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I don't find this particularly morally dubious. These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers. Disney owns about 1/3 of al

• themitigating 4y ago
  It's morally dubious to pick and choose what laws you follow. It doesn't matter if you think they are monopolies, that's not your judgment to make
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    or we need new laws that update what a "monopoly" is
  • Super_Jambo 4y ago
    Outsourcing your moral decisions to the legal system seems a lot more dubious to me. I don't think you can claim a coherent moral philosophy when the morality of an action depends on the legal jurisdiction you happen to be standing in.
  • pigscantfly 4y ago
    Practicing civil disobedience against laws you believe unethical is not morally dubious, it's legally dubious. If anything, I'd consider it a display of moral fortitude to prize one's ethics above the potential consequences.
    • Blammar 4y ago
      Exactly. And now it's time for Godwin, more or less: would you have followed the laws in Nazi Germany that made Jews less than human?
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        I mean I think copyright laws are dumb but this seems a like a bit of an over-dramatic comparison.
        • nkjnlknlk 4y ago
          Not really when the initial comment was that it is immoral to disobey _any_ law.
        • alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago
          Here in HN it is frowned upon, but I do sometimes like to exagerate a point to show perspective, first. Now that we can agree that law can not be followed 100% of time let's kill the comparison with genocide.
    • mhb 4y ago
      There's a difference between civil disobedience and just getting away with something because you can.
    • bee_rider 4y ago
      I actually think piracy is more like speeding than civil disobedience for most people. The intent of most people who pirate things isn't to get caught and change the laws. The intent is to just ignore a law that is inconvenient. And it is sort of similar in the sense that, copyright law is over aggressive, honestly, many speed limits are set too low, violation is pretty wide-spread, and within reason it seems basically fine. It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits.
      • 4y ago
  • otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    Unless there are people who literally never broke any law (and there aren't), picking and choosing laws is exactly what every human does.
  • ryanwaggoner 4y ago
    It's pretty morally dubious to think you can outsource your own sense of ethics to whatever government you happen to live under. Some laws are immoral to break, others are not. It's 100% up to you to decide what your own moral and ethical framework is, including whether to outsource those decisions to a government, religion, culture, etc. That doesn't mean you get to decide on the consequences for breaking the rules that society, religion, etc, has imposed, but that's orthogonal to whether they fit your personal ethics.
  • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Is it morally dubious to change citizenship to another country? That's literally choosing what laws you follow. What about religions? Their texts used to be laws, and we seem to believe in freedom to choose our beliefs. I think every citizen has the responsibility to choose to not follow unjust laws.
  • LocalH 4y ago
    It’s morally dubious to practice blind adherence to the law for the sake of it being the law
    • prometheuspk 4y ago
      You can object to the law. Petition your lawmaker to change the law. Be vocal about hating the law. But until its not the law, you have to follow it.
      • vcxy 4y ago
        I understand that you believe that, but you didn't say why. Is this a foundational belief or is there a deeper reason?
        • prometheuspk 4y ago
          It's a foundational belief of the social contract we've signed by agreeing to democracy
          • stormbrew 4y ago
            Democracy exists at all because people did not follow a blind adherence to law. At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.
          • LocalH 4y ago
            I agreed to no such thing. The social contract I've been forced into seems to have a lot to do with enriching power and moneyed interests, at the expense of the individual. I want no part of that.
            • themitigating 4y ago
              In a democracy you don't always get what you want
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    > that's not your judgment to make It certainly is.
  • jonathanlb 4y ago
    You assume that laws are moral to begin with. Remember, slavery was legal in the United States, and the Nazis made laws to deprive Jewish people of their rights. Conversely, not all immoral acts are illegal, e.g. cheating on a spouse.
  • soulofmischief 4y ago
    You need to fundamentally rethink your philosophy if you think law and morals are the same. Rosa Parks would like to have a word with you.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      Immanuel Kant would like to have a word with you.
      • soulofmischief 4y ago
        Ha, well Kant's universal moral law is really what I'm getting at here. It transcends the current, highly immoral, Western legal system which is often confused with universal law.
        • kube-system 4y ago
          Yeah, Kant wasn't a fan of 'law' in the legal sense, but natural and moral law does respect property rights. I'm not really aware of a deontological argument against IP.
          • soulofmischief 4y ago
            I don't think philosophy has caught up with the dizzing media landscape we exit in today. It's such a multifaceted problem. Like others have mentioned, media is heavily shaping culture today, and is responsible for a large amount of cultural dissemination and public discourse. And today, to be a patron of the arts, you are looking at an increasingly large library of works which you need affordable access to. Knowledge shouldn't be pay-to-play. With companies like Disney eating the lion's share, we should worry about what kind of legal landscape a continued, coordinated lobbying effort could lead to. Remember the shock around the DMCA? We still have massive and systematic abuse issues because of it. A chilling effect is well-established. With the way Microsoft, Apple and other vendors are moving, locked down computing platforms are becoming a silent reality. Thanks to corporate astroturfing efforts, cloud fingerprinting is being normalized as the moral choice. What's next, screen fingerprinting to ensure our greedy, multi-headed subscription serpent overlord always gets its piece of the pie? Eventually, unchecked corporate lobbying in areas like IP will lead to an inscrutable system of governance hiding behind the opt-in curtain, which completely sidesteps the ever-evolving system of rights envisioned by our past democratic visionaries.
