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Indeed. I'd add to that that paying 15 Euro for a BluRay may be perfectly acceptable in the Western world, but a huge budget hit in the rest of the world. The

Indeed. I'd add to that that paying 15 Euro for a BluRay may be perfectly acceptable in the Western world, but a huge budget hit in the rest of the world. The buy 'physical media via the Internet' argument doesn't fly there either.

roel_v 16y ago
Right, and a 250k Lamborghini is also a huge budget hit for me in the West. Which is why I drive a shitty Citroen. I'm sick and tired of the entitled whining. Nobody owes you the right to listen to the latest album of whoever is at the top of the charts; in fact, nobody owes you anything but what they agreed on. The proposition is very clear: there are people who create something. They give it to you, on the condition that you pay for it. They may not want to offer it to you because it's too hard to do business in your country. If you don't agree to their terms, or their decision not to offer you their stuff, that still doesn't give you the right to just take whatever it is they're offering from another source. Feel free to find other people who make things you want and offer it at terms you accept; or petition people to offer things at a cheaper price; or whatever. But taking things from creators against their wishes is not only criminal but also immoral. (Maybe you still do it, even if it's criminal and immoral. That's a personal decision. But then just acknowledge it for what it is and don't try to weasel yourself out of the moral responsibility).
- tjogin 16y ago
  One of my mottos is that it is far easier to change yourself than it is to change the world, even if you've done nothing wrong yourself. Trying to change everybody to live by that code is quite a bit harder than to adapt to the situation we're in (and, arguably, that kind of draconian view created in the first place).
- ericd 16y ago
  I gather from your comments that your moral code depends heavily on the rule of law. Many people don't base their moral code very heavily on the laws currently on the books, except as far as those laws reflect the original intent of law - to make the world a better place to live overall. It's generally agreed upon that stealing physical goods, murdering, etc. make the world a more unruly, unpleasant, inefficient, discouraging place for meek, cooperative people. Filesharing doesn't fall into the same league in those terms, so many don't really believe it's immoral, especially if one wasn't going to buy those files if there was no alternative. In that case, it's like happiness created from nothing. This other moral code makes the morality question a good bit murkier. That's my understanding, anyway.
  - steve19 16y ago
    According to some, each person in the USA commits multiple felonies each day[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447150457443...
  - krschultz 16y ago
    If filesharing undermines the creators to the point where they stop creating, will the world be a better place? In case you haven't noticed, we've had YouTube for years but the home-made movies are not on the same level as the ones produced by the major studies. Most indy bands are good, but can't reach their full potential without financial support. Filesharing undermines that whole system, especially because it would be near technically impossible to prevent something from being shared in all countries except those where the work is not being sold.
    - ericd 16y ago
      Good question, but the more important one is whether filesharing is doing that. This is where the question of whether someone would have bought something otherwise or not comes in. Anecdotally, most of the people I know who fileshare just consume more now than they did, in a wider variety. Some of them have stopped buying stuff, but most of them haven't, and many went to Hulu, iTunes, Grooveshark, Pandora, etc. as soon as those became a good enough alternative. You don't need to prevent it completely, that's putting your eyes on the wrong goal (though this seems to be the tack that they're taking). You just need to make the alternative as easy or easier and inexpensive enough to not think too much about if you're moderately well off. It's a stupid company that tries to force their market to act in the way they want it to, rather than finding a way to cater to them.
- steve19 16y ago
  Don't confuse copyright infringement, aka. pirating, to stealing. You may well believe that they are morally the same thing, but they are not legally the same thing. Theft has existed as long as man, copyright infringement was invented about 100 years ago. copyright infringement varies wildly in penalties. In some countries it is a serious offense, in others it is legal.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    I'm a lawyer, thank you very much, I know perfectly well about the difference, and this is another thing I'm sick and tired of - people making minute semantic arguments that have nothing to do with the substance of the matter. Note that nowhere I equated piracy with stealing, exactly because I know that when I do somebody will come with this remark. While we're nitpicking, your second sentence contradicts itself - if copyright infringement is legal, it's not infringement any more. Also you're wrong about the history of copyright and intellectual property. Although not named as such and part of a broader concept of exclusive rights on information, guilds in Medieval times had privileges granted to them that would nowadays be called, amongst others, copyright. You're trying to make it sound as if copyright is something that was just made up out of thin air 100 years ago and that it has no relationship to physical property law at all; that argument is misleading as the actual history and relationship is much more nuanced.
