undefined | Better HN

0 pointskijinbear15y ago0 comments

> People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral!

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. One could always ask: "Why is it immoral to steal?" and the answer usually revolves around how stealing deprives the owner of something he had a legitimate claim to, etc. etc. That's how our moral intuitions have evolved over thousands of years.

The fact that this age-old intuition no longer seems to apply online is exactly why piracy creates a moral conundrum. You can't resolve the conundrum by fiat. Copyright infringement is a different crime from stealing, and rightly so, because piracy has different moral and economic implications than stealing has.

0 comments

6 comments · 1 top-level

citricsquid15y ago· 5 in thread

I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.

If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.

Whether or not you deprive the person of money is a side issue, the idea of ownership matters more, to me at least. If I own something through purchase, creation or inheritance it's still mine and you have no right to take it, whether or not it deprives me of it, it's still immoral.

summary: my content, my terms.

tptacek15y ago

In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70!

The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."

yummyfajitas15y ago

$10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.

If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00.

That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.

2 more replies

nlogn15y ago

I don't think this is really a common pro-piracy argument. Most of the arguments I see stop at "it costs them nothing for me to copy it" and completely ignore the lost sale side of things. Those that address the lost sale aspect just say that they wouldn't have payed for it either way.

Personally, I sit somewhere in between. I consider piracy immoral but not as bad as actual theft.

1 more reply

randallsquared15y ago

I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.

So if you work harder at stealing something than the previous owner did at making it, it's not wrong? That actually meshes pretty well with the popularity of heist movies. :)

If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.

I don't think most pirates would disagree, properly defined. It's just that if Tony gives Uhuru an mp3 copy of his latest single for $10, and then Uhuru makes her own copies and sends them to her best friends, the pirate would say that the copies Uhuru made were hers, and she wanted to share them for free.

[edit: subject object agreement]

mattgreenrocks15y ago

You're not insane. I think the near-victimless nature of this crime makes it easy to compartmentalize away. Arguments such as "zero distribution costs," "it's just numbers," and "don't call it stealing!" tend to oversimplify the discussion in the hopes of avoiding the vast moral chasm that exists between enjoying media, compensating creators, and being part of a sometimes exploitative system.

Contrast the easy-going attitudes exhibited towards major IP rights holders ("it doesn't matter if I copy this movie...") toward the furor incited when a company is found using modified GPL code, but they didn't release the source modifications. The exact same infraction is occurring in both directions. Yet, in the first scenario, the "companies had it coming" and the media is "too expensive." In the second scenario, "each offender must be punished severely in order to prevent widespread neglect of the GPL."

Sometimes, the tone of each post says more than the post itself.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse