Winona, is that you?!
It’s me, Davey. Wanna come for a conjugal visit? 
Is first trying to attain the desired item with permission from the owner a necessity? How many ways would you attempt to get the item (like selling something to get money, borrowing money or asking someone for money, or asking the shopkeeper for a free potato) before you would resort to stealing?
andymurph64 didn’t mention if he had tried to get the publisher’s permission before copying the books, or tried any way to raise money to buy the books. Would this make a difference in his actions being right or wrong?
This question is not only for you, mangeorge, it’s just that your statement raised a new point. How does one decide when stealing is necessary? For those who believe pirating software is ok if you can’t afford it, how do you define being able to afford it? Do you sell all of your posessions to aquire the software, then pirate it if you still can’t afford it? Take out a loan? Charge it? People buy things they can’t afford all the time without stealing. If the criteria is that you wouldn’t have bought it anyway, because you didn’t want to spend the money (believing that in your case you could not afford it) then what entitles you to have the software for free, while others might, say, work a second job to get it?
If it’s not yours, and you take it without permission, that’s stealing. Not being able to afford something does not entitle you to anything, IMO. It is not my right to have software created by someone else, or hear music composed by someone else. If someone copied one of my term papers in college, I would be upset. Someone might argue that I am not out any money, and the copy does not prevent me from using the paper, so I have no right to be upset, but for me, theft does not require physical loss to be theft.
Thank you Velma! That’s a point I was trying to make, with much less success.
Funny you should mention that because this is an issue that burns my buns to this day. I tried to do this and was stopped by the administration when they found out.
They stopped it for two reasons. One was that they had an organised drive twice a year where they hit up businesses and people for money. They then promised the community that this was the only time money would try to be raised. Of course, I was not allowed any of this money or even to request it since it was laready spoken for on a continual basis. So, I was not even allowed to try to raise this money.
The second is that they didn’t want the community to think ill of the schools. Begging money for text books looks bad I guess.
My blood pressure still rises thinking about this after all these years…
I don’t believe that copyright violations carry quite the same moral weight as material theft. The reason I say that is copyright is based entirely upon a legal construct. Our laws state that a copyright is valid for XX years, after which, it is considered legal to copy and distribute those works without hinderance.
Is it immoral to copy works after a copyright has expired?
Many would say it is not, and since XX has changed over time, and XX is different in different countries, copyright does not enjoy an absolute moral position. If Andy had copied items which had expired copyrights, then we might say it wasn’t immoral at all.
Theft of property is (more or less) universally considered immoral, and would likely be so regardless of the law.
Since copyright infringement occupies a somewhat lower place morally than property theft, I don’t consider such violations as troubling, and am more willing to excuse them.
Cheesesteak said:
It is immoral to copy them and say they are your own. However, by law, it is okay to reprint them as long as you give proper credit. It should be noted that the copyrights generally last beyond the owner’s death, so it no longer really matters to the person who wrote it at that point.
So if you were in a country that had laws saying it was okay to rape a woman, as long as you forcibly marry her afterwards, you would say that the morality of that situation is okay?
You might feel differently if it was your pocket that was being picked.
David B: We can all agree on what constitutes theft in regards to material goods. The issue is intangibles, such as a movie script, a book, or a movie. In my opinion, theft of an idea would be something like me finding a copy of the script for a movie you wrote, producing the movie before you could, and selling it. You may still have the original physical script, but I stole the IDEAS (intellectual property) and destroyed your ability to use or profit from them. This destruction of your opportunity, either to use or to profit from your ideas, is what constitutes the theft. If I had just read the script and stuffed it in my desk, never to be seen again, I would not have comitted any crime. You have not lost anything (material or utility), so no theft has occured.
andymurph64: I don’t see why you should punish the children for their parents disinterest in their education. It’s your job to give them the best education possible under the circumstances, and if that includes violating copyrights, so be it.