    - ericd 16y ago
      Ah that might explain why your moral code seems to draw from legality. It's not nitpicking to separate theft from copyright infringement - they have very different effects on the owner, and to conflate the two is basically spreading FUD to confuse the argument. They should not be treated the same way by the law, despite what the rightsholders might like.
      - roel_v 16y ago
        Oh no it doesn't, if anything it just makes that I have been confronted with and thought about the orthogonality between 'legal' and 'moral' more than 'average' (I hate to use this phrase because it makes it sound like I'm arguing from authority there - I'm not) and I am highly aware of the difference. The reason I didn't respond to the post above saying a similar thing is that it's very boring to discuss personal opinions and circumstances that lead to them; and if personal opinions of certain people are interesting, I'm not one of those people. Rest assured though that I do not conflate the two, nor derive one from the other. The matter is that morality is based on a small set of axioms - personal sovereignty, strong property rights, and the moral binding power of contracts (not in the legal sense - in the sense that if two people agree to something, they are morally bound to following through on those commitments). Intellectual property is just as much property as physical property is; without going into too much detail here, it quite naturally follows from more traditional, physical property ideas like Locke's labor theory. To simplify (so disregarding subordinate issues like ownership of ownership of base products, work-for-hire etc), when a person puts his efforts into creating something, he owns it, regardless if that what he creates is physical or not. It's painfully obvious and intuitive; if not (to use a very crude argument), then why does CC with attribution even exist? Most everybody instinctively recognizes this concept, and no sophistic constructs about maximum social utility or information as an oppression mechanism (cough crazy man Stallman cough) can do away with that. Anyway, I'm not saying intellectual property and 'regular' property rights should be treated the same under the law; there are valid technical and conceptual reasons to separate them. That's not the issue I contend; what I contend is the pervasive cognitive dissonance in the 'geek' community (of which, to be clear, I am part) that somehow they should have the right to download whatever they want because there is at the moment no effective way for creators to enforce their will on what happens to their creations.
- danieldk 16y ago
  I am a utilitarian. If someone cannot afford a movie, downloading does not equate to a lost sale. It does not hurt any person involved with the creation of that movie. It can possibly make the downloader a bit happier. Therefore I think that, in this case, downloading perfectly moral.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Is stealing a bike not immoral until the owner of the bike notices it? Or until he misses it? Let's say he has a bike that he never uses, and never will. Is it not immoral to steal that bike? If you really mean what you say and understand the implications, I am disturbed by your ethics. I'm usually disturbed by utilitarians - they're the ones who end up saying 'torturing a couple of terrorists is morally OK when it means that we can save the lives of 50 innocent civilians'.
    - hxa7241 16y ago
      Well, you have started upon just the pertinent path, so let us consider the conclusion. Would it be immoral to do something 'to' someone, when it has no effect on them at all? Hmmm, that seems rather difficult to find any immorality in -- after all, any moral concern must eventually bottom out on some actual effect -- deontological or consequentialist. If all that can be said is that it would be 'spiritually' wrong or 'god' decrees it to be wrong, or merely that 'we' have decided it is wrong, that is unlikely to satisfy anyone rational.
