ticks by various methods. There might be no good way to solve this problem. But it might work and the current system cannot work.
But how many people do you know who practice for years learning to play, and they gladly do gigs in coffee shops for tips because they just love to play music? People who spend years learning to play are typically people who love music and for every guy who makes a living by playing music there are twenty guys who wish they could make a living playing music. Maybe in the future no one will be able to make any money from recorded music and that would be sad, but it doesn’t mean the end of recorded music.
That is a statement I could not agree with. A copyright is granted because the law assumes that a creator of something is entitled to be compensated for it once it is turned into something of value. Even if it is not something of value, the copyright gives the creator the right to control its usage. Artists have been creating works of art in various fields for a very long time without any expectation of return. Some people just have art inside of them that screams to get out.
But regardless of what you and I believe about art and its motivations, this is not about largesse or greed or anything else. Its about the legal right of the creator to control their work. They do that through contractual license. Without that - they have no control over the very fruit of their labor.
Creators have a LEGAL right to control their work, but do they have a MORAL right to control their work?
Why? And how long should such a right exist? Should the heirs of William Shakespeare be getting royalties from every production of “Romeo and Juliet”? Why or why not? How about John Lennon’s heirs? The man has been dead for over 20 years, and it’s still immoral to make a copy of “Woman”? Never mind that it’s illegal, why is it more immoral to perform a John Lennon song without cutting a check to Yoko Ono than it is to perform “Romeo and Juliet” without cutting a check to Shakespeare’s heirs?
Lemur - such questions are beyond my poor station in life. I know nothing about morality outside of my own sense of right and wrong. The law, as an expression of the people, is enough for me right now.
Well, I’m glad we agree that this isn’t about ensuring art is created, at least. Now we can get down to the real meat of the matter - rights of the creator vs rights of everyone else. If you’re going to argue that the creator should have legal rights, you’re going to have to tell us why. For me, I’m in favor of copyright being more similar to trademarks. That is, I can’t dilute your work, but I can parody it, and so on. Even in this, I think the limit should be whether or not I’m a) saying it’s official, and b) making money off it. This is mostly because I don’t see the harm in fanfic, but I think there are limits. I’d be perfectly happy to revise that opinion, however, as I haven’t thought it through too thoroughly.
As for copying, however - I don’t think it should be illegal. Basically, for me, it’s all about reputation. If I’m marring the reputation of your work, by changing it, and releasing it as ‘real’, that’s not cool. But my listening to your stuff in my own home doesn’t do that. So, I’d argue against copyright laws, generally.
Well, this is a problem. On the one hand, you say you rely on your own sense of right and wrong. Nothing wrong with this, plenty of other people do the same. The problem is that for many people their personal sense of right and wrong doesn’t tell them that copyright violation is wrong. Or, if it is wrong, it’s wrong on the level of forgetting to say “Excuse me” after you burp. Or, it’s wrong but who cares if it’s wrong as long as I get away with it?
Since the law is an expression of the people and lots of people ignore the law and there’s not much people who still agree with the law can do about it, what next?
Seriously though, if you can’t justify your positions in a way that makes them appealing to other people, why should they care what you say?
The whole issue with scarcity comes into play again too with calling piracy an immoral act. If I have a car, and you steal it, I no longer have a car: you have harmed me violated my right to keep the property I own. Even if I have a CD in a record store, if you steal it, I no longer have that CD to sell to other people, and you have harmed me. But if I have a page of music notes and you copy them down, we both still have them; it is a fundamentally different act. Whether that act should be illegal in a perfect world is a question that could reasonably be up for debate, but we do not live in a perfect world. If I forced my own moral beliefs on you and told you you can’t have premarital sex, you would ignore me because my disapproval is in no way going to cause negative consequences for you, right? Well, the government telling people not to pirate music is about as effective as PETA protesting outside a slaughterhouse—no matter how long they stand out there, some delicious cows are still going to be killed.
