While you might not be depriving someone of a car, you are devaluing the product. Consider in the OP's case, he learned how to do certain things with this stolen software, and now he can sell his services for what is most likely less than what those who paid for their software and training charge. This, in some way, steals work from them. His knowledge is "illegally gained." Even if they don't charge less for their work, maybe they come here on a visa. Once again, taking jobs from those that earned it through legal channels.
So simply suggest that the only ramifications are from the software company missing out on a sale ignores the entire ecosystem.
Blending both concepts of copyright violation and theft together, what happens in this common situation?
1. I go to a store and buy an audio CD. I'm given the receipt.
2. My audio CD is stolen at some later date. I still have the receipt.
Is the thief guilty of copyright infringement?
Edit: as meeting this line of thought out, I realize there are 2nd hand shops that can legally sell media of all types (cd's included). How this works is the person (me) goes in with the intent to sell the disc. They give me a price, which we come to a meeting of the minds. Sale occurs based upon first-sale doctrine.
This would indicate that the proof of copyright does not exist in the receipt. So would the rightful copy retain with me if there is no meeting of the minds (theft)?
Not intending to bite your head off. :-)
A rap artist is hired by a label to create an album. Said artist later dies. The label goes bankrupt soon thereafter, or perhaps simply folds up shop and leaves the business without auctioning off its assets.
I have produced a copy of the album, which I host at my own cost from my server, once these events have transpired. There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement, and indeed I'm helping to reduce the scarcity of this product in the world.
While somewhat contrived, this thought experiment is not particularly far off from reality.
Software companies never go out of business without selling off their assets, and it's the extreme edge-case where people continue to distribute the works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware
Illegal? Sort of. Immoral? Not really.
The victim is the artist's heirs.
I've been trying for years and I still haven't managed it!
Of course, in a lot of cases demos would work well for that, but they seem to have fallen out of favour recently.
The fact that a content company's product is easily stolen simply because the nature of his business means it is effortless to do through the internet doesn't change anything. If you go to a lawyer for legal advice and then refuse to pay him saying "I haven't deprived you of a tangible product so it's not really stealing" you are missing the point, it's still theft. No one would do that, but they do pirate content because it's unbelievably easy and there are no consequences. That's the only reason.
Some people are honest about it and say "I just don't want to pay for it". But most people I hear justifying piracy feel entitled to it and don't think there's anything wrong.
Choice of words here is very, very important. If you want to start staking out a moral claim on information, you damned well had better choose your message carefully.
Consider, if you will, that for hundreds of years the concept of intellectual property--indeed, even the idea of land ownership in some places-was foreign. You simply cannot throw up your hands and say "But semantics!" and expect to be taken seriously.
At best, you look lazy--at worst, you appear a sycophant to those who rely on provably unneeded monopolies of information distribution.
You're position is indeed much simpler: you seem to be either unwilling or unable to understand that this ongoing public dialogue about intellectual property, copyright, and related matters is something that isn't cut and dried.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." Thomas Jefferson
"The ordinary subjects of property are well known, and easily conceived... But property, when applied to ideas, or literary and intellectual compositions, is perfectly new and surprising... by far the most comprehensive denomination of it would be a property in nonsense." Lord Gardenston in Hinton vs Donaldson, 1773
To me and a lot of others, illegal copying is far more morally defensible than theft. If someone tries to call a person that pirate a thief, my immediate reaction is that the claim is not only flat out false, but offensive.
Copyright protection is an artificial government monopoly on an activity that does not affect your property rights, and as such it is perfectly defensible for someone to consider it moral to violate copyright. I do consider some forms of copyright violations morally wrong, such as selling copies, but I do consider a lot of piracy morally acceptable (despite the fact I don't engage in piracy, though I did some 20-25 years ago)
Theft is materially different because it deprives the owner of continued use of that which was stolen.
I see that a programmer or artist is slightly different because the work the programmer or artist did can be duplicated where as the lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic's work can not but they're still effectively the same. Someone worked and expects to be compensated for that work. Not compensating someone for work you received I believe is also called "theft".
I'll also note that the most pirated software often represents a lot more work than a single lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic. If you use one of their services you'll likely get a few hours of their time. If you pirate photoshop or MW3 that likely represents a few hundred man years of time.
Anyway, I'm not arguing against piracy. I'm not sure what other word their is though for taking someone's time/labor without paying them.
That's not only "slightly different", that's the crucial difference. So no, they aren't "effectively the same", they are two completely unrelated cases. Would people please stop trying to use this dishonest and flat out false argument to support entirely wrong chains of argumentation?
Besides which, the work an artist/programmer has done is unrelated to the distribution of the result. If one expects to be paid for the actual work done, they have to seek other models. One that often comes up here is Kickstarter, where a form of contract is made - money for work done. Perfectly fine. Musicians have and always had concerts and merchandise as their source of income. Comissioned works are also possible, and are a very valid source of income. Additionally, there's patronage - which is, for example, basically the way Linus Torvalds makes his money.
I'm positive this list is by far not exhaustive.
So no, pirating something is not taking someone's work time, since their time and money spend for distribution is effectively zero.
I'm not saying they are the same but I have yet to see someone clearly make the distinction on why one person's duplicate able work needed to be paid for and another's is not.
If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?
I live in a country where it’s forbidden to organise people to jog in the park together via social network (unless you get appropriate permission, lol). Is such a 'crime' immoral?
If you think your country’s laws are always correct, think again.
There are even cases when what has been considered a crime now is considered a bravery. For example, Lithuanian book smugglers were commiting a crime, but now they are considered to have been doing the right thing.
And what is dishonest about that?
When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life.
Nurses, doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, mechanics, service staff, chefs, teachers all have the same deal. You can't multiply your work by the people who benefit from it forever (maybe everyone who likes the person whose life you saved?) and get paid by each one.