      - roel_v 16y ago
        What can be done to someone that has no effect on them at all? Is there actually something being done then? I'm not understanding the situation. If you're asking if acts can be moral or immoral even if they have no consequences, then the answer is yes, they can. Objective morality doesn't have to be derived from god or a spiritual being, or feeling; there can be objective morality that we deduce, or interpret or find, depending on how you look at it, through reason. From a limited set of axiom (which I referred to in another post in this thread), we can derive objective morality. The problem with morality is epistemological, not about its nature. We just don't know yet how to deduce what is moral in some circumstances. Maybe we will some day, we'll see; but that morality is subjective seems to be a commonly held belief but one that usually doesn't stand up long when one examines the consequences. When enough people think that it is morally OK to execute all those with hair growing out of their ears, is it? No it's not, and it never is. It's not because it violates the right to life of those people (leaving aside issues of death penalty etc). People often argue to me 'but if there are no people, there is no morality, so morality has to be subjective' (actually someone said that to me last week right after saying how her Christianity was such an important part of her identity - I think she didn't quite get the memo on the nature of morality in her church, but I digress). My point is that morality always exists; it's like the fundamentals of mathematics or the laws of nature. Would Pythagoras's theorem hold even if there would never have existed humans who formulated it? Of course it would.
- hxa7241 16y ago
  The morality is quite different to physical goods. Infringement is a malum prohibitum not a malum in se. Copying is not immoral in itself. Quite the opposite: it is something we would want to encourage. It can only really be immoral in so far as the law is moral. And the law is only moral in that it serves an economic purpose -- that is, to be clear, it serves us overall. The law is not there to 'protect' or benefit copyright 'owners', they are the means not the end. So is it serving us overall to restrict access to goods where there is no need to? to charge more than can be afforded, yet the cost of supply is negligible? If the intrinsic act is moral, and the law obstructing it is in some case seemingly immoral, it is easy to support doing the act anyway.
  - maw 16y ago
    Not sure I agree. The two mala can overlap; in the realm of unauthorized copying, I think that they sometimes, but not always, do. It's complicated. What's clear, though, and where I'm pretty sure we'd agree, is that rhetoric conflating unauthorized copying with traditional forms of stealing doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. It isn't at all like taking somebody's food or jumping out of a taxi without paying.
    - hxa7241 16y ago
      > The two mala can overlap; in the realm of unauthorized copying, I think that they sometimes, but not always, do How? You are taking a more cautious view than me, which is maybe more prudent and respectable. But I would be interested to hear how copying can be intrinsically harmful . . . the basic problem is that it is by definition physically separate, so for there to be any effect communicated at all requires some other system. Is there a good counter-argument or -example?

roel_v 16y ago

Right, and a 250k Lamborghini is also a huge budget hit for me in the West. Which is why I drive a shitty Citroen. I'm sick and tired of the entitled whining. Nobody owes you the right to listen to the latest album of whoever is at the top of the charts; in fact, nobody owes you anything but what they agreed on. The proposition is very clear: there are people who create something. They give it to you, on the condition that you pay for it. They may not want to offer it to you because it's too hard to do business in your country. If you don't agree to their terms, or their decision not to offer you their stuff, that still doesn't give you the right to just take whatever it is they're offering from another source. Feel free to find other people who make things you want and offer it at terms you accept; or petition people to offer things at a cheaper price; or whatever. But taking things from creators against their wishes is not only criminal but also immoral. (Maybe you still do it, even if it's criminal and immoral. That's a personal decision. But then just acknowledge it for what it is and don't try to weasel yourself out of the moral responsibility).

tjogin 16y ago
One of my mottos is that it is far easier to change yourself than it is to change the world, even if you've done nothing wrong yourself. Trying to change everybody to live by that code is quite a bit harder than to adapt to the situation we're in (and, arguably, that kind of draconian view created in the first place).
ericd 16y ago
I gather from your comments that your moral code depends heavily on the rule of law. Many people don't base their moral code very heavily on the laws currently on the books, except as far as those laws reflect the original intent of law - to make the world a better place to live overall. It's generally agreed upon that stealing physical goods, murdering, etc. make the world a more unruly, unpleasant, inefficient, discouraging place for meek, cooperative people. Filesharing doesn't fall into the same league in those terms, so many don't really believe it's immoral, especially if one wasn't going to buy those files if there was no alternative. In that case, it's like happiness created from nothing. This other moral code makes the morality question a good bit murkier. That's my understanding, anyway.
