If we accepted your handwaving, people charged with actually robbing someone's home and people charged with downloading half a season of Glee would face the same sentencing standards. That is obviously deranged.
So, no. The debate must continue, until consensus is reached and the matter fixed in law.
Can you expand on this? Seems like a non-sequitur.
I'd argue that merely the observation that many intelligent, morally sensitive people here on HN feel differently should be enough to realize that this is not a 'tangent' that can be 'put to bed'. Why would you even put it like that, knowing that there is such disagreement?
Suppose I bake 100 brownies and try to sell them one morning. I sell some and as I'm packing up my booth you take one and eat it. You argue, "I was never going to pay for a brownie, I didn't want it that badly, and anyway you can't sell them tomorrow because they will be stale."
There is something deeply wrong and immoral about this way of thinking. The idea that you alone get to value someone else's work output to be zero and then take that output and claim it has no value, and that the taking causes no harm.
It is theft. But you don't want to be called a thief. So you play semantic games.
Either you can't see the moral argument, which leads me to believe you really are unable to see that piracy is theft. Or you simply don't want to see it and then I fall back to think this is motivated ignorance.
If you don't care to engage with the idea then I don't care to continue.
The harm caused is that you are denying the copyright owner their legal monopoly rights on distributing copies, therefore devaluing their virtual asset.
What does matter is marginal cost of providing service. In this case it is ZERO. So no, it is not stealing. Nowhere close.
Say that I have an idea for a copyrightable work. It is going to take me one year to create it, working 8 hours a day. To make it simple, put a price of my time at $100,000 for that one year.
Now I could find someone to give me $100,000 as a fee for creating that work (assume that I have no other desire to make it for myself, so I would only do that if someone pays me). But now the problem is, to almost any potential customer, that work is only worth $10.00. So it doesn't get created.
Or, I could find 10,000 people to each give me $10.00 in advance to make it. Now this is in the realm of possibility. Kind of like the Kickstarter model. But now everyone either has to pay in advance, then wait a year to receive it. Or sign a legally binding contract that they owe $10.00 each once the product is delivered. This all adds friction to the system.
Can we invent some technique to remove this friction? How about, I'm willing to take a chance on the popularity of my work, and build it in advance. I really don't know how many people are interested -- it might be 10,000; maybe 5,000 or possibly 50,000. So with copyright, I can safely take that chance -- over time, if I create enough works, some may lose (not be popular enough), some may win big (and I make much more than the time I put into it). As long as it averages out, society in general is better off (assuming you think it is worthwhile for the works to exist to begin with -- I'm guessing this is true, otherwise you wouldn't be interested in obtaining it to begin with).
Now, does anyone have any other models (I mentioned the Kickstarter model already) that can equally reduce the above-mentioned friction? That is, allowing a creator to take a chance on making something in advance, and then on average extracting the fair fee for everyone who wants that service?
Patreon?
And I don't really care about mega-production Hollywood. It can burn today if I care.
Copying someones work for your own consumption? Nothing is wrong with such behavior. Nor with non-commercial sharing. Not until you have disposable income. Then consuming and not chipping in is meh.
Legal positivism is has it's stronger sides, but this is victimless crime.
And what about your views? :)
I don't think whether or not you have disposable income is an important discriminant. Who decides whether you have enough disposable income to justify paying for content?
I think there are a lot of issues with laws regarding intellectual property and content. Even though I disagree with them, I don't think flouting those laws is right or some sort of civil disobedience.
Same with copying someone's work for personal use or non-commercial sharing. The existing framework is the one we've got, and there are currently ways authors or content providers can make it clear that they are willing to do so: Creative Commons licenses are one example. Likewise with other patronage models, such as Patreon. In other cases, you're benefitting from their work without them receiving compensation. There's no agreed upon transaction. Whatever term is used to describe it, I don't think it's right.
Concerning 2): many people I know who pirate, say, a particular show, would simply not watch if piracy was not available. On the other hand, once this show becomes easily available and accessible on something like Netflix, these same people happily pay for the content. It seems inaccurate and dishonest to call them 'thieves' by the conventional definition.
tl;dr: I wouldn't defend piracy in most cases (you could just not watch the show), but I think calling someone doing this a 'thief' is a morally worse because of what that words means to most of us.
Are you only harmed if I remove your access to those records?
Theft: you have a painting. I took it.
Copyright infringement: You painted a painting. I took a picture of it and sold/gave away prints to all my friends.
Violation of privacy: I got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics.
Warrantless search: The police got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics, possibly finding evidence of a crime.
They are different issues which can look similar at times, but are actually completely separate. Pretending like they are is just adding muck to this discussion.
Piracy: You have a ship. I climbed aboard, murdered some of your crew, and took control of your ship or stole some of your belongings.
If you reproduce my song without my consent, that's a violation of a very specific law which allows me a temporary* restriction on your rights. The ethical question raised, I think, is of a very different nature.
*temporary: used to be ~20 years, now is until 70 years after I die.
Disclaimer: I do not condone piracy, I just believe you've made a logical fallacy.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, it's counterfeiting. It's 100X worse because instead of just stealing some physical items like a television, it's devaluing the television to the point where it can no longer be sold.
It's not that people wont pay for media content, it's that they won't allow rent seeking behavior to stifle cultural innovation and enjoyment.
I view trying to silo culture to extract maximal rent as considerably worse than taking away their artificial monopoly in response.
What if the copyrighted material was code instead of media?
Suppose company A invests $500M in writing code for a major new product. Development finishes and they begin selling the product and slowly recouping their costs. Now, company B comes along and surreptitiously hacks into company A, copying their their source code (they haven't stolen the source code, only copied it). Company B now begins selling a copycat product for far less than A wants to charge, destroying A's ability to earn back its investment. Has company B committed a crime?
Certainly company B let company A keep its source code, but by copying the source code it did not let company A keep its way of earning money.
But I think you've got a couple of holes in your simile. Source code is a much more powerful thing to have than the final product. I can't remember a time where a movie's entire set of footage and effects assets were leaked/stolen, and the equivalent of a movie being leaked is compiled binaries being leaked, and that happens all the time. I'd also judge selling an illegally copied thing to be a worse offense than giving away an illegally copied thing.
> Certainly company B let company A keep its source code, but by copying the source code it did not let company A keep its way of earning money.
And yet, companies still make software, movies, music. I'd be more worried if those businesses were made non-viable due to copyright infringement losses and more sympathetic if I thought something copyrighted today would exit copyright within my lifetime.
But there are circumstances that might mitigate how the public (and perhaps law) feels about that, eg, if company B bought a copy of the software and slightly modified it to work on a new operating sysem, then sold just the changed version.
In theft you take something from someone else, and they are then deprived of what you took. I take your loaf of bread, you have one less loaf of bread.
If I copy your movie, you still have your movie.
Now, if I (somehow) get hold of a copy of a digital file you want to sell me, you'll be less likely to be able to get me to buy it (although, studies have shown that those that copy content a lot, also tend to pay for content a lot).
So we need another word than "theft" - and that word certainly isn't "piracy" - people that violate copyright, rarely murder people or disrupt trade routes and critical infrastructure.
I'm not saying we don't need some system of compensation if we want to continue to produce art - but just as a boycott is a very passive act of resistance, so is not paying for crippled (DRM) content. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that there's a need to prove that someone watching a copy for free would be more likely to pay for that copy than go outside and play a game of catch if the content wasn't available for copying.