I'm not sure what the point of this particular semantic debate is. It's not theft. Ok. It's still wrong, it's still harmful, and it's still totally within the purview of a reasonable government to regulate or outlaw.
I think the point is that we should be more careful with the words we use. Saying that copyright infringement is theft is just sloppy thinking, and is likely to confuse the issue and lead to even more sloppy and confused thinking.
You might argue that both are wrong, that both are illegal, or whatever. Fine. Just don't say they're the same thing, because they're not.
Redefining words for purposes of brainwashing consumers is propaganda pure and simple, even if you believe that copyright infringement is wrong and should be illegal.
Well put! I would have written much the same thing had you not beaten me to it, and will only add that sloppy thinking about this question isn't purely an academic concern: among other things, it leads to bad laws with difficult to foresee, but often undesirable, consequences.
It's equally bad to elevate a semantic argument so you can use it as a straw man, as you implicitly do with the word "even" in the sentence "even if you believe copyright infringement is wrong".
And face it, the Free Culture side of this debate uses that tactic a lot. "Copying isn't piracy! Pirates kill people! Abolish copyright!"
You specifically equated the "theft" of a song with the theft of a car, but your definition of theft ignores the difference between theft and copyright infringement. These are distinct concepts, legally, historically, and philosophically.
Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying, but it sounded like you were arguing that there's a moral force behind copyright and that it rests in its similarity to theft.
I equated them only in the sense that they are both natural human behaviors. You could just as easily replace it with "piracy of a song", and the argument would have been the same.
The choice of words is very important and not trivial in the least. Notice how you just said "piracy of a song", when in fact the copying of a song is not "piracy" which equates to robbery aka theft.
The words we choose are very important when discussing ideas, just ask the republicans who have used this technique for years to sway the public to their side on various social and political matters (death tx vs. estate tax being one example).
Demonstrate how this isn't a semantic argument? People aren't "brainwashed" into thinking copyright infringement is wrong. Copyright infringement is intuitively wrong.
Thou shalt not copy this scroll without the author's permission? I don't buy it and it doesn't hold ground historically.
Did people not intuit it before the 18th century? It took over 300 years from the invention of the printing press for modern copyright law to form.
Copyright (and patent) law exists and has always existed because it makes political and economic sense.
See Section I, Article 8 is the US Constitution, for example, where Congress gets its authority to establish copyright. Why do they have that authority? To promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Copyright law is a fundamentally different creature than the criminal law that governs theft and, IMO, this is just a reflection of their differing moral status in society.
You still haven't rescued this from semantics. What's intuitively wrong is freeloading. Tax evasion is a criminal offense, even though it too is simply an example of freeloading.
I'm not sure what there is to rescue. I feel like I'm repeating myself.
Matt's argument, however implicit, was that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft. It's not, nor has it ever been and therefore his argument is fallacious.
If that's a semantic argument then I guess I'll have to live with that.
Why is freeloading wrong? Or tax evasion, for that matter?
In any case, here is the argument. Theft is wrong because it violates the individual right of the property owner.
Copyright exists to provide a temporary incentive for content creators to continue producing. It's not a natural right, it's a collective bargain between the public and content producers. "You get a 14 year monopoly to make some money, please continue writing songs."
That bargain was broken a long time ago (roughly Mickey Mouse invention date + 14 years).
I don't know if I can agree that copyright infringement is intuitively wrong as my own intuition tells me the exact opposite: Legal enforcement of an artificial scarcity on our cultural and intellectual artifacts so that a minority of individuals can personally benefit is morally incorrect.
Even if there was broad consensus that copyright infringement is 'intuitively wrong', intuition has a rather spotty track record for producing sensible normative ethical guidelines. Consider slavery, for example. It used to be so 'intuitive' that owning other humans as property was not morally problematic.
It would be interesting to see an attempt at a meaty economic defence that demonstrates that more innovation happens in a world with IP in spite of the harm that has on network effects.
I've been interested in this field for a while and never seen sign of such a thing. "IP" has grown out of the lobby groups, not out of academic integrity.
Really? For the majority of human history, it hasn't been.
For the majority of human history, there has been but a tiny fraction of copyrightable material compared to what has existed over the past, say, 200 years.
It is? To whom? Surely not to people enjoying music - infringing copyright has made more people listen to more music.
It's harmful to the producers. It's not cheap or easy to put together a professional music recording. Producers wish to both recover the costs of production, and have funds available to live on and produce more.
In a government based on the US Constitution, only if such regulation and law "promotes the progress of useful arts".
Yes. If you allow the producers to profit from their works, then they will have both the funds and more motiviation to continue producing more.
U.S. copyright law began with discussions between educator Noah Webster and lawyer Daniel Webster. Noah had completed new textbooks for use in the public school system, which he had based on existing works. Nevertheless, his books were new productions, and he wanted to have control over how they were copied; he wanted to be able to profit from the production of his works. (Noah was never a very rich man, by the way; don't get the idea he was insanely wealthy and scavaging for more.)
