But what about my own rights? When the rights of two (or more) individuals infringe upon one another, how do we delineate the more “important” of the two; i.e. whose rights do we respect, and why do we respect them?
John Mace -
Perhaps we’re misunderstanding one another. More likely, I’m misunderstanding you.
You are right, I was speaking from a legal perspective concerning the statement you made. Within the context of the point I was making, morality was irrelevant.
That’s a difficult question to give a single, all-encompassing response to. I would say that, as a general rule, the more important right is the one that is passive (i.e. the one that does not require the person to take action).
As an example, if you want to murder someone, and they want to stay alive, your right to shoot your gun is active, and their right to remain alive is passive. Thus, the active right is revoked.
It simply makes sense for a society to make as many people happy as possible. People are happy when they are given a generous number of rights, and those rights are protected. Infringing upon the rights of other is wrong only in the sense that it is detrimental to society as a whole.
I’m not saying that morality doesn’t exist. Only that it need not be a factor when deciding the law, which can be formulated entirely by practical means.
To argue that, you’d have to first show that all property rights are created equal, that physical property (which is always scarce to some degree) is morally equivalent to intellectual property (which is never scarce).
“Currently, yes”? That implies there was a time when it was moral to break the law, and there may be again, but right now it’s immoral. How is one supposed to decide when it’s moral to break the law?
I say the legality of an action has no impact on its morality. There are plenty of laws which are perfectly moral to break. If I’m downtown at 2 o’clock in the morning, and no cars are around, it’s illegal to cross the street in the middle of a block… but you’d have to spin up a storm to call it immoral.
There is a single woman who has, say, 3 children. It comes to the attention of her neighbors that she’s abusing her children, but not severely. The police are called, and they’re unable to determine whether or not the children’t injuries are from the mother or from some other source. No arrest is made. The next day, the neighbors are out in the street protesting, saying things like, “The children should be taken away, the children should be taken away.” Here we have the rights of two groups - the mother and the neighbors. The neighbors are the more active group, but they’re right in their reasons to protest; the women is the more passive, but she’s in the wrong.
Probably not the best example, but I believe the point is conveyed.
This sounds all right, but deceptively so.
A society’s first priority is to sustain and progress. For progression to take place, measures must be taken to provide for the survival (safety) of the group, not necessarily its happiness.
I’m not so sure. Too many freedoms or allowances, and we may begin to rub shoulders more abrasively because infringement could be at a higher risk.
But does one distinguish between a good right and a bad right? If it’s a good right, infringement is negative. If it’s a bad right, infringement is positive.
It would probably be practical for those sentenced to the death penalty to be taken to a remote field and shot. It would save money, time, man-power. Practicality might create an infringement of rights.
Mr2001 -
I’ll address your post tomorrow. It’s time for bed…
Uh huh. So I’m cruising down the street in my truck, doing the signed speed limit. Ahead I see an old lady with a walking frame crossing the road. If I don’t brake I will hit her. I am already late for a delivery. I have a right to make a living, I have a right to drive on the road. The old lady has a right to cross the road. However if I break that requires me to take an action. Her right to not be run down requires me to take an action, and is an active right. Alternatively I can passively plow on over the old lady and exercise my passive right to go about my business that does not require me to take an action.
In this case the passive right of continuing driving clearly does not overwhelm the active right of not being run down. There are many other examples I could think of where passive indifference does not overcome the need for action.
I might begin to consider this guideline if it were stated that it only applies in circumstances where both the parties, and all unwilling parties, will continue unaffected if the active right is not asserted. For example I have no right to shoot someone who I have never met because if I don’t shoot them they will remain unaffected by my existence and I by theirs. However if a person I have never met breaks into my house I may have a right to shoot them because by not asserting that active right they will remove my property. Similarly if I come across a gang rape I may have a right to shoot people that supercedes their right not to be shot because failure to assert my right to shoot will affect an unwilling party. Using Nebulous Prime’s example the active right to protest supercedes or at least equals the passive right to be left alone because an unwilling party (the child) will be affected by not exercising that right. Similarly if I passively run over the old lady she can not continue her life unaffected by my lack of action.
To the OP.
I cannot see how copying music is immoral. Illegal certainly but not immoral. In copying music I do not deprive anyone of their property. It is not theft because after the act the ‘victim’ retains everything that she had before the act. Nothing is removed except for vague and nebulous things like ‘intellectual property’. Intellectual property essentially amounts to a person’s ability to monopolise a concept at some future date. I can not see any plausible reason why depriving a person of this ‘right’ is immoral because I cannot see any plausible reason why such a right exists to begin with.
If it is immoral to remove intellectual property then it is immoral for any business to set up in competition with an existing one. If I set up a business selling bulldozers in Town A that never existed there before then no one should ever be allowed to enter that market in competition with me. I developed the concept of peddling bulldozers in that location. That is my concept and if someone sees that I am making a profit and moves into the same market they are depriving me the of the right to monopolise a concept into the future.
