An Interesting Article...
Here is a Wall Street Journal Opinion Article on downloading music you don't own. It is merely a call to recognize the morality or immorality of such behavior. In other words, it can't be a matter of courts for ever and ever, but a matter of public morality that solves it.
This makes sense for internet people, too, because if you change the culture in a positive way (not saying this is easy), then there won't be people abusing good programs, and good programs can be made that have possible negative applications.
I have some thoughts on what makes stealing stealing, but I wonder about this argument that I've heard cited (from Phil) regarding illegal downloading. "It doesn't impact the artist, you're taking it from some big coorporation."
This argument seems to imply that stealing from bad people is permissable, but stealing from good people is not. Or, is it that taking from bad people is not stealing? Is it justified by some higher good, the good of civil disobedience?
I'm curious. Let's talk about it.
posted by Possum @ 4.4.05
17 comments
17 Comments:
I really love the idea of moral climate change.. of course it's revolutionary, and a revolution starts with oneself. It's easier for me to say as well because I have chosen to be moral about it and not rip anything that I do not own (nor give anything that I've ripped away).
Would that be a utopian society? One that is moral like that? oh, and you can't justify wrong actions by saying it's against a bad organization/government. That's bad.
Dante was wrathful to the wrathful and treacherous to the treacherous...
I'd like to start by saying that the terms your using don't do much to accomodate discussion.
First: stealing is taking something from someone. Copying is NOT stealing, as stealing implies that someone was deprived of a thing.
If you're going to get anywhere in this discussion, you need to use the right terms. The issue at hand is copyright infringement. (What drives me nuts is ignorant people asking the question "Is downloading music wrong?" Of course it's not wrong just to download music! It depends on what you're downloading.)
Copyright is the right to stop people from making copies of your material that aren't for fair use. (For info on fair use: http://www.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.html and http://fairuse.stanford.edu)
(The following argument is made in a hypothetical ideal situation in which artists own the music they produce.)
Anyhow, there are layers to the "it doesn't impact the artist" argument. While the oversimplification you cited is silly in many cases (mainstream artists do make SOME money off CD sales--I think the number is about 11%) there are artists that don't make any money off their recordings and are happy to get it out there.
The issue should be what does the creator want from their creation? Many musicians create from a labour of love, and while they would like to do it full time, they understand that it's not realistic. (Why should they want their records to sell more (when they don't get money for that) at the expense of greater exposure?)
It used to be that you could make a case that the artist owed something to the record companies, so you should respect more than just the wishes of the artist. After all, without the record companies, how would they record their CDs in the first place? But this argument is swept away by the new technology that allows recordings of the same quality to be made on thousand-dollar equipment.
This is in an ideal situation where people who deserve the rights have the rights. In reality, record companies own the rights to most artists work, not the artists themselves, so considering their wishes doesn't work.
That's why I would argue you should obey copyright law to the letter, if not the spirit.
What bothers me is people who say "I'm unhappy with the way that artists are being deprived of rights to their own creation by big companies, therefore I am going to disregard the law." That's stupid. Sure, the situation is bad now, but it's obvious that it's going to change in the future. Contracts expire, and artists learn from their mistakes.
One more interesting question to ponder: would Bono rather you spend money on the latest U2 CD, or download it illicitly and give $10 to the cause of AIDS in Africa?
It may be utopian, Luke. I guess it all comes down to whether most people would still take what's not theirs to take in most situations. There's also, it seems to me, a level of morality where doing what the government says is a moral act (one that is trumped by a higher authority: the one that the government is based on: God (Rom. 13)).
Phil: I think that we should talk a little more about the terms, "stealing" and "copying".
Stealing has two aspects, a moral aspect and an aspect of calamity. The moral aspect of stealing involves one thing, and one thing only: this is the agent responsible for taking something to which he has no right.
There's nothing moral about having something stolen from you, in any sense. You're neither better or worse because of that in the eyes of God, because there's no action of the will.
So, why is illegal copying not stealing? Morally, I can't see the difference.
There's an undercurrent of ethical discussion here that Eric and I hit on in that earlier thread that everyone stopped reading. How is something ethical or non-ethical? Is it arguing that consequences of our actions make something immoral or moral that underlies your arguments, Phil? I don't find that very intuitive, and that's why I posted originally, because I'm curious if you can maintain it on a more traditional Christian ethical system (which holds that actions have intrinsic value). In this sense I am really curious and desiring to learn. It's not an attack, but an enquiry.