Daniel Webster agreed wholeheartedly, that authors should have the right to how their works are copied and should get royalty payments for a limited time. He claimed this was so obvious it was like "natural law"... as obvious as laws against murdering and theft.
Some people in recent history (e.g., the RIAA and other big corporations) have taken copyright law to absurd and abusive levels, and that is wrong. But the basic principles of it -- to allow the author of a work rights over who copies it and rights to limited royalty payments -- are not absurd and do contribute to the furthering of more and better works.
Would copyright infringement still seem intuitively, morally wrong, if there were no copyright laws to begin with? If creators were never promised a legal expectation of control over their work, would you be violating any legitimate expectation by copying?
Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?
Is it the same amount of moral wrong as copying the work of someone who produced an album relying on the promise of legal protection for it?
What if I would paint a painting and hung it to my outside wall. I would require every passager that would go by and maybe look at it to pay me $5. I wouldn't be able to legally stop them for looking for free. They would walk away with a copy of my paiting in their heads.
I think this is a one problem. In the internet almost anything is public good. It's available for almost everyone and you cannot or you don't want to shut people of from consuming.
Not related, but the second problem of the copyright is that it's hard and expensive to use it properly. If you would want to legally use a song in your presentation, make a mixtape or even sing a song on your mom's birthday, you would have to go through riias, companys, individual artists, lawyers and applications to get proper rights.
Above process is fine for big corporations, they have the time, money and maybe motivation to do this. Individuals don't have this luxury. We all know that singing that song for your mom is copyright infringement, therefore as mattmaroon says, theft, don't we?
What if you put the picture behind a curtain, and demand $5 to look behind it? It doesn't hurt you when someone shifts the curtain to the side, but it does provide yet another silly example that doesn't resolve the underlying problem.
>Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?
Trent Reznor actually did this recently with his Ghosts I-IV album. It was released under a CC non-commercial license, making it freely copyable. But the only Reznor-endorsed way to download it was to pay him $5. In this particular case, at least, there is absolutely nothing immoral about downloading Ghosts from The Pirate Bay, even if Reznor would like the $5.
Reznor seemed guilty about pulling the pay me to download a CC album; his most recent album had sanctioned free bittorrent downloads of ultra-high resolution music files.
If Reznor had not CC'd it, had simply posted it at a URL on his site along with a PayPal link, and said "do not download this until you've paid me", would it still be moral to download it from The Pirate Bay?
Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?
What makes you so sure it's harmful? There is hardly enough data yet at a systemic level to prove that argument.
You can maybe intuitively say (as many do) that artists not getting paid will obviously result in less incentive to create and hence less art will be created, but you see, the tricky part with complex systems like this one is that they tend to actually be counter-intuitive and respond to many feedback inflection points.
Better access to more works of art, for example, would undoubtedly lead to some people being inspired to create that otherwise would have not.
There's enough data to prove it's harmful to some people. Maybe not the overall music industry, and maybe not the artists, but clearly to retailers, record labels, middlemen, etc.
There's enough data to prove it's harmful to some people. Maybe not the overall music industry, and maybe not the artists...
Aha! But that's precisely the catch! It doesn't matter if it's harmful for some people, because the constitutional foundation for copyright says that its point is to "promote progress of the useful arts". Intellectual "property" is not property. The terms is meant to confuse the law.
The question we should be asking - what system of copyright best promotes progress? It sure as hell isn't the one we have now, but it also isn't an abolition of copyright altogether.
I think the one we have now is doing a fantastic job. The record labels are failing miserably to adapt to the new reality, but that has nothing to do with the copyright system. It's with their own disincentives to adapt (a complex subject I will talk about tangentially soon).
I think the current copyright situation lets citizens do pretty much whatever they want and prevents corporations from infringing on creators and IP owners. That, to me, is perfect.
Corporations, for their part, went a little further than they had to with the DRM (which had nothing to do with our copyright system) and are finally starting to come to their senses.
"I think the current copyright situation lets citizens do pretty much whatever they want"
Share a song with some friends, create a mashup of two cool songs, use some music in a short film they've made, make a collage of different drawings, write new lyrics for an existing song and record that, use samples from an existing song to create something new etc. etc.
Yeah absolutely, but such is to be expected from industries being transformed. All those small retailers, middlemen and most of record label employees are out of the job with or without copyright, itunes and Amazon kill them just as well.
I intentionally avoided the larger debate, but one point I did make is that it is not a semantic debate.
Arson is also wrong, harmful, and should be illegal. But we don't regulate it in the same way that we regulate theft, nor should we. It would be bad policy.
I'm not sure your analogy holds. What's different about the way we "regulate" arson and theft? They're both criminal offenses, and both offenses leave you civilly liable for damages. Finish your point; I'm interested in hearing it.