Now to me, that seems sane and normal. You want more money, you do more work. Getting the government to pass special laws allowing you to extract rent from your creative endevour for every person who experiences it going into the future is what seems dishonest to me.
A builder:
- is hired by a single client
- to build a house for many months
- and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary,
which is pretty much guaranteed (unless being let off for typically external reasons).
- also takes many months to complete a book/movie/game but
- he is not hired by any single client
- his income is directly related to the reception of the end product by the audience.
Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.
Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.
Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.
Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.
We need new software, because: a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright), b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation, c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).
If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.
If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).
What's dishonest about it? The mental gymnastics to rationalize their actions when it's really about "I don't have to pay for this and there are no consequences if I don't so I'm not going to".
What I've been saying is that for many people it is not a rationalization. They genuinely believe, because of arguments from history and logic that sharing isn't wrong. They aren't jumping through mental hoops, this is their honest belief after considering the alternatives and arguments.
Now that isn't to say that there aren't some, maybe many people for whom it is purely rationalization, but your posts seem to entirely ignore any other possibility.
It comes up every time because piracy and stealing are worlds apart morally. Were I to steal someone's car, they would be incredibly inconvenienced. Were I to illegitimately obtain a piece of software, the developers just get a smaller check at the end of the month.
As the article says, things are not black and white and we should not treat them as if they were. There are degrees of 'badness', and piracy is not as bad as stealing.
..Only if you were going to buy it in the first place and decided not to.
That is theft because you've robbed the lawyer of his opportunity cost. For the time he was spending giving you legal advice, he could have been giving it to someone else that would pay him.
A more apt analogy would be secretly listening in on a lawyer giving legal advice to a paying client. You haven't taken anything away from him or the paying client, and all you've done is "copied" what was being heard anyway.
It's not stolen, it's copied. One of the dark-arts pro-copyright people used was to conflate those two terms into one word. We can still discuss if breaking someone's business model by copying is moral or not, but we really need to separate those two words and talk about them with extreme precision - especially given how heated the discussion is.
Mix that in with a bit of Work-for-Hire for things no-one really wants to make, and it would hopefully be viable. Maybe I'm an idealist.
It is materially different from theft. Enough so that making property law fit copyright is not feasible in any reasonable way.
One is based on an presumptive right of the individual to protection of their right to continued use of something.
The other is an artificial government monopoly restricting the public from exercising their right to full use of their own property, by preventing them from copying and distributing information that is legally already in their possession, and where nobody are deprived of continued use at all.
Piracy is more like counterfeiting. It's much worse than stealing. Stealing a TV only deprives someone of that physical value. Pirating software has the ability to destroy the value of the entire product line (why would someone pay $99 when they can just get it for free).
The same concept also applies to things like the app store. Now that games are 99 cents, it's not easy to create a game and charge $30 anymore (because the value is what people are willing to pay. If everyone were giving these games away for free or they were pirated and everyone knew these games could be downloaded for free, that value would be $0).
The people actually in the market for $99 dollar software in the first are not going to do all that nonsense (unless you have done something terribly wrong with your legitimate distribution channels...), and who cares if people who aren't in your target audience pirate it?
Photoshop is the classic example. The people who pirate it are jobless students, while the target audience for Photoshop is undeniably professionals (who buy it). This is evidenced by the lengths that Adobe doesn't bother to go to to prevent piracy.
Similarly, with video games people either pirate them because they are not in the market for things that cost $50, or because someone royally fucked up the legitimate distribution (with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever). Gamers who are in the market for games buy games.
So..I should be forced to compete with someone making an exact copy of my software and giving it out for free? Does this make any sense to you?
Should hackernews.com be forced to compete with hackernews2.com, which is an exact duplicate?
"The people who pirate it are jobless students"
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Adobe has a student edition that can be purchased for almost nothing from many sites and it's all legitimate. Microsoft has these programs and also things like the bizspark/webspark programs. You can get free Microsoft software and all you need is an LLC (costs very little to create).
Your reasons don't really make sense anymore.
"with draconian DRM, or by not offering it on Steam, or whatever)"
Wow, we sure are in an entitlement generation. If you can't get exactly what you want, you take it upon yourself to just take it. I also can't really take anyone that uses the word "draconian" seriously.
The problem with your logic is that it never ends.
Look at the music industry: At first, it was because CDs were too expensive. The record companies responded by having 99 cent singles and very cheap music. Next, it was because the artists weren't being treated fairly. With the Internet, you can now release your music without any label.
Hell, even the infamous louis CK $5 comedy special was pirated like hell the day after it was released. It's very cheap, DRM free, and people still pirated the hell out of it. How do you explain this? The "Draconian" DRM? Too expensive? The bits weren't in the right order for the pirates' specification?
Piracy came first, not "Draconian DRM", so this is not a valid excuse as to why people are pirating, sorry.
"Gamers who are in the market for games buy games."
Your mindset isn't new and as a software developer (and business owner), I just need to change my business plan. Now, you will need to pay a monthly fee for my service instead of owning it outright. It stops piracy dead. I hope you enjoy paying a monthly fee for all of your software, because it's a world piracy helped create.
I'm sick of people like you that just can't be honest: you want free stuff and you aren't willing to use you hard earned money to get it.
You seem to think that I am defending pirating; offering up a moral justification of sorts. I am not. I am not interested in the slightest in the morality of the topic, one way or the other. I offer them no moral defence, nor do I morally condemn them. Rather I am telling you that you should not get bent out of shape over it.
And for the record, despite your insinuation, I pirate neither software, nor music, nor movies, nor whatever else there is to pirate. Why would I?
I think you are taking my response too personally for some reason.