[WendyTheWillow]

Copyright law isn't really meaningful here as a representation of morality, it's a representation of the agreement you're making. By purchasing a work covered by US copyright law, you've implicitly agreed to abide by copyright law.

To put this another way, do you believe the owner of the work would have granted you access to the work had you been honest with your intent to engage in piracy? Do you think they'd have agreed to grant you access to the work if you weren't bound in some way to not copy their work and distribute it freely?

If no to either, then you've used deception to gain access to that work and this is an immoral act, which is extended when someone uses your immoral act to themselves gain access to the work.

[Dylan16807]

They probably wouldn't want to sell it to me if I was going to leave a bad review, either. That doesn't mean I deceived them.

But wow this is such a tangent from the original argument. This is just to argue that all pirated copies are tainted by deception because of the original sale? Because that's making a lot of assumptions. What if the first person to upload it bought a used copy? Or what if they bought it for personal use, then ten years later realized sales had been shut down and uploaded their copy to share with a new generation? There's lots of plausible ways for this to happen without even a hint of deception.

(Not that one deception for a giant pile of downloaders is even a big deal in the first place.)

[WendyTheWillow]

Regardless of the length of the chain of custody over the work, you always know the copyright holder would not have agreed to part with a copy of their work if they had known it would be further duplicated, so you can't really ever claim ignorance.

And I think it does mean you've deceived them if some law were in place and thus the expectation were in place that prohibited you from leaving a bad review. However, no such law exists, and therefore no such expectation exists.

(and yeah, I'm definitely not saying people are murdering puppies here. I have for sure pirated movies and TV shows, I just don't try to justify it -- I'm a tiny bit of a bad person!).

[Dylan16807]

> Regardless of the length of the chain of custody over the work, you always know the copyright holder would not have agreed to part with a copy of their work if they had known it would be copied, so you can't really ever claim ignorance.

Ignorance of what in particular?

If you bought from the original seller, and didn't know your purchase would enable piracy, then you can claim ignorance that your purchase would enable piracy. And you can correctly claim you weren't deceiving anyone.

And deception definitely isn't retroactive.

> (and yeah, I'm definitely not saying people are murdering puppies here. I have for sure pirated movies and TV shows, I just don't try to justify it -- I'm a tiny bit of a bad person!).

I just think this is going way too far to claim immorality.

I disagree that one act of deception taints all further access, and it's quite easy to reach a piracy situation without deceiving anyone.

[WendyTheWillow]

It's irrelevant who the original purchaser is; the fact that they conducted the purchase under the rule of copyright law determines they consented to that copyright law, as the seller would not have sold them the copy of the work had they not consented. From there, you can know this holds true regardless of how many times the copy of the work passes through possession.

And I wonder if you consider immorality to be some major defining concern. I don't, and I believe my interpretation is the prevalent one in philosophy. In fact, it's rare to meet someone who believes all immoral acts are equally immoral, and I am not one of those people.

It is not a death sentence to knowingly commit an immoral act; you're not fighting for your life here. It's just a song/movie/whatever, and the harm caused is infinitesimal. The stakes are profoundly low! But that doesn't eliminate the stakes -- they do exist.

[Dylan16807]

I don't think morality is super important for small matters like this, but also I think "The seller likely would have refused the sale, multiple transactions ago, if they had perfect knowledge of the future" is miles away from making something deceptive or immoral. If the major reasons for calling piracy immoral are eliminated in some situation, and the worry of deception is the only one left, then piracy is not immoral in that situation.

[WendyTheWillow]

That discounts the value of the minor reasons for calling piracy immoral, which are minor, but they do exist.

Otherwise, we're in agreement. I just don't think "small immoralities" are equal to "no immoralities."