The anklebiter is surely a lobbyist for perma-copyright laws.
You must not have heard of Home of the Underdogs…
We’ve got laws in place that passes ownership to the public over time. My argument is private ownership, and rights to work that I create, not public domain.
Or not, but nice try.
Gooood. But don’t worry. It has been established that you can download exactly 1,683,389,235 games that can’t be bought before you end up in The Bad Place.
The law as it exists when it comes to software is the same as nothing, good luck getting Mario 1 into public domain in what is it now, 80 years, and having it play, if it wasn’t for the current not as strict enforcement of the rules.
Me, if you can buy it and play it as it was intended in the hardware that it was intended, do that.
If you can’t, and for some reason you really want to play no longer available masterpieces, go for it.
Oh yeah, me too.
I don’t get too hung up on moral shit like this, but since the argument was in that direction, thought it would be fun to poke. I’m not wrong, but really, its academic.
It’s not academic when things disappear forever, like Tribes: Vengeance nearly did. The Tribes: Revengeance project is a great example of cultural preservation.
I feel like we have a tendency to think of these issues slightly backwards, specifically because capitalism distorts our understanding of them.
If someone creates something and we use it, we have a moral obligation to give the creator fair compensation for it (unless they explicitly gift it to us).
Lots of practical matters complicate our ability to do fulfill this moral obligation:
- Other parties fund the creation or provide distribution, and make a deal with creators to thereby take part of the compensation
- Many things we value are created by a variety of creators, sometimes thousands of them, and we don’t have the practical capacity to identify them and compensate them accordingly
- Technology changes and makes some products obsolete or inefficient to sell
- Legal and market circumstances intervene to make it harder for some products to continue being made or distributed
Markets theoretically help us negotiate a lot of these barrier, but they perpetuate others, often to the benefit of rent-seekers, often wealthy ones, and rarely to the benefit of creators.
Since we live in a world where we can get so much of what we want–and relatively cheaply–often the fact of our obligation gets replaced with an illusion of entitlement. Straight-up piracy of games is an expression of this self-serving illusion.
But even if we respect our moral obligation to creators, we might nevertheless find that the factors above, or others, make it harder and harder–often impossible–for us to fulfill that obligation. Morally stymied, we can easily fall back on our sense of entitlement and say, “I want this. I can get it. I can’t find a way to pay for it. So I will just take it.” It’s dangerous to just accept that logic without, at least, accepting that it comes from an illusion of entitlement.
But after we recognize that entitlement, there remain some more-or-less responsible ways to fulfill our obligation to creators. Maybe we suitably fulfilled our obligation when we bought their creation at the time it was new. Maybe we can buy something else from the creator as a substitute. Maybe we can spread the word about their creations to bring them more patrons. There is no measure for when our obligation is fulfilled except our own conscience. If we think there’s a formula that relieves us of our obligation–it’s been off the market for five years; it’s not on Steam, so the creator doesn’t want to be paid for it; etc.–then we’re probably just rationalizing our supposed entitlement.
So here’s the ethical way to practice software piracy:
- Recognize you aren’t entitled to anything.
- Try to find a way to compensate the creator of the thing you want, somehow.
- Check your conscience and ask if you’ve done enough. If not, do more.
- Enjoy the thing with a clear conscience.
- Look for ways to dismantle all systems that exploit creators.
hear hear!
This guy gets it.
Amen.
I know a honeypot thread when I see one. Yahoo Anime rules.
Let’s try it this way:
If you own a physical book, do you think it’s ethically okay to seek out and download a pdf copy without paying for it?
Also: removing downloading from the equation, would it be OK to create your own pdf file from scanning part or all of your book? (Pass it through some OCR, it’s now in your personal searchable archive…)
Google seemed to think it was OK to do something similar for Google Books, and courts agreed.
I think that’s the rub though. For example, if you build, from scratch, your own copy of Monopoly, for your personal use, there’s nothing Hasbro can do about it. The same goes with if I copy a book word-for-word via typing out the text on a word processor, printing it out, then painting my own cover. Copying it via machine is a bit grayer - for example, many copy shops won’t do it if asked.
If I just look up the book pdf online and download it without paying for it, the publisher can say that’s piracy.
Is it ethically wrong if I already own a physical copy?
Is there a meaningful ethical difference here? It just seems to be a difference of time and effort. If I bought a book scanner, e.g.
…would using that be ethically worse than re-typing a book by hand? The end result would be the same, a pdf of your book on your hard drive. As would downloading a copy someone else made with a similar machine…
The difference with digital, which was announced to the world via Napster, is that the reach is infinite and nearly instant. Piracy was a huge problem for content creators in a way that copying your VHS tape for a friend never could be, and it was largely defeated by creating convenient legal alternatives with equal reach and instant availability. (Always bet on convenience in the market.)
This is not about that problem. It’s a nearly opposite problem. Sales aren’t being stolen here. Media is being saved from extinction.
No.
There’s an ethical imperative to compensate creators for their work unless they have waived that expectation. If you bought a new copy of the book, then you satisfied that obligation already. Retyping a book you own, using an automatic scanner, or just downloading an epub copy differ in terms of legality, but not in terms of ethics.
Is the PDF and physical book sold separately? Then yeah, it probably is. Technically, you wanting both a physical and digital copy but only paying for one of those things and not the other would deny revenue to the creator. In theory. I’d say it’s ethically wrong in that case.
As a software developer, I tend to respect things like intellectual property.
But I also tend to think that things like copyright go well beyond time periods that are reasonable.
Good practical guidelines, but this doesn’t address one of the more interesting aspects of the topic.
What if an owner takes something off the market purposefully, for whatever reason? Should popularity and cultural significance of their property prevent them from taking this action? Is it ethical to pirate and then send them money directly?
I think no. If Disney doesn’t want to sell Snow White to increase value, or if George Lucas does not want Han shooting first, there are no guidelines to pirate these properties from an ethical standpoint other than don’t.