I think abandonware is sort of a different situation and acts somewhat in my mind like adverse possession, in that if they’re not deliberately trying to protect it or restrict access, they’re basically tacitly putting it in the public domain. And that’s for outfits that are still extant like Electronic Arts, where the original game was for a system that’s LONG out of production. Most are no longer even in business, which makes them fall more in the category of orphan works.
I mean, if I felt like playing “Mail Order Monsters” from 1985 (which is super-ripe for a modern multiplayer remake, IMO), it doesn’t really seem like I’m stealing from EA if I download a copy for use on an emulator. They’re not going to even go so far as to send a cease-and-desist letter- the game is effectively dead since they don’t sell it, you can’t buy a C64 except 40 year old secondhand, and no games are published for it any longer.
And most importantly, there is nobody to pay for it even if you wanted to. The combination is what makes it something other than pirating- you’re not depriving someone of revenue, you’re not taking something someone is expecting compensation for, and in some cases, it’s unknowable who that someone might be for all that stuff.
You’re taking something that’s not “yours”, but it’s arguable that it’s not theirs by that point either, and that’s why I likened it to adverse possession.
Things that those same rich people had themselves stolen (or so goes the story) from the peasants, through excessive taxation and strong-arming backed by the government. Then, Robin Hood re-distributed the takings back to their original owners (again, as the story goes). It wasn’t even just robbing from the rich to give to the poor, it was robbing the thieving rich to return stolen property to the poor. It was legally a crime, to be sure, but only because the government in charge had itself become criminal.
Back to the topic at hand (and excluding the toll roads part of the thread), the questions about digital goods seem to me to be quite simple: does the maker have the right to control the thing that they have made, or does anyone else have a right to “have” the thing, for any reason? To me this is not a particularly gray area, and most of the real world cases cited above are not the sort of edge cases that cause a moral person to scratch their head. I can’t see what difference it makes whether the maker knows they have suffered a loss by someone pirating their property, it is still a loss. I can’t see any point to the quibbling about whether pirating should be called theft or some other kind of illegal or immoral activity. Is it wrong to take something you want but don’t need that is available for sale?* That seems to me the crux of the digital part of the discussion, and for me the answer is unequivocally Yes.
*I put in the part about “don’t need” because I don’t want to get in the weeds about how it’s okay to steal bread and milk to feed your starving child; and I put in the part about “available for sale” because I don’t want to get into those weeds either, where something exists digitally but for some reason you are not allowed to buy it. Those are distractions from the main issue.
I just came across this thread and I may have missed it, or rather, didn’t read far enough to get the answer re: is stealing a digital song “theft” or not. It was pretty enlightening on both sides.
But it’s theft, right? You stole data that did not belong to you. The data, which you did not have before, is now in your possession. That’s stealing, right? I don’t understand the significance of whether the owner still (also) has it. The crime is gaining possession of something that is not yours.
It’s like if someone steals my “identify” (information data) from the bank. That’s a crime, and it’s identity theft. I can link to it. It’s probably a lot of other things, but it’s also stealing. It doesn’t really matter if the bank still has my data, now someone else does, because they stole it from the bank. They stole a copy of my personal data that did not belong to them.
Anyways, would someone kindly point me to the post where this was all hashed out days ago…
EDIT: I’ll leave this as-is, but I’m now thinking it comes down to whether theft is depriving the owner or the “thief” taking possession. A little semantics…Maybe it can be both.
But that’s not what @Cheesesteak said. There’s a difference between “no harm done” and “no one notices.” It’s quite possible to do something that is harmful without anyone noticing that it causes harm.
Piracy is an interesting test case for consequentialist ethics: the idea that the ethics or morality of an action is judged by its consequences. If I copy something for free that I would not or could not otherwise have paid for, it looks as though I’m doing something that isn’t causing anyone any significant harm, while benefitting myself. So it seems to me that I am forced to at least one of the following conclusions:
My actions are, in fact, morally justified.
My actions are, in fact, doing more harm than they appear to be.
A consequentialist approach to ethics is inadequate.
I didn’t justify it, I said that the morality of your actions depends on how much harm you cause. $100 of pirated software causes so little harm that the “victim” will not be able to even know they were victimized by examining their own situation. Morally, that crime is… wait for it… different than other crimes that actually impact the lives of people directly and significantly.
Piracy affects the thief a lot more than it does the victim, and many of the complaints in this thread are about how the thief is benefiting from their crime, and that’s not OK.
Contrast that with other crimes, like smashing a car window to get $2 of change from the cupholder. Nobody cares about the jerk having an extra $2, hell nobody cares if they got $50 from hocking a laptop. Nobody cares that the thief has something, they care that their things were taken or broken and they don’t have them anymore. This doesn’t exist with piracy, but we fill in our outrage with suddenly caring that the thief has benefited from a crime.
