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>Your definition of stolen goods is circular
No, it's not circular. A good is a stolen good if it has been stolen. That's not circular. There's a distinction b
>Your definition of stolen goods is circular
No, it's not circular. A good is a stolen good if it has been stolen. That's not circular. There's a distinction between something being stolen and something being a stolen good, and the definition of the latter rests upon the definition of the former. I didn't define "stealing" because I didn't think it was necessary, as I thought we all know what it means. But it seems we actually don't agree on what "stealing" means. I think you "steal" something if you remove someone's possession of an item without their permission. If there's such a thing as agreement between two parties that if violated can void one of the parties rights to exploit an item then that's not stealing. When you purchase something you acquiring complete ownership over the thing. If there's strings attached that can turn the purchase into a "theft" then it's not a purchase. Perhaps it's a lease of some kind.
>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.
You're using control in a different sense than I. What I mean is that you can decide what to do with the object as you like, with regards to the object itself. No, you can't drive your car anywhere you like, but you can sell or gift your car to anyone you like, and you destroy it you like, or you can leave it parked forever if you like. None of these are things you can do with a car you don't own, are they?
>You, knowing that Bob obtained the secret by lying to Steve, are complicit in Bob's lie, making you morally culpable.
Well, let's stick to one thing at a time, eh? If you have yet to convince me that my behavior is unethical, much less are you going to convince me that it's immoral.
>What it boils down to is the ethical obligation a person has to do what they said they would do.
I don't think a person has an ethical obligation to keep promises that are based on unethical grounds. Such as attaching strings to things that you sell. If you *sell* me a car and make me sign a contract that says I can't gift it to whoever I please, you bet I'm going to do whatever I please. Your contract is nonsensical and opposite to the notion of property. If you sell me something you relinquish all rights to the thing you sell me and acknowledge my right to do as I please with it. If you don't relinquish those rights then you can't call it a sale, and you have to price the transaction accordingly.
>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.
If you want to say that capitalism cannot exist without intellectual property rights then I'll have to ask you to argue for it.
So you must believe that Steve can't condition the sale of his secret with Bob upon Bob's behavior, according to you? Steve can't say, "Bob, this is yours as long as you don't tell fluoridation. If you break this, you forfeit ownership of this secret, and it is now mine again."
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.
Besides, if one could enter into such an agreement, what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement, resulting in you knowingly possessing what then becomes Steve's secret again upon sale to you? To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements, I do think you'll have a pretty large problem with capitalism, even separate from intellectual property, as it questions the very nature of both freedom and ownership. 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?
> 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.
I don't know of any country in the world that allows anything and everything to be put in a contract and for good reason. Why do you think that it is so?
> 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?
When you sell it? Absolutely not. Why do you think that you should have control over something when you sell it?
To be clear, we limit freedom in a great many ways. There's nothing wrong with that, in principle, but it is a limitation of freedom.
By reading the rest of this comment, you agree to give me all your money forever. (edited to emphasize "rest of" which OP apparently missed)
Assuming you're still here, what's the ethical difference between this and "by purchasing this DVD you agree to blah blah"? In neither case did anyone agree to anything.
>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.