…because I’ve asked you to.
ME: “Hey, you can download and use my photos if you pay me money.”
There are three possible responses here:
1 “Okay, here’s the money.”
2 “No thanks, I don’t really need your photo.”
3 “No thanks, I’m just going to download and use it.”
Please explain to me how option three is a moral response.
To the extent that there was nothing stopping people from making copies of the “Mona Lisa” five minutes after Leonardo finished it. The first copyright laws came into being in the 17th or 18th century some time. Quite late in the piece. Prior to that it was effectively open slather, yet there was no shortage of artworks.
Obviously modern technology makes it much easier to produce faithful copies of works, but by the same token, Leonardo couldn’t easily produce copies of his *own *works either, so there’s no net change.
The point being that I do not believe for a second that people are going to stop creating artworks simply because they can’t sell copies of their work. Leonardo was not protected by copyright laws, nor did Shakespeare sell thousands of DVDs of his performances, yet most people still agree that they produced some fairly good art.
So if I ask you to consider something to be immoral, you obliged to consider it to be immoral.
How does that work?
The standard philosophical stance is that all acts are moral until they can be established to be immoral. Since you are unable to show that the act is in any way immoral, it is moral by default.
This like asking me to explain how breathing is a moral act. The question makes no sense. Since you haven’t demonstrated in any way that breathing is immoral, it is moral by default.
…wow, you’ve just written a lot of nonsense.
According to the Lords of Kobol: all acts are immoral until they can be established to be moral. Since you are unable to show that the act is in any way moral, it is immoral by default.
Or why don’t you stop talking nonsense, and explain why you believe that option three is a moral decision to take?
But what constitutes a copying device? If the work is digital then surely that covers every computer/phone etc?
Personally I don’t think there is much you can do to copyright to improve the current situation. For the foreseeable future I think we will just continue in the state we are at the moment with enough people are still paying for content to justify it’s creation but a significant minority paying nothing.
At some point this might change and for it to become uneconomical to produce some of the work. At this point you will see some things not being made anymore. I would expect movies (due to high production cost) and written fiction (due to ease of storage/copying and low perceived value) to be particularly badly hit. Music should survive better because of it’s low barriers to entry and live performance income.
I think the only real solution to this is alternative funding models. The ‘patronage’ system historically used for art has often been mooted as a possible model but with many partons instead of one. A recent example of how this could work is DoubleFine’s Adventure Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure They initially asked for $400,000 to make a video game and based on their reputation (and unsatisfied market demand) they are currently standing at $2.4 MILLION. Once they have made the game it hardly matters if it is pirated a lot because they’re costs have already been covered easily. This is clearly an exceptional case but I think this could work for more projects, especially if they no longer have to compete with multi-billion dollar corporations going after the same market.
Well that is certainly a compelling argument. I am convinced. :rolleyes:
Can you provide a reference to this so that I can examine the basis of it?
For the third and final time:
An act is moral if it doesn’t violate nay moral principles. It’s that simple. Since you are unable to demonstrate that the act violates any moral principles, the decision to take such an act is inherently moral.
That is why option three is a moral decision to take.
QED.
…just so we have it on record everyone: Blake thinks its moral to steal my work. Cheers mate: I’ll make sure I remember you when it comes to Christmas Card time. 
No, as we have already established, what we are discussing does not meet any standard of stealing. You are not in any way deprived of any property.
Yeah, you made such a great contribution to the thread. :rolleyes:
Yes. Everything that is capable of being part of a system that can make copies of works.
Wrong yet again. You’re doing a horrible job with this ridiculous attempt at analogy. Your buggy whip maker lost money because someone created a better, more efficient, more desirable means of transportation and his customers stopped buying his product and bought the better one instead.
That is not what pirating does. Pirates don’t create anything. Pirating is more like picking the lock on the warehouse where the buggy whips are stored and then stealing the whips, because you really want a whip and don’t want to pay for one. The buggy whip maker has been deprived of his property in the same way a pirate deprives the artist of his property.
Taking something that belongs to someone else, without their consent or legal authority to do so, is immoral. Wrong. Bad.
Nor did anyone ever make such a claim.
In what sense is it it similar. In what sense does making a replica of a buggy whip deprive the owner of the original of the full use and enjoyment of their whip?
Please explain how, when I make a copy of a CD, the artist can no longer listen to that CD?
Because if someone “picks the lock on the warehouse where the buggy whips are stored and then steals the whips”, the owner can no longer use the whips. And you just told us that the buggy whip maker has been deprived of his property in the same way a pirate deprives the artist of his property.
So you must be able to tell us how when I make a copy of a CD, the artist can no longer listen to that CD, since the effects are the same.
Right?
I agree entirely.
And making a copy of a CD that belongs to someone else without ever, at any point, taking it from them, is moral. Right. Good.
Agreed?
You’ll recall I specifically stated that “art” works–works of passion, as I put it in the post–may be exceptional here, and perhaps we should allow them to be copied willy-nilly.
But more mundane, explicitly profit-driven works, it would seem, would not be made if everyone copied them as soon as they were made. For there would be no motive to create them. Is the way it seems to me right now.
I also think there are relevant differences between images and texts–and among images, further relevant differences between media. We value original over copy when it comes to images in certain media. We value original over copy much less in other visual media. And when it comes to texts, we only value original over copy in an exceedingly small number of cases, specifically, cases with independent historical interest.
I said above that the question whether it’s theft is a red herring, but the discussion keeps coming back to that. I’ll tell you why it’s a red herring then–the disagreement is purely verbal. One side thinks that theft by definition requires the taking of an object in a way that removes the ability for the owner to use it. The other side thinks theft doesn’t require that–that you can have theft even in cases where no object was taken in a way that denied use to its owner.