Skammer: Yes, I do believe that criteria applies to all moral issues. I am a Moral Relativist Asshole™. By stealing cable, I affect no one but myself, either negatively or positively. Therefore, I am the only one concerned with the morality of my actions. Also, I don’t see anyone claiming that harm occurs if I pirate a CD, for example, that I didn’t intend to buy in the first place. The problem is how to seperate those that didn’t intend to buy the CD from those who are using the pirated copy as a substitute good for the legitimate CD.
stofsky: By stealing that shirt, you deny the owner the possible use or revenue from it. What if it served to draw customers, who would then purchase less expensive apparel? Besides, you cannot see into the future and know that no one would purchase it. IF you could magically know for certain that the shirt served no purpose whatsoever and that it would end up in the trash, then sure, you could take it. But you can never be certain of these requirements.
Yes, Velma, I meant “couldn’t get it any other way”. I tried beg, then borrow. No luck. So I gave steal a try. I finally got my potato. I decided that the lack of a potato would be much more harmful to me than it would be to Safeway.
And you know what? That potato gave me enough strength to continue trying to improve my situation, find a job, and become the successful person I am today. No more stealing for me. Do I feel some remorse, as does the OP? Nope. And I actually took something away from Safeway, something they would have benefitted from. The OP didn’t. He stole thoughts, and gave them to someone else who needed them.
Now ask me what I’d be willing to do to feed my (or your) kids.
Peace,
mangeorge
I don’t have time right now for a full response, FDISK, but I would like to point this one thing out. You have been going on and on about how it harms nobody if you steal a CD that you didn’t plan to buy anyway. I find it odd that you would want to steal something if you were so disinterested in it that you wouldn’t want to buy it. But that aside, you then said to stofsky:
Interesting. Now go and apply that to what you’ve been saying.
David B: A shirt is a physical good. Taking it necessarily deprives the owner of it. Downloading a CD does not in any way affect the owner’s ability to use or sell that CD. Fundamental difference.
Merely asserting that doesn’t make it true. Intellectual property, like capitalism, is not a zero-sum game. We can both benefit at the same time; my benefit is not necessarily at your expense.
You still have your articles, I have a duplicate of one of your articles, and we’re both earning extra ad revenue. We’re both better off.
What have you lost? Nothing. So nothing has been stolen from you. No theft occurred.
On the contrary, you’ve taken away my ability to sell it to you. You may claim that you’d never buy it, but your actions speak otherwise. Obviously you had a desire to use the information, I maintain that I still wish to keep that possibility of selling it to you. Buy downloading it you’ve deprived me of that.
No matter how remote, I could sell that possibility to a third party, analogous to someone buying bad loans with the hope of getting something on the dollar. You’ve deprived me of that, and therefore stolen from me.
As a software developer, this is very real to me.
Of course not, this is exactly my point. There is an absolute morality when it comes to rape, it is wrong, period. Any country that has laws allowing rape has immoral laws.
However, copyright laws with a 20yr term are not necessarily immoral, they are merely different. A person who is following the laws of their country, and uses material with expired copyrights is not necessarily immoral either.
If there is an absolute morality with respect to copyright, then please tell me what the correct term is. Is it forever and a day? Life + 70yrs? 120yrs? 95yrs? 75yrs? 56yrs? These are all terms that are (or have been) used in US Copyright law. If there isn’t a “correct” length of term, it could very well be 5yrs, and a whole lot of stuff would be unprotected.
Personally, I think that copyright should be used as an incentive for people to create original works. The protection gives artists a chance to profit from their efforts, while the expiration of that protection allows society as a whole to benefit from older works becoming freely available. Unfortunately, the unbelievable length of copyright these days is nothing more than a tool for corporations to retain control of these older products. Would the world be a better place if some corporation held the rights to all of Shakespeare’s works?
Telemark: I haven’t destroyed your ability to sell me anything. If I download a CD and decide I like it, I buy it when I get the cash to do so. Studies have shown repeatedly that sales of CDs increased with the spread of the file sharing phenomenon. For the vast majority of people, warez and music sharing services are NOT a replacement for the actual software and music when they have the money to pay for them. The “warez problem” is simply an excuse trumpeted out to explain sales drops that are actually due to poorly produced and overpriced software.
Well if you’re like me you aren’t concerned with the morality of it at all,I would do whatever is necessary to ensure that my students get the best education possible.
