General Twinkletoes said:
I don't think pirates are bad people, but that doesn't mean piracy isn't a morally wrong thing. Do you honestly see nothing wrong with it? Only a few providers are at risk of getting caught, everyone who doesn't pirate does it because they think it's morally right, not because they're afraid of getting punished.
Honestly, you see nothing morally wrong with piracy?
I think it's morally wrong on the same level that jaywalking is morally wrong. As in, not very.
The problem with talking about piracy as a moral question is that it opens up a whole bag of moral quandaries that you don't really need to address. Let's say copyright infringement is morally wrong in the basis that you are deriving the benefit of a creator's work without paying for it. Under that framework, I can think of a number of
equally wrong but
socially acceptable activities, such as;
- borrowing a book from a friend
- buying a used video game
- accepting a hand-me-down iPhone from a sibling
- reading a comic book or a magazine in the store
- watching a DVD of the Avengers at a friend's house
- listening to music played on your friend's music player
- watching a clip of a comedian's stand-up routine on Youtube
You can keep going. Under the moral framework for copyright infringement, literally any scenario where you obtain the
benefit of a work - reading it, watching it, listening to it - without paying money to the artist is
morally wrong. That's unworkable. There isn't a single human being in the first world who hasn't done one of those items on the list at some point in their lives. They're all about as malicious as eating the last slice of cake, or telling your girlfriend she doesn't look fat in those jeans.
Add that to the fact that, as I said, if you take a moral view of copyright law it's morally wrong to pay anyone
other than the creator. How much of the money made from music and films goes to the creators and how much goes to the lobbyists and industry powerbrokers behind the MPAA and the RIAA? How much of the money made by sales of Batman comics goes to Bill Finger? If I buy a copy of the Hobbit, does the deceased Tolkien get the money? His
descendants get the money - people who are passively deriving a benefit from their grandfather's achievements.
Once you apply a classical moral framework to copyright law, the whole structure collapses. If the point of copyright is to benefit the author, why does it persist past the author's death? Why is it possible to sell your copyright in a work?
So how do you answer those questions? You don't. Copyright infringement isn't illegal because it's morally wrong - it's illegal because the law says so. This might seem unjust, but it's what happens when powerful lobbyists use a shallow appeal to morality to justify expanding the scope and length of copyright far past the point of absurdity. Better to think of it as a legal question concerning legal rights and governed by legal principles. That way, at least it makes sense.
When you get down to it, the only time anyone is going to
care about copyright infringement is when you're being sued for it. And when you get put in front of a judge, talking about morality isn't going to get you very far. The judge is sitting in front of a big book called The Law, and he wants to find out if what you did was illegal, not if it was
wrong.
