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> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the

by wahern 6y ago

> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. They disobeyed unjust laws in protest, but they succeeded in their cause because they were often punished for the disobedience. Being punished is a sine qua non of non-violent protest methods as pioneered by MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela. (Notably, all of whom started out believing in the necessity for violent protest, AFAIU.) If there was never any serious threat of punishment, especially for protesters (as opposed to authorities just letting it slide, and then reintroducing enforcement later) then we might still have many of the laws and norms the Civil Rights movement was working to rescind and change. It's difficult to convince people to change unjust laws; much easier to convince them to change unjust consequences. In a way it comes back to what Socrates taught: you can't reasonably expect to make effectual changes in the law or politics without subjecting yourself to the consequences. And if you're a citizen, making effectual changes is an obligation. The self-righteous justification for surreptitiously violating copyright as some sort of protest really bothers me. I'm not going to claim that I haven't ever knowingly violated copyright, and I certainly am not going to defend our overbroad copyright protections, but I'm not going to delude myself about why I'm doing something--purely out of self-interest. Doing something out of self-interest isn't per se unethical, but there is something dissonant when you do it knowing that you're technically violating a law that should be changed, and would be more likely to be changed, if everybody felt the pain, either through strict adherence to the law or open violation and consequent punishment.

semanticsbitch 6y ago
You sound like a little bitch
mk81 6y ago
Good post. Self-styled revolutionaries who are proud of themselves for torrenting consequence-free rub me the wrong way too.
- semanticsbitch 6y ago
  Damn, tech people really have become cunts
CogitoCogito 6y ago
> The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. I don't understand how you can make this claim without any support. If companies believed that withholding random subsets of their collections wouldn't keep consumers from seeing them only lead them not to receive any compensation, they might simply not withhold those catalogues anymore. It's quite easy to come up with thought experiments in which your claim is incorrect.
- wahern 6y ago
  Because the desire most often expressed, particularly by non-corporate parties, in these debates is that the best overall outcome would be a change in the law so copyright holders didn't have the power to be so discriminatory. Even though the debate often revolves around famous works, like Mickey Mouse, the real costs here often involve orphaned works, or works which copyright owners don't believe can be monetized but because of risk averseness and what-if fantasies of future riches won't relinquish control. If we could write legislation that allowed Disney to retain exceptional rights to their works, but rebalanced copyrights for everybody else, I think a lot of advocates would take that bargain. But more generally it's a matter of consistency and equity and achieving a more optimal balance of rights and incentives, which absolutely does require a change in the law, especially considering that it's the law that has created these rights in the first place. And as compared to rights in real and chattel property, the justification is far more dubious and certainly the extent of the rights given far more arbitrary. Of course there are better and worse ways to exist under a bad regime, and if the presumption is that the regime is immutable then your hypothetical is more persuasive. (Although I don't buy it--where can I legally purchase NES ROMs, or original cuts of Northern Exposure? The reality of the situation proves to me that copyright holders have unnecessarily broad rights, and that either they're not perfectly rational actors or the likelihood of the favorable hypothetical manifesting is otherwise slight and rare.) But to respond in a slightly different manner to the original question, I would ask, "would you rather have a bigger piece of a small pie, or a smaller piece of a large pie"? That's the ethical issue--that there's a better balance of copyrights such that everybody gets a bigger piece of pie in absolute terms, but we can't get there if everybody is myopically focused on the size of their piece relative to the whole pie, rather than focusing on how big the pie could be. And the issue naturally implicates tensions between selfishness and pro-social, collective behavior.
hedora 6y ago
I’m arguing congress should change copyright law so that such surreptitious violations would not be illegal any more. Surely, it would have been better if the civil rights movement was never necessary because decades earlier society and the government simply decided to grant equal rights because it was the right thing to do.

by wahern 6y ago

semanticsbitch 6y ago

You sound like a little bitch

mk81 6y ago

Good post. Self-styled revolutionaries who are proud of themselves for torrenting consequence-free rub me the wrong way too.

semanticsbitch 6y ago
Damn, tech people really have become cunts

CogitoCogito 6y ago

> The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. I don't understand how you can make this claim without any support. If companies believed that withholding random subsets of their collections wouldn't keep consumers from seeing them only lead them not to receive any compensation, they might simply not withhold those catalogues anymore. It's quite easy to come up with thought experiments in which your claim is incorrect.

wahern 6y ago
Because the desire most often expressed, particularly by non-corporate parties, in these debates is that the best overall outcome would be a change in the law so copyright holders didn't have the power to be so discriminatory. Even though the debate often revolves around famous works, like Mickey Mouse, the real costs here often involve orphaned works, or works which copyright owners don't believe can be monetized but because of risk averseness and what-if fantasies of future riches won't relinquish control. If we could write legislation that allowed Disney to retain exceptional rights to their works, but rebalanced copyrights for everybody else, I think a lot of advocates would take that bargain. But more generally it's a matter of consistency and equity and achieving a more optimal balance of rights and incentives, which absolutely does require a change in the law, especially considering that it's the law that has created these rights in the first place. And as compared to rights in real and chattel property, the justification is far more dubious and certainly the extent of the rights given far more arbitrary. Of course there are better and worse ways to exist under a bad regime, and if the presumption is that the regime is immutable then your hypothetical is more persuasive. (Although I don't buy it--where can I legally purchase NES ROMs, or original cuts of Northern Exposure? The reality of the situation proves to me that copyright holders have unnecessarily broad rights, and that either they're not perfectly rational actors or the likelihood of the favorable hypothetical manifesting is otherwise slight and rare.) But to respond in a slightly different manner to the original question, I would ask, "would you rather have a bigger piece of a small pie, or a smaller piece of a large pie"? That's the ethical issue--that there's a better balance of copyrights such that everybody gets a bigger piece of pie in absolute terms, but we can't get there if everybody is myopically focused on the size of their piece relative to the whole pie, rather than focusing on how big the pie could be. And the issue naturally implicates tensions between selfishness and pro-social, collective behavior.

hedora 6y ago

I’m arguing congress should change copyright law so that such surreptitious violations would not be illegal any more. Surely, it would have been better if the civil rights movement was never necessary because decades earlier society and the government simply decided to grant equal rights because it was the right thing to do.