- steve19 16y ago
  According to some, each person in the USA commits multiple felonies each day[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447150457443...
- krschultz 16y ago
  If filesharing undermines the creators to the point where they stop creating, will the world be a better place? In case you haven't noticed, we've had YouTube for years but the home-made movies are not on the same level as the ones produced by the major studies. Most indy bands are good, but can't reach their full potential without financial support. Filesharing undermines that whole system, especially because it would be near technically impossible to prevent something from being shared in all countries except those where the work is not being sold.
  - ericd 16y ago
    Good question, but the more important one is whether filesharing is doing that. This is where the question of whether someone would have bought something otherwise or not comes in. Anecdotally, most of the people I know who fileshare just consume more now than they did, in a wider variety. Some of them have stopped buying stuff, but most of them haven't, and many went to Hulu, iTunes, Grooveshark, Pandora, etc. as soon as those became a good enough alternative. You don't need to prevent it completely, that's putting your eyes on the wrong goal (though this seems to be the tack that they're taking). You just need to make the alternative as easy or easier and inexpensive enough to not think too much about if you're moderately well off. It's a stupid company that tries to force their market to act in the way they want it to, rather than finding a way to cater to them.
steve19 16y ago
Don't confuse copyright infringement, aka. pirating, to stealing. You may well believe that they are morally the same thing, but they are not legally the same thing. Theft has existed as long as man, copyright infringement was invented about 100 years ago. copyright infringement varies wildly in penalties. In some countries it is a serious offense, in others it is legal.
- roel_v 16y ago
  I'm a lawyer, thank you very much, I know perfectly well about the difference, and this is another thing I'm sick and tired of - people making minute semantic arguments that have nothing to do with the substance of the matter. Note that nowhere I equated piracy with stealing, exactly because I know that when I do somebody will come with this remark. While we're nitpicking, your second sentence contradicts itself - if copyright infringement is legal, it's not infringement any more. Also you're wrong about the history of copyright and intellectual property. Although not named as such and part of a broader concept of exclusive rights on information, guilds in Medieval times had privileges granted to them that would nowadays be called, amongst others, copyright. You're trying to make it sound as if copyright is something that was just made up out of thin air 100 years ago and that it has no relationship to physical property law at all; that argument is misleading as the actual history and relationship is much more nuanced.
  - ericd 16y ago
    Ah that might explain why your moral code seems to draw from legality. It's not nitpicking to separate theft from copyright infringement - they have very different effects on the owner, and to conflate the two is basically spreading FUD to confuse the argument. They should not be treated the same way by the law, despite what the rightsholders might like.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Oh no it doesn't, if anything it just makes that I have been confronted with and thought about the orthogonality between 'legal' and 'moral' more than 'average' (I hate to use this phrase because it makes it sound like I'm arguing from authority there - I'm not) and I am highly aware of the difference. The reason I didn't respond to the post above saying a similar thing is that it's very boring to discuss personal opinions and circumstances that lead to them; and if personal opinions of certain people are interesting, I'm not one of those people. Rest assured though that I do not conflate the two, nor derive one from the other. The matter is that morality is based on a small set of axioms - personal sovereignty, strong property rights, and the moral binding power of contracts (not in the legal sense - in the sense that if two people agree to something, they are morally bound to following through on those commitments). Intellectual property is just as much property as physical property is; without going into too much detail here, it quite naturally follows from more traditional, physical property ideas like Locke's labor theory. To simplify (so disregarding subordinate issues like ownership of ownership of base products, work-for-hire etc), when a person puts his efforts into creating something, he owns it, regardless if that what he creates is physical or not. It's painfully obvious and intuitive; if not (to use a very crude argument), then why does CC with attribution even exist? Most everybody instinctively recognizes this concept, and no sophistic constructs about maximum social utility or information as an oppression mechanism (cough crazy man Stallman cough) can do away with that. Anyway, I'm not saying intellectual property and 'regular' property rights should be treated the same under the law; there are valid technical and conceptual reasons to separate them. That's not the issue I contend; what I contend is the pervasive cognitive dissonance in the 'geek' community (of which, to be clear, I am part) that somehow they should have the right to download whatever they want because there is at the moment no effective way for creators to enforce their will on what happens to their creations.