I'm still interested in context, though, and I'm not sure if I understand your position. What are you saying, exactly?
Eric: Yes, Dante does say that, and it is an interesting thought, but it's not tapping off my intuitions the way it does in the poem. I think hell is a pretty extreme context. I can expand on that (Hell is a specific place where certain rights present in life are no longer present).
As regarding your last question, I don't know.
It seems that hell is a place where are actions no longer have a moral affect. Hell is where you actually get what you are asking for and so the type of Grace we see on earth no longer applies. Plus, Dante is not suppose to indulge in the same sins as those he comes in contact with, but merely give them what they properly deserve. I do not think this type of morality can be expanded to the earth we currently live in.
On the note of copyright infringment... We cannot live in a society where people take the law into their own hands. This leads to anarchy. Therefore, I would say, even if you think it would be the musicians desire for you to break the law and steal, it is still improper from a citizen level to do so. Our society is so information based, we must be very careful how we treat information. A misstep could be extremely detrimental to the entire society. Therefore, it seems that both the letter and the sprit of the law should be followed.
On stealing: if you are going to talk about ethics, you need to talk about the law. If you are going to talk about the law, you need to accept the definitions the law puts forth.
Stealing is legally dealt with in a different manner than copyright infringement because stealing involves depriving the injured party. In such a case, intuition as well as the law demand that a redress is made. If no deprivation is done, the need for redressing is (at the very least) much less intuitive. You may be able to make a case for it, but it seems to me the punishment could be a fine for breaking the law, not a payment directly to the copyright holders. (If you profited off your infringement things would be totally different obviously.)
You don't have to hold that consequence determines morality to hold that copyright infringement and stealing are two very different things. Even only considering the internal state of the subject, an action that injures or deprives a person involves a very different volitional act than one that harms no one. You could say it involves a sense of malice. If you go into a store and physically remove a product, you cost them not only the cost of the individual product, but also the cost of any future sales of the same item restocked. (They don't restock it if they don't know it's gone.) You have done a very different thing than ripping a track from a friend's CD. You can't go applying the same laws to both.
I'm not saying copyright infringement is ok because it's not stealing; the law is still very clear that both are illegal. I'm just saying that your equivocation is very unhelpful.
I admit the context of my last post was rather unclear because in part of it I was dealing with a hypothetical ideal situation. If you took my statements there to be my stance you will have a very confused idea (ahem, Dustin) of what I think people should do with the laws as they actually stand.
My actual thought is that you should honor copyright law to the extent that it applies. However, I think the current power structure is not as just as it could be (artists do not have the rights to the music they produce), so where the law allows for more than one option, I would prefer the option that does not propagate the situation as it stands. (Steve Albini, the producer who worked with Nirvana, has this to say: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html)
I've been trying to (in context of the article I posted) separate ethics from the law, and determine what the ethical thing would be, even if there was no law present. Because, as the author suggested, it may be more fruitful to encourage good civic morality rather than make accurate laws for people to follow. I wouldn't steal from a store, even if it wasn't in the city's law-book to not steal from a store, because it's wrong to steal from stores. So, it would be bad and evil for me to do it.
It does seem to involve less malice to copy music than to steal from a store, but that might mean it's a less severe form of robbery (but the same species of crime). I'm inclined more towards that view from your argument.
For example:
A man walks into an enormous warehouse, filled with 8,000,000,000 feathers. Each feather is worth $1.00, and he takes one. It is wrong for him to take that feather (praise God for His grace). The consequences are negligible: they are almost nothing (like copying: which is almost nothing because one person who downloads it may not buy it because they downloaded it, this will at least happen once in 8,000,000,000 copies, I suppose).
I still have this intuition that it's reducing to consequentialism. The problem may be that I'm Abelardian (if that's a thing you can be) in respect to ethics. I still haven't been convinced by anybody else (even St. Thomas!). For some reason this is one of the few philosophical positions that I've been sold on pretty whole-heartedly, and I'm not sure why.
(re: Abelard, I think I'm sold on him because his reasoning is solid, actually)
The basic point of the article seems to be that these people who pirate music are immoral secondarily because they make the artists suffer through not giving the artists their livelihood, and primarily because by doing so they undermine the arts and thus, their own enjoyment.