In UK law, theft is when someone is permanently deprived of something. The thief doesn't have to gain from the act for it to be theft. The similarity between theft and arson would be that rightful owners would be permanently deprived in both cases.
I do not agree what is deemed copyright infringement in the US is wrong and harmful in all cases. Luckily, the Canadian government agrees with me. A 2005 ruling states "Downloading a song for personal use is not an infringement.".
Doesn't that virtually eliminate the point of copyright? Almost all music and movies are bought for "personal use", so what if everyone downloaded for free instead of paying?
Canadians pay levies on recordable media (and have since cassette tapes) that goes to the Canadian recording industry.
Initially it was deemed legal to tape the radio for personal use. Now that has moved into the digital age.
It does not whatsoever eliminate the point of copyright. I can't bootleg albums and sell them on the street.
To answer your question, nothing would happen if more people downloaded movies and music for personal use. Lots of Canadians still buy music to support the artists, and still purchase DVDs. Movies still make a killing in theatres, and musicians still make most of their money on tour.
There are two obvious problems with the Canadian system:
(1) It's a tax on everyone that, at least in part, takes money out of reasonable people's pockets and gives it to Miley Cyrus.
(2) No equitable mechanism exists to apportion that tax revenue, with an end result that Nielson SoundScan becomes social policy.
The problem with copyright isn't copyright. The problem with copyright is that the music distribution channel is controlled by a small, intertwined group of cartels. We should solve the right problem.
I agree the system has some major flaws. It is better than the alternative system with the RIAA prosecuting people for 10,000$ per song in my opinion. I don't want my money going to poor 'artists' that are just manufactured entities by massive labels. Luckily the recent rulings do not support a levy on digital music players or digital storage devices.
Your proposed problem to focus on solving would drastically improve the American system if changed, so I hope it happens.
One final point I would like to add: I did not purchase music in university when I could not afford the luxury. Since I have improved my economic situation, I have recently purchased various older albums. I think that is a good example of how the system can potentially be successful.
Ask 10 people whether they'd rather give $1 to Clay Aiken or see a single mom sued for $2,500 for illicitly distributing a Coldplay album. You're right; they'll all fork over the $1. But they'll all have to think about it for a second.
I find this concept very objectionable. If I buy a blank CDROM for the purpose of distributing my own software then music companies receive some of the proceeds of the sale because I could have used the discs to copy their work.
That's a bad law because I'm assumed to be guilty and I have no recourse to prove innocence. Furthermore, why is the levy specific to recordable media? If we're going to be fair then we should have similar levies on cars, crowbars and numerous other items which can be used in crimes that deprive people.
Taxes may be levied unfairly and they may provide facilities that individuals don't use. However, they are for collective benefit, public ownership and with nominal charge for use, at most. In the case of recordable media levies, the law enriches a private industry to the detriment of the public, distorts a market to the detriment of the public and doesn't exempt us from further fees. Specifically, after you've bought one blank CDROM, you're not exempted from one album sale.
I also think it is a direct result of the power of the giants. In the US, the RIAA can sue individuals for large sums of money.
In Canada, you can't sue for any amount - you have to show damages. So if downloading a song was copyright infringement here, you would only be able to sue for the cost of the song.
So, it is in the recording association's to have a levy rather than to pursue individual legal action here.
Right. My point was more to highlight the absurdity of saying we shouldn't outlaw natural human behaviors than to get into an argument about the definition of theft. I don't know why he chose to worry so much about whether music piracy is theft or some other crime, it's basically irrelevant to my arguments.
I think the last example is a little off. It compares taking a friend's book to simply copying it, but the friend presumably does not own the copyright to the book.
The idea of copyright extends beyond money. By being able to freely copy an artist's work the artist loses control of his creation. Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, did not license out his characters for lunchboxes or plush toys because he felt it would hurt the artistic value of the comic, even though he could have made much more money licensing it. He was able to prevent licensing because he owned the right to copy his creations.
Copyright and theft occupy different legal, historical, and philosophical spheres. Therefore arguing against copyright infringement because it is a kind of theft is fallacious.
You're right. Copyright infringement is trivial to argue against as a form of free riding. Does your blog post make it in any way easier to reconcile Watterson's rights with the RIAA's demands and the Free Culture people?
Copyright was created because the old system of guild-based monopolies collapsed and authors demanded that the Parliament deal with the influx of cheaply copied books devaluing their works.
That is, the basis for copyright law is in economics and politics, not morality. Passing off copyright as theft creates an emotionally charged environment where rational discussion is difficult.
I intentionally avoided the larger argument because it's about copyright-as-such and how it applies in the digital age. There are people talking about it who are far smarter than I am.
I'm also intentionally not discussing my opinions about the status quo.
You're off the rails again. "Theft" isn't what makes it charged. "Crime" is. Plenty of free riding problems are crimes. There's no "economics" versus "morality" issue at play here. Free riding is immoral.