danieldk 16y ago
I am a utilitarian. If someone cannot afford a movie, downloading does not equate to a lost sale. It does not hurt any person involved with the creation of that movie. It can possibly make the downloader a bit happier. Therefore I think that, in this case, downloading perfectly moral.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Is stealing a bike not immoral until the owner of the bike notices it? Or until he misses it? Let's say he has a bike that he never uses, and never will. Is it not immoral to steal that bike? If you really mean what you say and understand the implications, I am disturbed by your ethics. I'm usually disturbed by utilitarians - they're the ones who end up saying 'torturing a couple of terrorists is morally OK when it means that we can save the lives of 50 innocent civilians'.
  - hxa7241 16y ago
    Well, you have started upon just the pertinent path, so let us consider the conclusion. Would it be immoral to do something 'to' someone, when it has no effect on them at all? Hmmm, that seems rather difficult to find any immorality in -- after all, any moral concern must eventually bottom out on some actual effect -- deontological or consequentialist. If all that can be said is that it would be 'spiritually' wrong or 'god' decrees it to be wrong, or merely that 'we' have decided it is wrong, that is unlikely to satisfy anyone rational.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      What can be done to someone that has no effect on them at all? Is there actually something being done then? I'm not understanding the situation. If you're asking if acts can be moral or immoral even if they have no consequences, then the answer is yes, they can. Objective morality doesn't have to be derived from god or a spiritual being, or feeling; there can be objective morality that we deduce, or interpret or find, depending on how you look at it, through reason. From a limited set of axiom (which I referred to in another post in this thread), we can derive objective morality. The problem with morality is epistemological, not about its nature. We just don't know yet how to deduce what is moral in some circumstances. Maybe we will some day, we'll see; but that morality is subjective seems to be a commonly held belief but one that usually doesn't stand up long when one examines the consequences. When enough people think that it is morally OK to execute all those with hair growing out of their ears, is it? No it's not, and it never is. It's not because it violates the right to life of those people (leaving aside issues of death penalty etc). People often argue to me 'but if there are no people, there is no morality, so morality has to be subjective' (actually someone said that to me last week right after saying how her Christianity was such an important part of her identity - I think she didn't quite get the memo on the nature of morality in her church, but I digress). My point is that morality always exists; it's like the fundamentals of mathematics or the laws of nature. Would Pythagoras's theorem hold even if there would never have existed humans who formulated it? Of course it would.
hxa7241 16y ago
The morality is quite different to physical goods. Infringement is a malum prohibitum not a malum in se. Copying is not immoral in itself. Quite the opposite: it is something we would want to encourage. It can only really be immoral in so far as the law is moral. And the law is only moral in that it serves an economic purpose -- that is, to be clear, it serves us overall. The law is not there to 'protect' or benefit copyright 'owners', they are the means not the end. So is it serving us overall to restrict access to goods where there is no need to? to charge more than can be afforded, yet the cost of supply is negligible? If the intrinsic act is moral, and the law obstructing it is in some case seemingly immoral, it is easy to support doing the act anyway.
- maw 16y ago
  Not sure I agree. The two mala can overlap; in the realm of unauthorized copying, I think that they sometimes, but not always, do. It's complicated. What's clear, though, and where I'm pretty sure we'd agree, is that rhetoric conflating unauthorized copying with traditional forms of stealing doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. It isn't at all like taking somebody's food or jumping out of a taxi without paying.
  - hxa7241 16y ago
    > The two mala can overlap; in the realm of unauthorized copying, I think that they sometimes, but not always, do How? You are taking a more cautious view than me, which is maybe more prudent and respectable. But I would be interested to hear how copying can be intrinsically harmful . . . the basic problem is that it is by definition physically separate, so for there to be any effect communicated at all requires some other system. Is there a good counter-argument or -example?