[Aarostotle]

It’s very simple.

They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms.

You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms.

Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore.

You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.

[ElevenLathe]

Your morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.

[Aarostotle]

The moral principle here is just property rights.

One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental.

Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway.

With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area.

There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Its the enormous power differential between the two parties that changes the moral dynamic. There is no compromise and no negotiation possible, which are the foundations of fair contracts. Couple that with effective monopolies and you have a situation with no moral authority. Just super powerful entities pushing around weaker ones because they can.

[saaaaaam]

Authors’ wages are paid by people buying their books.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

It's even simpler than that:

Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important to clearly distinguish true morality from this false morality, which is nothing more than the preservation of existing privileges. Those who fail to make this distinction tend to neglect true morality.

[Aarostotle]

Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad.

You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it.

Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.

[Marsymars]

You could have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights - there's nothing that makes the latter instrinsically follow from the former.

[Aarostotle]

Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it.

In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project.

Surely you agree that you have a property right to your computer. How did you get it? You purchased it from the manufacturer (or a retailer, who purchased it from them). The laptop itself was their property from the moment it was made.

What about the factory that made it? Surely, the factory is their property, too. It would be theft for you to get a gang to go and take it over, just as it would be theft for you to loot its machinery and supplies. A factory, though, isn't just a building. It's a set of processes, designs, and techniques that a company uses to build products. For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.

Similarly, a book on your shelf is yours. The store bought it from the printer, who was contracted by a publisher, who paid the author to write it. The fact that _you don't like these middlemen_ doesn't give you the right to steal from all of them.

To those of you who rationalize your thieving behavior: It makes you an entitled child.

The ideas in the book are the author's intellectual property, and only because that exists, you can claim any right to own your copy of the book as physical property.

So, no, you cannot have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights. That is a complete contradiction.

[__MatrixMan__]

> Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root

Intellectual property rights came about when The Church wanted to use them to prevent people from using printing presses to distribute the wrong kind of bible. They have nothing to do with property in the sense of something that you lose access to when it gets stolen.

[Aarostotle]

It appears that you read the first clause of the first line, grepped your dogmas, and posted the first thing that came back.

My existing post already precludes your point.

[Marsymars]

> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.

No, it's for fundamentally different reasons.

Physical property rights exist to protect people.

IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that explicitly exist to prevent consumer confusion).

"Processes" and "techniques" that aren't patentable don't "belong" to a company with a factory in any legal or moral sense, and if they are patentable, they only belong to the company for the defined term of the patent, after which they belong to the public via public domain.

[atmavatar]

> (copyright, that expire)

For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.

Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.

Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.

[__MatrixMan__]

Where do you get inalienable from? Whatever rights to property you enjoy are granted by the consensus of the people around you. If you piss them off enough, they'll revoke those rights.

[Aarostotle]

The idea that rights are inalienable is a fundamental moral principle of every modern free society. People can violate your rights. That doesn't mean that your rights go away. If someone steals your laptop, you do not lose your right to that property. If the people around you form a mob and burn down your house, they haven't revoked your rights, they have committed a moral crime against you — they've violated your rights.

I wonder if your question is facetious or ignorant, but I will answer you as though it is earnest: I get it from great thinkers such as John Locke, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. To the extent that you support any kind of civilizational progress, you have these thinkers and their ideas to thank.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

> Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad.

That’s not very nice. I can assure you that I read everything you write here with the same contempt and accuse you of at least the same intellectual dishonesty. I just wouldn’t have put it so bluntly.

If I’m hungry, I’ll just take a piece of your cake and eat it, no matter who it belongs to. Everyone should do that. And if you refuse to share the cake, you should (and will) receive a just punishment for it.