Here's a moral question put the other way round. Do you think libraries are a good thing?

We now have the technology to make available the great majority of human knowledge and culture to a vast amount of humanity for free. I'd call that a very positive state both for the people receiving it and the benefits it would bring to the world.

And the only thing stopping us is that certain people would like to be paid. It's the same argument with cheap generic drugs for the third world. At some point you have to incentivise research. But also, at some point you have to consider the benefits to the rest of society too.

Libraries pay the publisher (who in pays the author in turn) and are limited to giving out one copy at a time (even electronic copies are often limited in this way). Piracy doesn't result in any money going to the artist.

Sure it does, presumably the original person that ripped their CD paid for it. Libraries don't pay the publisher "per checkout", they merely buy the books.

> Libraries don't pay the publisher "per checkout"

That depends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

"A Public Lending Right (PLR) programme, is a programme intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries [...] Canada, the United Kingdom, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand currently have PLR programmes. [...] How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. Some pay based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, others use a simpler system of payment based simply on whether a library owns a book or not. [...] In the United Kingdom authors are paid on a per-loan basis calculated from a representative sample of libraries. The current rate is 7.82 pence per individual loan."

(I imagine that any occurrences of "authors are paid" should be replaced by "publishers are paid", but I don't know specifics.)

Libraries pay authors in most countries (such as the Public Lending Right payment in the UK).

Libraries only lend out the copies that they have purchased or access that they have subscribed to as previously mentioned. Libraries are a public good since they serve as a home for the local community and a benevolent institution for those who are very disadvantaged and might not even have access to the internet.

Book publishers have definitely tried to fight libraries before though, in the past couple hundred year history of libraries. Buying a book and then loaning it to _hundreds_ of people who would otherwise have bought it themselves was viewed as stealing from publisher/author profits. I think in some/many countries libraries still actually pay licensing fees to publishers? (similar to what/how radio stations do in the U.S.). The "first sale doctrine" that's part of copyright law in the U.S. says once you buy a book you have the right to loan that book out, give it away, resell it used, or even lease it out if you want -- but the first sale doctrine is particular to the US.

Music piracy groups mostly upload copies they have purchased or otherwise legally gained access to. Their torrents are a public good since they serve as a benevolent institution for those that are very disadvantaged and might not have the money to buy the content otherwise, allowing them to participate in modern culture.

For almost any kind of digital "piracy" you can make arguments that sound very similar to yours, because in the end libraries and piracy do something very similar: both buy content once and redistribute it for free. The only reason we treat libraries different is because of history and because libraries have a bunch of physical restrictions that seem silly in the digital world.

We do exactly that for every moral dilemma when the question is what companies need to do to survive.

There's nothing wrong when discussing the morality of piracy, but it's irrelevant when the topic at hand is what media distributors should do in order to make money.

Imagine a convenience store which experiences so much theft that it loses money, and they're trying to figure out what to change to save the store. Is it useful in that context to state that "theft is immoral"?

Copyright is not about morality. Nobody has a fundamental human right to prevent others from copying their work. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that we maintain as a means to encourage creative activities.

Copyright is basically a subsidy to content creators. Just like any other government subsidy, it should be adjusted periodically to balance its benefits against any drawbacks.

There is no question of morality here, only a question of effectiveness -- is a subsidy really needed, and if so, how much?

> Copyright is not about morality

That seems like a weirdly narrow definition of morality, maybe due to the long association with the Christianity and the faith's retreat from the public sphere.

I prefer the definition of morality as the set of shared rules and norms that we as a society decide are to our mutual benefit. In that case, laws and morality are absolutely closely intertwined.

If indeed there was broad consensus that copyright law as it exists in the United States right now is to everyone's benefit, there might be a moral obligation to follow that law.

But all I see is a bunch of interest groups trying to pretend that there is a consensus and painting anyone who disagrees as a modern day Jack Sparrow. It's easy to manufacture a consensus if all the opponents are criminals, isn't it?

I don't deny that there might be some kind of broad consensus on the issue of copyright. I just don't think that the content of it will be anywhere near what the law of the United States currently says.

I agree, yet to say that 'copyright law is is currently not moral' is a very different claim than 'copyright law and morality are unrelated'. Most of our discussions of whether something should be law or not imply morality at some level (e.g. 'copyright law is wrong because...', 'this law is evil', etc.)

I didn't say "copyright law and morality are unrelated." Everything is related to morality at some level, so I don't think it adds anything interesting to say that copyright is either related or unrelated to morality in that roundabout way.

I said "Copyright is not about morality." Copyright is about promoting creativity first and foremost. It has zero moral value apart from whatever starlight it might reflect from the more fundamental value of creativity when it's in the right point along its orbit (when it works effectively).

Suppose you're building a startup to help poor people. That's obviously about morality. But how about your choice of javascript framework? You just use whatever floats your MVP without torturing your devs too much. And as soon as it outlives its usefulness, you can throw it away without a second thought and there's nothing morality has to say about it.

I think where I depart from your analogy is that copyright law has been explicitly framed and discussed using the language of morality by both proponents and opponents.

E.g. copyright maximalists say that pirates are thieves, that they unjustly take from content creators what is rightfully theirs.

Copyright opponents will say that this is a cash grab by greedy corporations, that this will destroy the freedom of the web, etc.

Theft, destroying freedom -- these are explicitly moral claims.

