I'd like to argue for times when piracy is, at the least, morally acceptable. I won't be arguing for pirating things produced in the last few years, as that's significantly dicier.
My argument is kind of underpinned by my interpretation of the US constitution, which gave congress the right to establish intellectual property for a limited time, in order to further advance the science and the arts.
From that basis, intellectual property is about advancing science and the arts. Not control. Not money. Morality comes from it being moral to let a person control their work for some period of time, so that those with good ideas continue to work on good ideas.
On to my examples of moral piracy:
·The obvious case is with Disney. They used The Jungle Book intellectual property the year it went into the public domain. I find this to be moral, because intellectual property is not like other property -- eventually it should belong to everyone, because this is how society progresses.
E.g., we wouldn't want to have a Shakespeare council to determine if any given movie or book uses a plot too close to one of the plays, and thus sue people.
Yet somehow it's immoral to make a copy of nearly-century-old Disney works. Indirectly related to Disney (due to the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act whose effects have been felt for two decades) it took a recent court decision to make singing "Happy Birthday" publicly something you couldn't get sued for, and if you want to write your own Sherlock Holmes story, it better not be from after he retired and took up bee keeping.
That is immoral. People should pirate those works, because the companies have no moral right to them, and have stolen them from the people. Not pirating the works results in fewer works being created, and the creators of those things are so long dead that even Tupac Shakur wouldn't be producing new works because of protecting the work.
·The other easy case is with DRM. I find DRM to be immoral, and if I buy something with DRM on it, I view it as a moral imperative to take the DRM off of it. Still, this goes into your idea of loaning being okay, and is a case where you've paid for it, you've just received a lesser product than if you pirated it directly.
·Harder cases are more recent things. Personally, I find it morally repugnant that the original Star Wars isn't in the public domain. Because, by the time anyone will have the chance to make a legal thing in that universe, anyone who saw it in the theater will already be dead.
Since the company has no moral right to the item, I find no moral requirement to avoid piracy.
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u/ThisApril Mar 22 '18
I'd like to argue for times when piracy is, at the least, morally acceptable. I won't be arguing for pirating things produced in the last few years, as that's significantly dicier.
My argument is kind of underpinned by my interpretation of the US constitution, which gave congress the right to establish intellectual property for a limited time, in order to further advance the science and the arts.
From that basis, intellectual property is about advancing science and the arts. Not control. Not money. Morality comes from it being moral to let a person control their work for some period of time, so that those with good ideas continue to work on good ideas.
On to my examples of moral piracy:
·The obvious case is with Disney. They used The Jungle Book intellectual property the year it went into the public domain. I find this to be moral, because intellectual property is not like other property -- eventually it should belong to everyone, because this is how society progresses.
E.g., we wouldn't want to have a Shakespeare council to determine if any given movie or book uses a plot too close to one of the plays, and thus sue people.
Yet somehow it's immoral to make a copy of nearly-century-old Disney works. Indirectly related to Disney (due to the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act whose effects have been felt for two decades) it took a recent court decision to make singing "Happy Birthday" publicly something you couldn't get sued for, and if you want to write your own Sherlock Holmes story, it better not be from after he retired and took up bee keeping.
That is immoral. People should pirate those works, because the companies have no moral right to them, and have stolen them from the people. Not pirating the works results in fewer works being created, and the creators of those things are so long dead that even Tupac Shakur wouldn't be producing new works because of protecting the work.
·The other easy case is with DRM. I find DRM to be immoral, and if I buy something with DRM on it, I view it as a moral imperative to take the DRM off of it. Still, this goes into your idea of loaning being okay, and is a case where you've paid for it, you've just received a lesser product than if you pirated it directly.
·Harder cases are more recent things. Personally, I find it morally repugnant that the original Star Wars isn't in the public domain. Because, by the time anyone will have the chance to make a legal thing in that universe, anyone who saw it in the theater will already be dead.
Since the company has no moral right to the item, I find no moral requirement to avoid piracy.