Our capitalist system and my personal ethics say that it is not only moral but desirable to stop a person from monopolising such an idea if that is possible. Of course they have the right to try and hide the idea from potential competitors as well. I extend this belief to all ideas, including music. EMI has no inherent right to monopolise a song. They have the right of course to monopolise the physical media or even the artist.
In short I guess that someone will need to explain to me why there exists a moral right to monopolise an idea. There may be a legal need to enable people to do so, but that is another debate. If there is no moral basis to the right to monopolise an idea then anyone can morally exploit any idea. And that includes an idea of how to arrange music, or how to arrange 0 and 1s. Those things are just ideas and concepts, they are not physical property.
I am a bit of a scholar on this subject, and have spent much of my time in college studying and writing on intellectual property laws.
The constitution supports copyright for the sole purpose of motivating new art. Our legal idea of copyright is not based on any moral stance about “rights”. The founders saw copyright as a dangerous monopoly, but one that was temporarily neccesary to induce artists to continue to create. And they lived what they spoke- Ben Franklin, for example, refused to patent his famous stove.
What we have forgotten here is the idea of the public domain. The public domain serves a very important cultural purpose. It functions as our shared cultural background. It furthers the causes of education. It allows old art to inspire new art, and recognizes that all art is deritive both on the culture that created it and the art that precedes it. A strong public domain glorifies a nation, edifies it’s citizens and allows art to live up to it’s full potential and live up to it’s greatest good.
As a practical example, the song “Happy Birthday” is still under copyright. To use it in a film or public event you have to mail a check to a couple of elderly sisters. But look at it honestly. How can this song has been part of each one of our lives from childhood, for generations, belong to anything but our culture at large? To film a birthday scene without singing “Happy Birthday” is absurd- but I’ve had to do just that. Copyright can hurt art, too.
Through the years, through some very specific acts (most recently the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act and the DMCA) the idea of the public domain has been just about obliviated. Nothing will enter the public domain for another seventeen years at this point. Nothing. And it’s highly unlikely to start there. The intellectual property lobby is the biggest lobby in the nation. They have blatantly bought the vote, and can get whatever they want. And they won’t be happy until there is strong copyright (they are looking at how to make it illegal to sell music second-hand, for example) in the hands of private owners into perpetuity.
I consider it immoral to pillage our public domain. I consider it immoral to destroy the very idea of our shared cultural heritage. While I support the founder’s origional idea of copyright (seven years, extendable to eleven- enough time to give an artist “first dibs” so that they continue to produce) and even some ajustments made for the times, I just cannot abide the way things are now and I will actively commit civil disobeidience against the record companies and other intellectual property interests until they are no longer allowed to buy the legislation that is killing the public domain.
Not at all, actually. Pedistrians have the right-of-way (at least they do here) and once she steps onto the road, you no longer have the right to use that bit of it until she steps off.
What? How do you think laws change then? Do we all agree to change the law, wait for the law describing behavior to change, then shift our moral perspective at the instant the bill is signed into law?
giving an example of something that is both immoral and illegal does not prove that all things that are illegal are immoral.
there is no one-to-one correspondence between law and morality. there are things that are illegal that are not immoral and things that are legal but immoral.
you seem to be arguing that owning another person was once the right thing to do in the usa. then one day, it miraculously stopped being the right thing to do because the law changed. would you not rather say that the law changed because slavery wasn’t “the right thing to do”?
That is irrelevant. We are not discussing legal rights here, we are discussing moral rights. If you believe we are discussing legal righst then how can you even think that there is room for cotention on whether you can legaly shoot a complete stranger? That was the exmaple used that invoked this standard of comapritive rights. If you want to argue which legal right overideswhich other legal right the only way you can do that is to cite precendet, and frankly I have no interest in it even if you do.
I’m going to take the other side of this argument for awhile. I think most of us agree that something that is illegal is not necessarily immoral. But couldn’t one also argue that in a democractic society, one is morally obligated to obey the law unless the law itself specifically causes harm to someone? In other words, we cannot morally just pick and choose which laws to obey, except in the instant where that law is clearly designed to hurt certain individuals (like the laws protecting slavery before the Civil War). I doubt anyone could argue that the law preventing the downloading of music could it any way conceivably hurt anyone.
OK, but for your reasons to be more than simple rationalization, you have to choose your music based on the publisher and how much they are involved in the “pillaging” of our public domain. For instance, you limit your downloads to songs that are derivitive of public domain works, or whose copyrights are more than 7? 14? 21? years?
I don’t disagree with much of what you have said. I think the original copyright lengths were much more reasonable than what we have now. And the new enforcement powers granted under recent copyright legislation are scary to say the least. But for downloading mp3s to truly fall under the “civil disobedience” label, you have to select tracks based on something other than the sound. Or at least it certainly lends moral credence to your argument.
I’m not sure the issue of which laws we obey is so simple. We have a long history of civil disobedience. If you are morally opposed to a law it can be argued that you have a right (perhaps duty) to challenge that law. There are many ways to do this. Besides the various lobbying tactics, you can also disobey the law and challeng it in court.