So we’ve established that stealing $100 in software via downloads is possibly “less immoral” than stealing food from babies or smashing up cars? Well, that’s… something. Pretty low hanging fruit but I guess it’s something. You wouldn’t download a car, right?
I strongly disagree that “harm” requires quantifiable material losses or that you get to decide when harm occurred from your actions. To use the car example, someone might only care about the window and $2, another person might care deeply about their car’s space being violated and someone going through their stuff and loss of security. From a moral standpoint, the thief doesn’t get to decide which of those factors count or how much harm was caused. From a legal standpoint, we have judges and juries to decide when harm happened and to what extent but, from a legal standpoint, we’ve also already decided that downloading software without permission causes harm.
This is not true. And in fact- when the average person pirate, they aint doing it all by themselves- they are doing it from a link that allows thousands and thousands to steal.
A paper cut is no big deal but death from a 1000 such cuts- is.
Yes. I did some consulting for a national glass company- many of the callers/buyer were traumatized about having their car broken into. The company depended heavily on calls per hour, I suggested that in some cases the rep be able to take more time with the customer.
Of course the thief doesn’t get to decide that’s what we’re doing! I’m here in my ivory tower declaring that stealing food from babies is definitely more immoral than stealing a $100 software package from EA. Not “possibly”, maybe, if you squint a little, it’s a worse thing to smash up someone’s car than to pirate a copy of Fallout 3. It definitely, absolutely is.
As you noted, you smash and grab from a car the human owner of that car feels violated. The main issue isn’t that the thief is now enjoying something that’s not rightfully theirs, it’s that the thief violated a human being’s property.
Pirate one game from EA and we’re talking about the impact on an EA shareholder, who will now see their share price drop one ten thousandth of a cent.
Making sure the shareholders of EA are able to take full advantage of the company’s IP is not a moral issue, it’s an economic issue.
Wait, what happened to your basement programmer you were pirating from? Setting aside the fact that this new damage isn’t limited to one rich guy with a monocle, I thought it was cool to steal from the hapless indie dev because he wouldn’t notice anyway?
I think the argument here isn’t that one is worse than the other. That’s clear. It’s that both are bad, not that one is bad, and the other is fine because it’s not noticeable by the entity being stolen from.
It’s not much different than arguing that hooking up an illegal tap to water your roses isn’t stealing city water, because you only use 10 gallons or so a week, while the city pumps more than 800 million gallons a day. Even if that’s literally a rounding error several decimal places out when dealing on their scale, it’s still stealing water (which literally falls from the sky), and it’s still not right to do.
Yes, I was not trying to argue that they were equal acts; I was poking fun at this being the low-hanging fruit we’re going with to say it’s “not that bad” (and thus morally justified) to steal media. “Hey, at least I didn’t blow up an orphanage!”
You’re still assuming that 1 instance of piracy equals 1 lost sale. That adjusts the moral calculus. And no, I’m not saying that “morally justifies” it. Something being “less bad” or “not that bad” is still bad. The outrage over it and the punishments levied against it should be proportional to that, but they’re not.
Yeah, yeah, everyone “wasn’t going to buy it anyway” or “only wanted to test it”, etc. More to the point, I was asking why THEY switched stories from saying it didn’t matter if they stole it from one guy in a basement making three sales a month to its supposed impact on an EA shareholder.
Cool. The OP question was whether or not people act entitled to something for free that they don’t actually have any entitlement to. We seem to both agree that the answer is yes and all the “But I wasn’t going to buy it anyway” or “But I don’t like DRM and DLC and once the head of Ubisoft said something bad about my mom” doesn’t change THAT calculus. (Complaining about the ‘outrage’ is really just a side effect of that entitlement; saying the laws are too strict is one thing but whining that people are talking too much about your admittedly immoral actions is just hilarious)
One of my brothers used to pirate everything. Don’t know if that’s still his practice, but I mean everything. If it could be procured via piracy, that’s how he got it—music, software, etc. His library was immense.
And none of it was something he would have otherwise purchased. Can you imagine that? According to him. None of it. So, it was okay, right?
Perhaps not everyone is as extreme as my bro, but I do roll my eyes at the “virtuous thieves” (yeah, I said “thieves” colloquially; so sue me). Sure, sure. You wouldn’t have purchased it. That’s good enough for me.
Is it really beyond your ability to pay for it? That’s not the same as asking if you think it’s overpriced. Is it impossible for you to put aside some $$$ every week until you can afford it? “Sure, I could, but it’s just not worth it to me.” Well, that’s a really different flavor of “I wouldn’t have purchased it anyway.” IMO.