- Stealing - I used to have a property that I could exploit, and now I don’t. Creator loses.
- Copyright infringement - I used to have a property that I could exploit, and now my opportunities to exploit it are severely diminished.
- Personal Fair Use - I used to have a property that i could exploit, and now my opportunities to exploit it are slightly diminished.
You are completely focussed on the taker, not on the creator. From the creator’s perspective alone, it’s a difference of degree. Now, you can justify the taking any number of ways. For example, taxes take someone’s property, but the immorality of the taking is justified by the good it does society. But once you decide there is no immorality in the taking, you enter a very different realm.
I’m going to call garbage on that. Or is the book industry doing better than ever. Or the music industry. In fact, let’s look at a real industry in which everyone understood there was no moral wrong to copying: The Hong Kong movie industry. Copying is absolutely rampant - there’s no moral approbation to copying - and there’s minimal legal enforcement. And now, one of the more vibrant film industries is a shadow of itself.
And why do developer write for Apple’s closed platform rather than Android? Because you at least get customers to pay for software. (I still remember listening to a salesman desperately telling a potential customer to buy an Android phone instead of the iPhone they picked up because with Android you don’t have to pay for any software… I guess he got better commission from the Samsung…)
I’m happy to have artists release their stuff for free. But it has to be their choice. Telling them they have no right to to how their work is used and it’s for their own good is just… twisted.
I understand the good of the masses. And surely, you understand that your assets would do a great deal of good for the masses and thus it’s completely moral to confiscate your assets, sell them, and redistribute it to the truly needy across the world. Sure, you don’t have a place to live, but then, you’ve made it clear that it is completely moral for an artists income to be taken dime by dime, leaving his family on the street as well.
Honestly, there’s a hell of a lot moral justification for 10,000 desperately needy people to steal everything I own and leave me penniless than there is for 10,000 middle class kids steal everything I make money upon and leave me penniless.
I believe in limited copyright terms because, yes, at some point, the good of the masses is large enough to justify the immorality of the taking. But my point has NOTHING to do with copyright reform. You are saying there is nothing immoral about taking someone else’s IP. I disagree. You pretend that the benefits of an immoral act erase the immorality. I disagree. Writ large, there are true justifications for doing horrible things. But they are still horrible things - just legitimately justified.
I see this all the time. It’s not enough that the benefits to some of an act outweigh the costs to others. It’s the claim that if we decide that something is justified, we also decide that there is no cost. We don’t just accept “collateral damage” as the cost of the benefit. Now we decide that the “collateral damage” deserved it. Or will be better off. All because we’re too bloody cowardly to accept that we choose to perform immoral acts because of the benefit that it brings.
Come on. Even a six year old knows that taking something that isn’t yours is stealing. I’m not talking about legal definitions, I’m talking about moral definitions. And almost anyone I know who’s had IP stolen, from a 5 year old on up, describes it in exactly those terms. Hell the man on the street probably doesn’t even know what copyright is. But can someone take your creation without your permission? Stealing.
Funny, but we always had the money for the games we couldn’t pirate. Why do you think PC gaming pretty much died? If we hadn’t pirated at all, our money would have been shared with those publishers who didn’t believe in copy protection. And our overall software sales would have been higher by sacrificing a few movies, or meals at restaurants, etc. Let’s not be liars here. One pirated item is one lost sale. But in my circles, it’s would have been a 20th of a sale.
Garbage. driving trollies is annoying people for the sake of annoying people. I believe this quite passionately.
I don’t trolley to annoy people. Admittedly people do get annoyed when you suggest that they are committing an immoral act for the personal gain of a luxury good. But many will find protection in the “I’d never spend any money on a artistic good, so I’m free to take it” or “if artists are stupid enough to make something I can take for free, that’s not my problem.” or apparently “not paying artists benefits them because… some other sucker will pay them, even though they’re under no moral obligation to do so, just like people support beggars.”
Funny, but the vast majority of people for whom you are fighting to lift this moral opprobrium are middle class white people who want the moral permission to not have to give money to artists so they can buy the next iPhone, or other technical gizmo or night on the town. You’re fighting for the rights of the middle class to not pay the lower rungs of society - artists.
From what I’ve seen, there are a few who are actually thoughtful advocates of copyright policy. And I do admire them - I’ve made an occasional donation to EFF. But they’re the “useful idiots” who provide the moral fronting for a hundred million people who just don’t want to have to pay for stuff they don’t need, but want.
And it’s sad. Because quite frankly, I suspect if the implication wasn’t “get free stuff”, I think they’d have almost no visibility. The vast majority of pirates have no interest whatsoever in the actual real issues, except as it provides them with moral cover for not having any responsibility to the artists whose work they’ve taken.