Of course, if you take that route, you are still liable for the full penalties of the law.
even sven, you might want to make yourself aware of those penalties to make sure you are willing to protest this way.
One could argue anything he wanted to. Are you going to argue for a moral obligation to obey the law?
You’d need to come up with a pretty strong reason that breaking the law is immoral, in order to balance out the sheer nonsense of calling it immoral to cross the street in the middle of a block when no cars are around, or to drive 1 MPH over the speed limit, or (more appropriate for this thread) to circumvent the copy protection on a DVD you own in order to watch it on a Linux system.
Well, nothing at all will be entering the public domain for nearly 20 years, so all copyrights are longer than 14 years.
One could also argue that all songs are derivative of other songs, which in turn are derivative of other songs, which are eventually derivative of works in the public domain. Without Beethoven, we may never have had the Beatles.
It’s an interesting viewpoint John Mace, but I don’t agree with it. To me it has the dual probelms of shifting the blame and being impossible to establish.
I see it as unfairly shifting the blame because it assumes that ‘the state’ has the right to interfere in the lives of the people unless or until the people can establish that it causes harm. I take the other view. The state should keep out of the lives of the people until it becomes necessary to prevent harm.
Based on what you are saying many of the Jim Crow laws were moral. Not all of them, but many. For example how does it specifically cause harm to someone that they are not allowed to enter my restaurant? Mostly a “No Coloreds” sign could not cause harm. It could certainly cause frustration and resentment against the business involved, but that can also be applied to the downloading of music. Allowing businesses to blatantly discriminate on the basis of color is not clearly designed to hurt anybody. It is designed to prevent access to specific services from specific vendors. Music download laws do the same.
This then brings me to the next problem. I could argue that the law preventing the downloading of music could it some way conceivably hurt someone. It hurts them in the same way that a ‘No Coloreds’ sign hurts someone. It causes incovenience, frustration and annoyance. That is after all the only hurt that many of the Jim Crow laws caused. While some of the laws relating to schools or hospitals may have caused genuine financial or physical harm an inability to use the front seats in a bus will not do that.
Inconveneience and resentment are forms of harm, and they are even more pronounced when theyresult form laws that are inequitable or based on prejudice or corruption. I won’t attempt to argue prejuice, but even sven makes a case fro corruption and injustice. If the law is based in vote buying and is designed primarily to protect the rich and powerful then it is corrupt and injust. that causes resentent, as reading any number of web pages on this issue will show. Resentment of this sort causes harm to society. In short these laws do cause harm in the same way that the Jim Crow laws caused harm. Not direct physical or financial harm, but harm in the form of resentment, inconveneicne and reduced opportunities and a perception of overnment bias to those in power against the powerless.
But Civil Disobedience, in historical contex, is used to change laws that are morally repugnant. Laws that are designed to hurt individuals or treat them significantly differently. There is no tradition of Civil Disobedience concerning laws that are morally nuetral. I’m asking if there is a distinction between laws that we are morally obligated to disobey and those that we might want to simply protest but should still obey. And I’m proposing that the distiinction is when the law specifically hurts people. When it does not, must one, morally, work within the system to change it rather than simply to disobey it?
I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate on this, and I’m actually looking for someone to blow holes in my argument.
I, too, take the position that the state should not interfere in the lives of people except to prevent harm. But isn’t there harm being done to the artists? If not, then you have to say that copyright laws are not justified. No?
Actually, I would argue that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate in any way they want. I don’t see the parallel between the “No Coloreds” sign and music downloads. Music downloads laws are simple extensions of copywrite laws. It almost sounds like you are saying that in addition to being moral, music downloads shoudl be legal.
Again, are you arguing that music downloading should be legal? What about the hurt to the artist? The “inconvenience” to the downloader cannot be comparable to to the financial harm to the artist. I personally don’t see the “inconvenience” as a harm, but even if I accept that it is, then one must balance the two harms and come down on the side of greater harm. Isn’t that the way these things are worked out?
I think we probably are hurting someone. The artists who produce the music and depend on it for their financial security (the high amount is irrelevant). We hurt the record companies and the entertainment industry (which employes many many people). What I am unconvinced of is whether we are hurting the art. Specific to music there is a mess of commercial crap out there that reminds me of the cheap icing on a cheap cake. Glossy and hollywoodized and made only to sell to the masses.
BUT, another rationalization might be the greater good is being served by allowing the downloading of music. There is no way I can afford to pay for every song I downloaded, yet so much pleasure was recieved from these songs. Multiply that by the number of people who could never have afforded the music and you begin to realize how much ‘joy’ is being generated. So much happiness and joy is being given to all that the argument can be made that to remove it would not be in the interest of mankind as a whole.
Taking things to extreme can also be interesting to help a contentious situation. Imagine no one (or very few) actually bought music. Large amounts of artists would leave the industry and it may turn out the only way to make money is music is to insert advertising messages into the middle of the songs or start rapping about Pepsi (can you just here 50 right now)… in this sense you could argue it is clear in the long run that we are destroying the quality of this art,
