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Would copyright infringement still seem intuitively, morally wrong, if there were no copyright laws to begin with? If creators were never promised a legal expe
by eyudkowsky 18y ago
Would copyright infringement still seem intuitively, morally wrong, if there were no copyright laws to begin with? If creators were never promised a legal expectation of control over their work, would you be violating any legitimate expectation by copying?
Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?
Is it the same amount of moral wrong as copying the work of someone who produced an album relying on the promise of legal protection for it?
- tptacek 18y agoLet's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying? Uh, yeah? Like, very?
- mattmaroon 18y agoIt would clearly be intentionally rude. Is that immoral?
- eyudkowsky 18y agoIf you listen to a busker on the subway, and you enjoy the music, but you don't tip them anything, is that just as wrong, or less wrong?
- rms 18y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism To me, there is no intuitive moral wrong here to start with. >Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying? Trent Reznor actually did this recently with his Ghosts I-IV album. It was released under a CC non-commercial license, making it freely copyable. But the only Reznor-endorsed way to download it was to pay him $5. In this particular case, at least, there is absolutely nothing immoral about downloading Ghosts from The Pirate Bay, even if Reznor would like the $5. Reznor seemed guilty about pulling the pay me to download a CC album; his most recent album had sanctioned free bittorrent downloads of ultra-high resolution music files.
- tptacek 18y agoIf Reznor had not CC'd it, had simply posted it at a URL on his site along with a PayPal link, and said "do not download this until you've paid me", would it still be moral to download it from The Pirate Bay?
- enra 18y agoWhat if I would paint a painting and hung it to my outside wall. I would require every passager that would go by and maybe look at it to pay me $5. I wouldn't be able to legally stop them for looking for free. They would walk away with a copy of my paiting in their heads. I think this is a one problem. In the internet almost anything is public good. It's available for almost everyone and you cannot or you don't want to shut people of from consuming. Not related, but the second problem of the copyright is that it's hard and expensive to use it properly. If you would want to legally use a song in your presentation, make a mixtape or even sing a song on your mom's birthday, you would have to go through riias, companys, individual artists, lawyers and applications to get proper rights. Above process is fine for big corporations, they have the time, money and maybe motivation to do this. Individuals don't have this luxury. We all know that singing that song for your mom is copyright infringement, therefore as mattmaroon says, theft, don't we?
- tptacek 18y agoWhat if you put the picture behind a curtain, and demand $5 to look behind it? It doesn't hurt you when someone shifts the curtain to the side, but it does provide yet another silly example that doesn't resolve the underlying problem.