I really wouldn’t care about the corporation or all the little ancillary effects my actions had,the chance of helping a student i care about out of that poverty is all that matters.
As for downloading music,stealing a burger out of hunger,downloading movies,stealing cable,direct tv etc etc.
I wouldn’t rationalize it,i needed or wanted it at the time.
Ahhhh, but listen to this. In my last two years of teaching, I had an idea. The idea involved, in simple terms, writing a textbook with software going with it (I have a computer science major along with my math degree). This idea would have taken a long time to do, probably a couple of years putting in 15 hours per week on my own time.
I was excited about doing this and so was many members of the administration. I figured there were about 3000 ‘copies’ needed in the district and, if they sold for $15 apiece then I would make the equvalent of $28 per hour. Considering my squat pay, this was pretty good but I would be doing this on my own time and taking all the risks.
When I brought this up in order to reach an agreement, they were surpised that I actually wanted money for my work! They thought I was being greedy and selfish. That I should just do it. I thought about all the work required and the lack of any $$$ to go with it. Sure, there was satisfaction with helping students but what is too much to ask for some $$$ for my work, especially considering I was paid so little and struggling?
I decided not to do it.
Now, I wonder how many good pieces of work out there that would benefit many people were not done because the author didn’t think it was worth the time due to piracy or something similar?
FDISK, I disagree. I don’t believe that any studies have shown much of anything. If you have good cites though I’d be glad to read them.
My experience is that people who download music get what they want and never purchase much of anything, and they don’t erase stuff they’ve downloaded. I know too many people who have stolen software because they were too cheap to pay for it, and they can get away with it. If they were forced to pay either they would save up the money or they’d do without. Morals are supposed to enforce the same thing.
Take PhotoShop (many people do). They’ve decided to price it very high, that’s their perogative. If you don’t want to spend that much money, use something else (there are alternatives) or do without. The option of downloading a copy and then deciding later to pay (or not), I consider stealing. If you intend to pay when you save enough money, then wait until then and get it legally.
So, I dispute your contention that filesharing benefits the copyright holders/authors/artists. However, even if I accepted that part of your arguement, it is still the authors/artists decision whether to take advantage of that, not yours.
I think you are absolutely right. Except why limit yourself to a potatoe or cheeseburger? Why not go to some $200 a plate restaurant and do the old “dine & dash”? Or why not steal a car if you really need to get somewhere, or just because you want it?
Please justify the “it’s ok to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family” mentality.
Ok, then, now that you are successful, due in part to that potato from Safeway, do you repay them what they are owed?
Theft is such a tricky issue to define, it seems there are endless ways for people to justify taking something that is not theirs (it’s not a material good, the person will never even know, it helps me more than it hurts them, etc.) I can’t say what I would do in a situation like this (having never experienced it), but if I did take a potato from Safeway, I would still call it stealing, and feel it was wrong (whether I choose to commit that wrong knowingly because I would rather be wrong and eat, I can’t say). I guess I’m asking if your position is “Stealing the potato was not wrong”, or “Stealing the potato was wrong, but I did it anyway, for the greater good.” In the second case, I would think that attempting to repay would follow when you were able to do so. You could make a judgement call about the Safeway owner’s morality (that he is a bad person for not giving you a potato), but that is a separate issue than whether what you did was wrong.
As far as pirating software, or downloading music illegally, I would say it is theft, and it is wrong, because you do not have the creator’s permission to own or use their work. I can make judgements about the author, that they are a bad and selfish person for not wanting to share their work, and they shouldn’t try to make a profit from it, because people could be helped if everyone had free access to it. This may be absolutely true, the author could be a terrible person. But the face remains that he is the creator of that work, not me. I do not have a right to use his work without permission. He is the one who spent years working out the bugs in his software, not me, I am not entitled to benefit from his labor.
FDISK, If you believe it is not wrong for you to steal cable, then would you agree that it is ok for me to steal cable? And everyone to steal cable, until no one is paying for it anymore and there is no more cable, because no one will pay for it? Your stealing cable hurts me, because I pay for it so that it will continue to exist for you, but I don’t want to pay for your cable.