You might be right that morality is not the appropriate framework with which to think about copyright, and I tend to agree, although that certainly hasn't stopped both sides from harnessing moral outrage to buttress their viewpoints.

There are different ways to relate something to morality.

The maximalists claim that copyright violation is identical to theft, whereas their opponents claim that copyright law is being used to make huge profits and destroy freedom. The former puts copyright at the center of the moral spotlight, but the latter pushes it aside and helps us see that justice and freedom are the true moral issues.

Don't we have an obligation to follow the laws of the land we live in? I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

In the same way that we have some folk intuitions about the validity of ownership of property, we have them about intellectual property. Namely, we (the citizen of the western world) have an intuition that creators of intellectual works should have some say in how their work is exploited.

When it comes to the abstraction required to create a system of property, the one that strikes me a the most bonkers is the concept that people can "own" a geographic section of the earth.

We don't really have those folk intuitions. That is just our cultural baggage. No form of property is universal. No form of intellectual property existed until the 17th century, and it took until the 20th century before it IP worked the way we think about it today and became commonplace in the majority of the world. Guam in the 16th century didn't have a concept of personal property, leading to Magellan to dub it the Island of Thieves. Ownership of land was also a non-existent concept in many societies, famously many Native American ones.

Laws and ideas about ownership and property don't exist as some Platonic Ideal, but they change and morph to fit the societies they exist in. IMHO, IP law today, especially but not exclusively in the United States, does not serve content creators but publishers, and it is my belief that it is time to adjust the laws to fit the society we want to live in.

With the obligation to follow the law comes the right to demand changes in the law.

> I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

TL;DR: physical property="who gets to have this", 'intellectual property laws'="who gets to make money from this".

Physical property isn't natural, but it's an answer to physical scarcity, which is natural.

You and your friend can build identical houses, they can't be both exactly at the same location. Physical property creates a non-volatile answer to the question "Who gets to build his house there?".

All working societies must address this problem (even societies in which money doesn't exist), hence "property" (which I don't claim is the only answer).

Texts, recordings, etc. are a completely different issue.

Original works might be rare, however, there's no scarcity in using them : you and your friend can both listen to your copy of a recording without interfering. So there's need to answer "who gets to listen to this recording?", as there's no scarcity, and thus, no conflict.

The conflict lies between distributors, because the only scarcity that remains, when works can be copied for free, is in the exploitation. For distributors, money is scarce, so question becomes: "who gets to make money from this recording?".

This is a very different question, which already presupposes the existence of money, and exploitation.

My point is that both of these problems, who gets to occupy a spot of land, who gets to exploit an intellectual creation, are solved through the abstraction of laws.

Arguments that the concept of intellectual property serves no purpose are refuted by the increasing role it plays I our economy.

well, in a very narrow sense, if you are a creator you are in the unique position at first to copy the the piece - or not. That's not just a fictive right. And indeed, industrial entities often enough choose to refrain from public publishing. And artists may choose to remain underground and cryptic lest they be copied and their ideas diluted.

That statement is exceedingly difficult to square with a vaast body of law which preciscely and specifically claims that copyright is about moral rights.

See: Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany,[4] before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928.[5]:37 Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur).[6] The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989,[7] and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

The article you linked to says:

> Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.

I have a moral right to insist that I wrote something, and argue against people who say otherwise, even if I assigned the copyright away, renounced it, or let it expire. It's more about honor than property. A Picasso is a Picasso no matter who owns the painting now. It's an insult to Beethoven to say that he didn't compose his 9th even though all his copyright has long expired. The same would be true even if all copyright law was repealed tomorrow.

The claim was "Copyright is not about morality". The fact is that there is an extensive scope of copyright law, dating to the 18th century, which is specifically couched in language of morality.

Reegardless of how you feel about that scope of law (and I'm not declaring views one way or the other), the point remains that your initial assertion does not square with the stated foundations of law, in at least part. Regardless of how separable or inseparable those moral rights are from any other.

If the HN hivemind wants to declare its support for the counterfactual, so be it.

Most laws in the past were couched in the language of morality, or even better, divine commandment.

But just because people think all law is about morality doesn't make it so. It's the job of a philosopher to question people's assumptions and identify errors in them. This looks like a classic case of hasty generalization. Some laws are about morality. Other laws might not be.

I think copyright belongs in the non-moral category. You have not offered any reason to disagree with my statement other than a vague "But people in the 18th century believed otherwise!" Well, I'm not disputing your historical facts. The fact is that people in the 18th century believed a lot of things. Some were true, some were not.

My point is not that the law is moral. It's that, as you've just stated, it was coached in the language of morality.

Again, this is at odds with your initial statement. And again, for some quite large and significant aspects of copyright.

You're right, many laws were (and still are) couched in the language of morality. I'm not disputing the historical facts! But why should I care how they are couched? People can couch anything in any damn language they want, and the couchings are often misleading.

I think it was you who derailed this particular subthread by confusing the concepts of "moral rights" (being named as the author of something you have written) and "morality" (not being stolen from, or randomly killed).

This confusion was no doubt intended by those who coined the term "moral rights". But they are not the same thing. Copyright law is not needed to enforce moral rights, as you can very well see from the fact that we do acknowledge the creators of works that predate copyright by hundreds or thousands of years. We can freely copy Homer's works. And we do. Be we don't remove his name from them.

In practice we're talking about large, wealthy multinational corporations. I'm not convinced a moral argument is appropriate when one side of the transaction has no morals, in the traditional sense.