When a business fails to cater to a market that wants its media, and said market can have its needs met by piracy, does it become ethically OK to pirate?
Lets not talk about ethics in the context of copyright. 95 years after the authors death. laws done by lobbyists against any common sense. No cost-benefit analyses. No safe guards against abuse.
A few month ago, a court decided it was legal to send copyright extortion letters to people. The hours after the sentence was done, more letters were immediately sent out with more unverifiable claims, and the court website went down from all the victims asking what the heck the court did.
I current pay a tax (Sweden) for a additional permission of private copying. The idea was that people should be able to do a backup of media they legally own, and be able to transfer media between different places like the car, the home and so on. DRM however prevent this, but the law is still there, allowing something for which technology has made impossible. Worse, the lobbist created a exception so that the permission doesn't even trigger if there is DRM. I am only allowed to copy non-DRM media, but the artist get paid regardless if they publish on DRM media or not.
Is it ethical to demand payment for something for which is then not delivered? Is it ethical to ignore a unethical monopoly? Is it moral to respect unjust laws? Is it moral to break unjust laws?
> Lets not talk about ethics in the context of copyright. 95 years after the authors death. laws done by lobbyists against any common sense. No cost-benefit analyses. No safe guards against abuse.
The content in question is new. Ethics definitely play a role. For the record, I tend to be on the side of "if you can't buy it legally, get it illegally", but if there is any ethical role for copyright it is visible here.
If we were to create a moral acceptable copyright law, then new content would be the staring point. That discussion has not started yet, and the pirate party movement who were one of the early starter for a copyright reform has had problems competing against the more popular political issues such as banking crisis and refugee crisis.
Asking people to respect copyright law in current environment is a thought sell. The publishers for GoT are part of those who are currently corrupting and stealing, so from a ethical stand point I have little sympathy saved for them. One could argue that two wrongs don't make it ethical, but then I would argue that respect can't be demanded, only earned. The argument of the article and the lack of a fair product also points toward a lack of mutual respect.
Had this been a self-published indi movie, things would likely look a bit different.
The problem with drawing ethical lines is, nobody is ever going to be able to really agree where that line should lie. Exactly how nice does a media company's offerings have to be? Exactly which circumstances justify piracy?
The right way to think about this is that each person has their own ethical line that they will or won't cross in certain circumstances, and companies can and should encourage, through market offerings, them to stay on the commerce-friendly side of their line.
If prices are too high, offer a lower-end product. If people are complaining about nags, offer a higher-end one. And so on until you've got so few people on the destructive side that the people on the commerce-friendly side do the work of bringing them in line.
Of course, this means making your business responsive to the market and not just profits, and that's exceedingly difficult for the media conglomerates. Piracy is the big stick we all have to force them to play ball with us.
Ultimately, there's no right or wrong, just competing interests. It's bringing them all in line with each other that's the goal, not hammering out some grand idea of justice that's going to change every time the market changes.
I think most people who ethically accept piracy would feel different if there weren't amoral, faceless content corporations between them and the actual creators.
It's a convoluted argument to justify piracy as being absolutely wrong when the end result of paying for content is perpetuating a system where someone else decides what you can and can't watch (and then attempts to wring every drop of revenue from you for the privilege).
> Exactly how nice does a media company's offerings have to be?
Under capitalism, if the distribution company is not the best provider of their service, then they deserve to be pushed out of the market. So the answer to how good their offering has to be is: Better than the pirates'
If there were more effective market competition, the answer would be "another private legal entity". Which would be optimal. Unfortunately due to regulatory capture (at least here in the US) the only real pressure to innovate at modern speeds* is piracy.
* Two words: Cable boxes. In 2016. (And as someone who worked on back end cable apps briefly, it's not like better alternatives don't exist. The service providers just don't care enough to make them better)
But piracy doesn't function within capitalism; it breaks the rules of the system.
That's rather like saying that if your democratically elected officials is not doing things that are in your best interest, they deserve to be pushed out by a man with a gun.
The thing about politics and economics is that they build the effects of people breaking the rules right into their calculations. Econ has concepts like breakage, politics has straight-up watched thousands of political orders get upended by various people with various goals including "because fuck you, that's why". And they've quietly worked out ways to correct such perversions and keep everything reasonably smooth.
Nothing breaks the rules of either because failure is built right into the system, the stakes are too high to allow such systems to remain brittle. Capitalism is bigger than individuals, firms, collections of firms, entire industries, groups of industries trying to coerce the system. People once thought OPEC could bring down the global order. Never happened. People thought the very existence of nuclear weapons put humanity on a clear path to annihilation. Also didn't happen, but it was hairy for awhile.
Just because a system is built to withstand certain rule-breakage doesn't mean that those things are part of the system. Cars come with airbags and seatbelts, but driving into a concrete bollard is not recommended by the manufacturer or the DMV.
Economies aren't cars, they're made of people. A person can respond intelligently to something breaking his economy, a car can't, it can only respond according to the way it was designed.
That's not true. The actual rules of capitalism are the laws of nature. Everything else operates within the system and is subject to the various forces. The government is not some impartial 'referee', it is just another player, albeit one with a monopoly on violence which it licenses to other players from time to time.
Surely you don't accept all existing government laws and processes as valid components of capitalism. Civil asset forfeiture? Institutionalized racism? Bans on gay marriage? Bans on medical marijuana? Bailouts?
Ethical? Maybe, maybe not.
Should we do it? Absolutely yes. As long as it's easier to pirate Game of Thrones than it is to watch it legally, I would say we have a duty to send the message to HBO et al that they need to change their business model. Nobody's going to change shit if we sit back and suffer through their horrible distribution channels and just raise our little voices in protest without actually doing anything.
Convenient that getting entertainment free becomes a responsible, ethical choice. How nice. Consider the media company counts a pirate (who they can't see) the same as somebody that doesn't watch the show. So just not watching has the same effect? And may be a wee bit more ethical.
It's a moot point, since a large group of people either consider it ethical or they are not bothered by it being unethical.
Companies then have two choices:
- Trying to enforce the laws that make piracy illegal, which has time and again proven completely ineffective.
- Trying to make legal access painless and more convenient than the alternative, possibly adding value in itself, which has proven successful (Spotify, Steam, Netflix), at least to an extent.
It is a difficult problem (it has been since decades) but I don't think putting in terms of ethics does much to solve it...
I think the ability to transfer information from one consenting party to another is closer to a fundamental human right than the ability of content creators to control how copies of their content are distributed.
A few month ago, a court decided it was legal to send copyright extortion letters to people. The hours after the sentence was done, more letters were immediately sent out with more unverifiable claims, and the court website went down from all the victims asking what the heck the court did.
I current pay a tax (Sweden) for a additional permission of private copying. The idea was that people should be able to do a backup of media they legally own, and be able to transfer media between different places like the car, the home and so on. DRM however prevent this, but the law is still there, allowing something for which technology has made impossible. Worse, the lobbist created a exception so that the permission doesn't even trigger if there is DRM. I am only allowed to copy non-DRM media, but the artist get paid regardless if they publish on DRM media or not.
Is it ethical to demand payment for something for which is then not delivered? Is it ethical to ignore a unethical monopoly? Is it moral to respect unjust laws? Is it moral to break unjust laws?