  • lwhi 4y ago
    How on earth is not our right to engage our own brains and decide if we agree with any aspect of the world that hold sway on us????!! I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    I think you could make a strong argument for the "sign" on the morality of pirating being negative. But the "magnitude" is so low, I can't imagine caring when other people do it.
  • fancyfish 4y ago
    It's well-accepted in psychology/sociology that moral development extends beyond simply following the law, i.e. using the law as a stand-in for moral principles. E.g. in Kohlberg's stages of moral development[1], there is a post-conventional stage where an individual develops a moral code independent of laws, and views laws as a social contract that can be disobeyed if it violates his/her morals. Laws are a good guideline, but are not an absolute moral framework. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
  • chalst 4y ago
    Do you know all the laws that apply to you? If you don't, that's some selectivity right there.
  • dexterdog 4y ago
    It's not? I don't know where you're from, but if you're from one of the places that claims that its people are free then it is the people's judgement to make. If I download and watch a show from irc/usenet/torrent/etc I am harming nobody. It is no different than going to watch it at a friend's house. If the content providers want to secure their content they have to go back to showing it only in controlled locations, but that costs them too much and restricts their audience.
• andsoitis 4y ago
  > These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers. This doesn’t compute. Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource. Secondly, there is by just one company who controls the majority or all content. In fact, having to subscribe to multiple services proves that there are multiple companies who provide tv shows and movies.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource. Sure they can; it's called a cartel when that happens. The major content publishers have acted in concert to kneecap Netflix; pulling licensed content, no longer licensing popular new content, etc.
    • motoxpro 4y ago
      So you're saying you WANT Netflix to be a monopoly and have all of the licensed content and new shows?
      • wvenable 4y ago
        If we disallow exclusive licenses then that's not as much of a problem.
      • stormbrew 4y ago
        If we had something like the Paramount Decree for streaming/tv anyone would be able to license those shows and we'd have actual choices.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        From a consumer standpoint, life was much better when that was the case. One app, one service, pretty much anything I want to watch. Per-network streaming services were just a glint in some executive's eye, and things were good. The current state of things is confusing, expensive, and user hostile. I was trying to figure out how to watch Rick & Morty S6 the other night. It'll be on Hulu, but not for months. It'll be on HBO Max, too, but it's only downloadable for offline viewing on Hulu. Wanna watch it now? Need a cable subscription, even though Adult Swim's website says "now available on HBO Max". I like the idea of any streaming service being able to license any show, if they can pay the fee. Another comment mentioned the Paramount Decree as a similar example.
• scarface74 4y ago
  > approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers “There are too many streaming services to choose from and I don’t like having to pay for competing services therefore there is a monopoly” So it wouldn’t be a monopoly if there was one company that had all of the content you wanted? > Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue A third of one channel of distribution is not a “monopoly” > Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks Yes the government must step in for the good of society because having a team of superheroes including a man who turns green when he gets mad is influencing society.
  • geodel 4y ago
    Good points. It seems that arguing or challenging free loaders is considered morally reprehensible here!
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      When freeloading becomes widespread and normalized, perhaps it is those who are creating the conditions that gives rise to that freeloading who are in the wrong. Digital piracy might be wrong, but the business decisions driving it seem as wrongly-implemented as Prohibition was. Castigating modern streaming freeloaders might give a feeling of moral superiority, but it seems as futile as yelling at music downloaders back in the P2P days. It's using a bucket to drain the ocean of a widely accepted behavior. That said, most people don't pirate movies or shows these days, even if they might not have qualms against it- they simply share streaming accounts. Is that illegal, or even against EULA? The platforms don't seem to mind.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        > When freeloading becomes widespread and normalized, perhaps it is those who are creating the conditions that gives rise to that freeloading who are in the wrong. Digital piracy might be wrong, but the business decisions driving it seem as wrongly-implemented as Prohibition was. Do you apply the same standard to other laws? If too many people do it, we must legalize it?
• throw10920 4y ago
  Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms. > that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on. Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
  • k__ 4y ago
    If the laws are flawed a citizen should resist. I think, corporations gatekeeping huge parts of human culture is something that we can resist once in a while.
  • alexilliamson 4y ago
    There is IMO a coherent moral framework that says "this is harming no one"
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • xeromal 4y ago
      I think that's borderline a similar argument to loss prevention in department stores. I don't know hard numbers, but assuming there's a 2-3% loss in goods due to theft, the department stores can still make profit. "No one is harmed yet" If everyone stole goods, the stores would go bankrupt. I think the same argument can be made for pirating. It's harming no one as long as it remains a minority action. If the entire population felt the same as you, the movie/game/show industry would take a huge crash. My personal believe is that morals shouldn't rest on other people not doing what you're doing for it to be ok morally. It needs to be applicable for 100% of the population for it to be moral. (barring obvious exceptions like handicapped people using handicap stalls, etc)
• hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  They are approaching monopoly by ... competing with each other and taking down Netflix's near 100% streaming market share?
  • harlequinn77 4y ago
• fasthands9 4y ago
  >Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue. In what way does Disney "own" box office revenue. It spends the most and gets the highest return? I know there are some anti-competitive theatre negotiations at the margins, but at the end of the day anyone could invest in their own business and produce good movies - if they had the talent.
• dimitrios1 4y ago
  > The government has shown they're unwilling to Have they? Or perhaps trash media is the bottom of their list of priorities? Maybe they are overloaded with cases and need more support? There are many more possible explanations than "shown they are unwilling" You can take a look at some recent current and pending antitrust cases on the DOJ's website: https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_api_views_fulltext=apple&items_per_page=10 https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap... In fact there was just recently action taken against Disney, which forced it to sell of major parts of 21st century before it was allowed to proceed with the merger. https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_api_views_fulltext=disney&items_per_page=10 https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...
• Dove 4y ago
  John Locke said that what makes something yours, in a natural setting, is your having invested effort into making it what it is. A wild berry bush might be anyone's, but once you have picked the fruit, that fruit is yours. Whether or not you buy this theory of ownership -- there are competing theories -- there is something about it I find intuitively appealing. Some time ago, I saw one friend kick another off of his minecraft server -- and when I objected, he said it was his server, which he paid for, and he could do what he liked. As indisputible as this was, I couldn't escape the impression that the other friend, having invested months of time into building things in that world, in some sense owned those things, and that this was a moral consideration that changed the circumstances and made them different from someone who had spent five minutes in the server. At one time I ran a gaming ladder for a small community. And while it was undoubtably mine -- I developed it and paid for it and was central in running it -- as the accumulated history of the community on the ladder grew, as the ladder became central in the life of that community, I couldn't escape the impression that all of that data and history was theirs, maybe even more than it was mine. And indeed, a previous ladder in the same community had been run by someone who saw it (very rightly) as his and ran it how he liked -- and after some unpopular decisions, the community reacted by perceiving him as a tyrant. Is this an odd intuition? I think it's one we've all voiced at some point in this era, even if we couldn't defend the idea logically. I think this philosophical tension is at the center of a lot of struggles in our age. Facebook was certainly made by certain individuals -- they can certainly do what they like with it. And yet I can't escape the impression that the platform wasn't made by them alone -- that what it has become, both in the larger society, and in my personal circles, is what we made it by use. I don't know exactly what that implies from a moral standpoint, only that the intuition of ownership Locke desribes seems to me somehow to apply, and to be describing something real. I think the same applies to this issue. George Lucas made Star Wars. Without a doubt. But what Star Wars was in 1977, and what it was in 1997, and what it was in 2017, are entirely different things. Some of that change was wrought by Lucas himself, but a lot of it was wrought by us -- the culture that watched it, and talked about it, and adopted it into the milleu. In 1977 it was cool, but in 1997 it was something much closer to literature, to required reading. (And in 2017 it is something else -- one of the niche kingdoms again, and perhaps yet different rules apply.) Can one person own that? The community seems to have generally rejected Lucas' rightful ownership over the series, which I take as a general consensus that, even if we can't philosophically defend why we think this, even if it's happening on an intuitive moral level, people broadly agree that at this point the world owns Star Wars more than the creator does. That people are looking at its maintenance less like a private estate, where the owner can do what he likes, and more like a public government, where the citizens are right to regard bad behavior as equating to illegitimacy. (And Disney owning it seems like a legal quirk that has nothing at all to do with moral intuition.) Cultural works in general seem to follow this path, from private to public, from entirely owned by the creator to entirely owned by the community. But the ability of that community to actually guarantee access is different than it used to be. Decades ago, Lego was part of the universal landscape of childhood. At one point it was owned by The Lego Group, but at some point it seemed to be owned by everyone, taken for granted in the cultural landscape -- and no one had the power to tell a kid who was interested that he couldn't play with Legos. But Minecraft fills that niche now, and a hundred other things fill a hundred similar niches, and it is absolutely easy for a corporation to stop a kid from playing -- a power so obscenely socially costly as to chill the behavior of parents. Does that seem intuitively like a tyrannical, if not an evil, change in the world? It does to me. But I don't think the pirates are right, either -- I do think ownership means something. We don't have good rules for this. We have moral intuitions, but no ethical heritage. I don't know where the line is. I don't know what models apply. I don't know what all this means morally, let alone legally. We need a Locke to tell us. But I cannot escape the impression that Locke has a point here, and that consumption may be its own form of creation, and that figuring out how to deal with all of this in a fair way remains one of the most novel and interesting questions of our age.