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> 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

> 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.

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.