We could argue about the nature of theft, and that’d be interesting, but it’s a separate issue from the morality of copying intellectual works.
Another way to put the question:
If there are no rules in place disallowing the copying of my book willy-nilly, and if I am not particularly interested in writing the book simply for my health, as a hobby, and if it is very easy for anyone who wishes to to instantly create a copy of my book on demand, then why would I write a book? Does some alternative set of rules need to be in place concerning IP? Or, alternatively, are no rules necessary, and is there a natural way for people to profit from writing books even in the absence of any kind of IP laws? Or, could it be that there would simply be fewer books and that’s okay?
That’s just stupid. Mind bogglingly so. Pirates are not stealing a CD, pirates are stealing the content on the CD. Content is property. Property is not limited to tangible things.
There may be a few points worth evaluating here.
Is personal use the same as commercial use? If not, then why should they be treated equally?
If the argument is that we are depriving the creator of income either way, then what of the counter that many artists distribute their work for free over their airwaves daily? I"m sure the radio stations pay a license of some sort, but the* end users *do not. How is downloading a free copy any worse ethically than making a mix tape off the radio? Somebody paid the artist either way to obtain the material in the first place.
What about artists who do live performances? How is taping a live event for my personal, non commercial use unethical? I paid for the ticket. Maybe I just have a poor memory.
Now suppose as a fan I put that taping up years later for other fans to enjoy. I don’t charge for it. I gain no profits from it in any way. If the artists never taped that show to use, then you cannot argue that I’m depriving them of anything. They never had it in the first place. I cannot conceive of an ethical argument that would allow a third party to control information they willingly put out into the public sphere. It’s like trying to sue someone for whistling a song they heard on the radio. I"m not seeing how any of these examples *actively harm *an artist. Potential profits are a smoke screen ethically. You cannot assume that people would simply just pay for things. There is an even chance they’d simply decide to skip your work entirely. So any fair discussion must demonstrate a real, tangible, quantifiable harm.
The actual laws don’t matter in this type of conversation. We can make laws against or for anything. Ethics exist independently from the law.
Thomas Babbington Macauley, quite rightly, says that this is exactly what copyright is. It’s a tax which the government enforces to fund creativity. It’s fundamentally iniquitous and therefore should be as light a burden as possible. A free market wouldn’t have the government redistributing wealth and maintaining monopolies like that, now would it? And he was a big owner of copyright, being a prolific author who’s still in print these many years later.
We also have the BBC, which taxes television owners to fund content production, libraries which pay copyright holders on each time someone takes out their stuff. And so on.
Patents are another restraint on trade. Hollywood only exists because its founders fled from the tyrannical regime of the Edison patent machine. Whole industries can therefore start because piracy allows innovation without having to pay into a protection racket. Then they, in their turn, can request the government to stamp down their competitors.
This thread is the intellectual property of its originator, and your attempt to fork it with a legal-themed remix is a reprehensible act.
Yeah, it ertainly protects consumers from all that horrible horrible freedom.
So, why should we decide the merits of a law based on how it affects your income? You could be a very profitable crack dealer, if only the laws would come to their senses.
To go back to Macauley’s argument, he was against extending copyright because it would turn people against it. There was already opposition to copyright because it intentionally inflates prices, reduces availability, and if it does so to a great enough degree you get piracy. Back then piracy required a printing press, it’s easier now.
…well, we haven’t established that yet at all. Are you talking about your dictionary cite? You posted a definition from the Farlex Free Dictionary: thats all. In the context of this discussion, that was pretty meaningless.
So a counter-cite:
Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/theft.html#ixzz1oLLvtKxL
There you go: by your standards for the purposes of this debate I have established that taking intangible property is theft, therefore meeting the standard of stealing. And its also immoral, because you would agree, theft is immoral, isn’t it?
I’ve invested seven thousand dollars into my equipment, spent three years learning the trade and invested five thousand dollars to attend the best photography school in this country. I know my equipment and I understand light and I understand people and that is why I produce images that have value.
If you don’t want to pay me for the images, thats fine, just don’t use them. But if you decide to use them and make money off them and not pay me, well, immoral is probably the most polite thing I would call you.
I’ve invested thousands of dollars into making that photo, you’ve invested zilch. Zip. Nothing. Nada. I asked you not to take it, you took it anyway.
Fortunately under the current legal framework I have protections: for which I am thankful, and that system is unlikely to change. The system that protects Sony and Disney and all the other big businesses in the world also protects people like me struggling to make money in this economy working out of an office in my bedroom. The current copyright laws are good: and I’ve yet to be convinced otherwise, especially by this thread.
And the reason why there is so much resistance to change is because there are people out there who when asked politely to pay for something I have invested my heart and soul and thousands of dollars into, turn around and say “nope” and just take it. And these people somehow manage to think that this is somehow a moral choice: and the will go to absurd lengths to justify that choice. Well I’m sorry, taking my work without paying me is not justifiable at all.
Kind words and photo credit don’t pay the bills and if you think that my work is good enough to use then its good enough to pay me. It’s early in the morning here in NZ and I’m off to bed, but I’ll let Harlan have the last word:
…well, actually, the originator agreed to the terms and conditions stated here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/faq.php?faq=vb3_board_faq#faq_sdmb_rules
So I’m not entirely sure why my decision to participate on a message board in accordance of those rules is so reprehensible.
So we can agree, regardless of the legality, and regardless of the morality, piracy is definitely just plain rude.