Even if this isn't the point, this seems to me the only plausible basis for the authors claim that downloading music is immoral, given my own utilitarianish stance on morals.
I don't think that the point will be persuasive until people see that their piracy adversely affects the artists and themselves. So far, this adverse effect is not evident.
There are a number of very wealthy artists and music companies complaining that they are losing money, but most people don't really care about rich people not getting as much money as they want.
There are also some public, but not so wealthy, artists who are more inclined to the free distribution of art.
Finally, the open source movement, and other artistic movements, etc. seem to be contrary evidence that excellence does not require economic motivation.
So, in summary, there doesn't really seem to be any prominent evidence in support of (my inference of) the author's assertion, which is why I think I, and probably Phil, are not so persuaded by the author's argument.
Of course, this is all underpinned by my understanding of morality, so for you people who happen to have access to the ontologically immoral nature of music piracy I applaud you, although I don't happen to have access to the ontological truthfulness of your views.
Well, you'll never make me a consequentialist, Eric. It's clearly (to me) contra Revelation (like, the 10 Commandments).
I feel like a legalistic heel, but I think if you KNOW it isn't a legal thing... yeah.
Rationalizing can get us anywhere which is why God gave us His rules that we can't scoot with.
The record companies legally own the music sold to them by the bands. Copying is not buying from them. It is essentially taking from them. So... grace, should we sin more that grace may abound? May it not be!! Now that we are free from sin (and the bondage to immorality) why would we want to go back to that?
in relation to my last post, there is no cause for those who are not under grace to not copy. Just an interesting though. They've condemnation copy or not, it really doesn't matter except to the physical/economic world which is temporal anyway. I don't know why I thought that was worth posting.
Yet for some reason, Robin Hood is a very popular story...
Nice, Eric. Robin Hood is a childhood hero of mine.
I can think of two ways to respond to this from a virtue ethics account.
1) He was immoral.
2) He was moral.
I'd argue (2) becuase there is a heirarchy of moral goods. Robin Hood, a loyal subject to his king, never betrayed this primary loyalty. Indeed, since the king was gone and his power abused, he was a sort of representative of Richard for the common people. He went about executing the king's power to redistribute ill-gotten wealth. Thus he was conformed to justice, still.
Even though this may sound it, I'm not being completely efficious: maybe art is the sort of thing that should not be owned, even in a ontological view of morality. Thus, music piracy is doing the same thing that Robin Hood did.
I do have kind of Marxist ideas of property, that people should only own what they need for subsistence, and everything else should be in common among people.
One could argue for this point of view if you take C.S. Lewis' view of great art, that a true artist discovers, not creates. Thus, copyrighting art would be equivalent to copyrighting scientific discoveries.
One could also argue for the emancipation of art on aesthetic principles: it seems that artists sell out when they get signed by a record company, their art no longer seems to be a thing for itself, but becomes a means. This is why beautiful commercials make me cringe. They can sometimes be quite moving, but once the realization hits that the whole purpose of the commercial is to make me buy something, I feel manipulated.
Anyways, not even all artists seem to think that their music should be their property:
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.shtml?tid=141&tid=3
Regarding revelation, as I discussed with you Jon, the fact that there are absolute moral laws, i.e. the 10 commandments, does not seem to necessitate that those laws have a moral value in themselves.
I've thought that the Silmarillion could be used to make a similar argument regarding artistic ownership.
Obviously, if there are aesthetic absolutes, then the beauty intrinsic in a thing is what gives it its value in an important sense. And that does seem to have implications about who should own the art (The Silmarillion myth is a good likely story giving credance to this).
However, it takes certain pepole to create art. And these certain people's unique character is a necessary aspect of the nature of the art piece, also. Art is contingent, intuitively, not only on the absolute but on the sub-creator. Thus, the art piece derives its value not only from the absolute beauty its tapping into, but also from the person creating it.
If this is the case, it seems there is a place for protecting the artist's rights to an art piece. Insofar as its existence is contingent on him, there is an element of merit. And since merit involves reward, there is a place for saying that an artist can receive a price for his art. Further, he has a right to it, for his merit should be equal to the value of the art he (sub)created.
Now, it might be responded that this is Feanor's hubris. It would be hubristic, certainly, to claim that mankind has the ability to create beauty. But I don't see that one has to make that claim to say he can sell his art and own his art.
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