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It's a fair question, but you are ethically responsible for knowingly obtaining ill-gotten goods, and pirated media violates the original purchaser's agreement
It's a fair question, but you are ethically responsible for knowingly obtaining ill-gotten goods, and pirated media violates the original purchaser's agreement with the IP owner.
Basically, Bob agreed with Steve that Bob would not give anyone else the secret, and Steve only sold Bob the secret because he made that agreement, but then Bob turned around and gave it to you for free.
So Bob lied, and you know Bob lied, and you benefit from Bob lying, so it's unethical.
Again, all kinds of modifiers and caveats apply to the severity here. I really have little sympathy for Steve when he's a gazillionaire already, and the marginal value lost isn't meaningful enough to stop Steve from making more secrets, but technically speaking it appears to be an immoral act to pirate.
Well, it's sort of an "all bets are off" deal.
The purpose of copyright was a tradeoff: exclusivity, for a while, but then cultural content is available and preserved. The latter part of the deal has been broken. And this is a deal with no teeth. There's no penalties to the copyright holder for something just becoming completely unavailable, despite that availability being part of the original intent.
So, if they let down their end of the social contract, anything goes.
>ill-gotten goods
I reject that there's such a thing as "ill-gotten bits".
>So Bob lied, and you know Bob lied, and you benefit from Bob lying, so it's unethical.
If unethicality is transitive like this then the concept of what's ethical or unethical dissolves into meaninglessness. Everyone's actions affect everyone else in form or another. How many murders and thefts am I currently indirectly benefiting from just by existing, or by using this computer? Even if I count just the ones I know about and the ones I can infer, I think the number is too large to care about.
I'm willing to concede that Bob's behavior is unethical, but not that "my" behavior is, by transitivity.
But I'm not talking about "affecting", I'm talking about the direct action of knowingly obtaining stolen goods. That's not indirect, that's direct!
We can look at law as an example of an application of ethical concepts; it's illegal to knowingly purchase stolen goods.
That said, if you don't believe in ownership of "bits", then you probably don't care about this even if it were unethical to you to obtain stolen goods.
You also probably don't have a great deal of respect for property ownership generally, or capitalism, so there are more foundational issues that can't really be resolved in this context.
>I'm talking about the direct action of knowingly obtaining stolen goods. That's not indirect, that's direct!
"Stolen goods" are stolen because someone stole them and is now trying to give them to you, probably in exchange for money. If Bob purchases a secret from Steve and tells me "hey, do you want to hear this thing Steve told me? I'll tell you for free", at what point does the secret Bob tells me become "stolen"? How can an action that takes place after the acquisition of a thing have an effect on the legitimacy of the owning of the thing (in this case, a copy of the secret)? It seems to me that the only possible answers to these questions are "never" and "it can't", respectively.
>if you don't believe in ownership of "bits", then you probably don't care about this even if it were unethical to you to obtain stolen goods.
I believe in the ownership of bits. If we understand that control is a fundamental part of ownership, then it stands to reason that bits (or, more accurately, sequences of bits) are owned by keeping them secret. Therefore, if you reveal a secret you give up ownership of it, in the same way that you give up ownership of something when you hand it over to someone else.
That aside, do you think bits are exactly the same as physical goods? Why would you think that someone who rejects ownership of bits rejects ownership of property in general?
Your definition of stolen goods is circular; stolen goods aren't stolen because someone stole them; they're stolen because consent was not granted by the owner. You can however contingently be sold a good, which means you are only allowed to have the good if you agree to certain conditions. Once you violate those conditions, you are forfeiting your ownership of that good if that's what you agreed to (and it is in the case of most digital content).
As for control, it is decidedly not a fundamental part of ownership. You are not, for example, able to control driving your car into another person willfully, but you do still "own" your car.
What it boils down to is the ethical obligation a person has to do what they said they would do. Are you ethically obligated to not lie? If so, when Bob tells Steve that he (Bob) isn't going to share Steve's secret with anyone else without Bob's permission, he would then break his word if he subsequently shared Bob's secret with you. You, knowing that Bob obtained the secret by lying to Steve, are complicit in Bob's lie, making you morally culpable.
This is obviously complicated by the infinitely reproducible nature of digital goods, hence why I said you don't care much for capitalism if you don't agree with this notion, as capitalism introduces the concept of artificial scarcity to protect Steve's incentives to continue to produce secrets. There are many arguments suggesting that Steve would produce secrets regardless of incentive, but for a capitalist, the protection of the monopoly is paramount.
>What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
Nothing prevents anyone from entering into such an agreement, but it can't be called a "sale". Like I said, perhaps it's a lease of some kind, but selling something and putting special conditions on the transfer are mutually exclusive. If you sell me something then I own it, can I do whatever I want with it (destroy it, gift it, sell it, etc.); if can't do whatever I want with it then I don't own it, and you haven't sold it to me.
>what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement
At this point we're probably talking about contract law, not ownership rights, so "violation" seems perfectly adequate.
>To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
Just as example, when someone misses a payment on a purchase and it's repossessed, they're not said to have "stolen" the item, they're said to have "defaulted" on the debt. Your usage of the word "theft" is one I've never seen before.
>If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements
You can enter into all sorts of agreements that entitle you to limited prerogatives over something. Those agreements go by different names, and so does the relationship between you and the thing that the agreement is about while the agreement is current. "Contingent ownership" is a term that refers to nothing that exists, as ownership involves total decision power over something, and a sale is a particular agreement that involves the transfer of that power in its entirety.
>Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
Yes, again, you can enter into agreements with other people over something you own and impose whatever terms you like without transferring ownership of the thing. It's not a sale until you relinquish all rights over the thing. Hell, you can even do a sort of timed sale where you reserve the right to claw back the thing for a limited time; in such a case one could not say the sale is complete before that time elapses, and before then the person doesn't have complete ownership.
If I defined "contingent ownership" as a "perpetual license for use that only expires if either party violates the terms of the contract," would all of this make much more sense? Then, Bob never owns Steve's secret and is only permitted to use it in certain circumstances, none of which include Bob making Steve's secret available to you. In fact, Steve explicitly disallows Bob from doing that in the contract, and Bob agrees to this.
If Bob violates his agreement, breaks his word, and you know he did that but accept Steve's secret anyway, is that immoral, to you?
As I said previously, bits are not exactly the same as physical goods. You own a string of bits as long as you keep it secret (i.e. within your control). Regardless of what any law says, once Steve told Bob his secret, he lost ownership of it. If someone steals your car, there are, conceivably, things the law can do to get it back to you, because a physical item can only exist in one place at any given time. If Bob finds out Steve's secret, there's nothing any law can do to make Bob forget Steve's secret.
Any law or contract that attempts to treat strings of bits as equivalent to physical items is fundamentally flawed.
> Regardless of what any law says, once Steve told Bob his secret, he lost ownership of it.
This, therefore, means you don't believe in the enforceability of contracts, or that someone is free to make agreements as they see fit. That's kind of a problem in a capitalistic society, as contracts run, well, everything more complex than a simple transfer of ownership, which IP rights are not.
Besides, we're not really talking about the legality of any of this, we're focusing on the morality. In this case, the morality of asserting you won't do something, and then doing that anyway.
To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
You're welcome, and for the record, I'm equally fascinated by your position - that a corporation can change the ethics of my actions merely by wishing it so. Like, is this limited to corporations, or can regular people wield this magic? You seem to think that money changing hands is a critical factor - why so? If a moral commandment can be attached to a purchase, why not to a gift, a meal, a story, a forum comment? That's why I keep going back to the hypothetical about "By reading this you promise to give me money" sort of license. Yes, it's absurd, but that's the point - your position leads to absurdities.
And lots of them! Could a restaurant declare, "By purchasing this sandwich, you promise not to give us a bad review on yelp"? If not, how is that different? Would that license apply if the sandwich was free? What if someone else bought it for me? If I make you a sandwich and stipulate that you must declare it to be delicious, and it isn't, is it more ethical for you to break my "license" or to lie?
I got more! What about DVD region restrictions? If I buy a movie in America and the license requires me to buy a second copy to watch in Asia, am I ethically obligated to do that too, even though that doesn't have even a fig leaf of moral justification beyond the manufacturer's profit motive? Is it unethical to skip the unskippable ads? For that matter, how does this license magically transfer itself from the rightsholder to the manufacturer, warehouse, retailer, and thence consumer? If I sell it used to my friend John, has he "agreed" to a contract with whoever originaly published the media through the magic of transitive association? What if I give it away for free, or throw it away and someone picks it out of my trash?
We're not done! Does this magic travel backwards in time? What license did I agree to when I inherited my Dad's old Beatles albums on vinyl? Bandcamp offers seven different licenses for music, is it one of those or a different one? Am I allowed to watch in in Asia, or is it region-restricted too? If not, how do you know?
We haven't even discussed immoral licenses. What if the license says, "By purchasing this you agree not to show it to any filthy stinking [ethnicity] people", can I ethically ignore that? What about those Taylor Swift albums that she doesn't own the rights to, can we pirate those? What about a trans person who wants to read Harry Potter, is it more ethical for them to purchase the books or to bootleg them? Can I download Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book"? OJ Simpson's autobiography? Henry Kissinger's?
Etc, etc. You get my point, I hope, which is that the seemingly simple "piracy is bad because it's unethical to ignore a shrinkwrap license" position is actually fraught with contradictions and argumentum ad absurdums. Whereas, the inversion - breaking the license is unethical because piracy is bad - is blissfully free of these problems. It allows exceptions, as in "OK, Henry Kissinger is fair game but you still have to pay for books not written by mass murderers" without compromising its central premise. The only downside is, it requires you to demonstrate that piracy is bad in itself, which requires a discussion of the different ways it can help and hurt different artists in different circumstances, rather than a tidy one-line proof that all pirates everywhere are bad, QED.
This is a long thread and post and sometimes with all the hypotheticals it's easy to be misunderstood, so to be sure that I am actually taking a stand (as opposed to just throwing rocks at yours) I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker. That the license claims it constitutes an "agreement" is simply false by any reasonable definition, as proven by the fact that people regularly purchase media who demonstrate their failure to agree with it by word and action. The only purpose such licenses serve is that some corporate lawyer somewhere decided it might help them win some hypothetical lawsuit; it is the ethical and legal equivalent of wearing a t-shit reading, "By reading this shirt, you agree not to rob me."
>This, therefore, means you don't believe in the enforceability of contracts
It means don't believe in the absolute enforceability of contracts. If a contract contains clauses that require the physically impossible to happen, such a contract cannot possibly be enforced in its totality.
>To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
Your question is too abstract to answer. If Bob promised Steve he wouldn't release the slaves, I'd say it's outright immoral to keep that promise. If Bob promise Steve he would make another payment in 30 days, it's probably at least unethical to not keep that promise, absent any additional circumstances. If Bob promise Steve he wouldn't do something with Bob's own property, I'd say Bob is within his right to do whatever he wishes, regardless of anything else.