I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc.
To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification.
Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventions in history. The only connection between copyright and theft that I see is that by extending copyright retroactively, politicians (and their corporate sponsors) are stealing from the public domain. most importantly, copyright does little-to-nothing to encourage creativity and likely even prevents it. I see it as an obstacle to progress.
I wouldn't necessarily oppose a limited copyright term (14-20 years seems plenty), but I completely oppose the current regime. However, I still often pay for media (after having pirated it and confirmed its value) to support the author(s).
One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations.
I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
> I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
It may be the creator's right, but it isn't necessarily the creator's will. There are a lot of reasons to publish in particular journals, and restricted access to the published paper isn't necessarily the desired effect, it may just be an unfortunate side effect.
There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment.
Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations.
By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting the potential impact of the invention.
Instead if access to such knowledge is made freely available, the possibilities are endless.
What if Sir Tim Berners-Lee patented the World Wide Web and monetized it?
If this isn't sarcasm I think either interpretation can be easily disproved.
That sounds simple, but it's not.
Imagine this scenario: Disney makes a poster to advertise a Mickey Mouse. They display the poster in public. You (someone with no contractual relationship with Disney) see the poster, and decide to make kids' toys that look like the character in the poster.
How would your principle apply to this situation?
If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000. In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers. To sustain that rate is obviously impractical.
This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world's research. It's a terrible, indefensible situation.
I agree that the current journal/paper fee is crazy, but to say that piracy is the "obvious" answer is short-sighted, in my opinion. I very much enjoy the conversation though.
My experience with academia is very limited, but I happily used sci-hub & libgen when I was researching the Hierarchical Fair Service Curve paper.
And then the reviewer says "you should compare this to papers X, Y, and Z", each of which costs $35+ for a non-subscriber to read.
If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play.
Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days, trying to figure out which ones are relevant and which ones aren’t. Paying $3000 just to sort through and find the 5 out of 100 papers which bear closer scrutiny is very expensive, even for someone who isn’t “financially struggling”. (No, the abstracts alone aren’t sufficient for this.)
And it’s not clear that the money is going anywhere useful. The scientists who wrote the papers never make a profit: all the money goes to a couple of rich corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress.
This, a thousand times. Compounded with the problems of research quality and legitimacy that this essay highlights, it's even worse than looking for mere "relevance". Many published papers are outright dross, serving as filler that further increases the power of a $30-$45/paper paywall.
More problematic , the three major publishers are in UK, netherlands and US, which means the rest of the world's scientists donate their science to make these publishers richer.
I don't do research, but from my point of view the issue is pretty much settled, there's no reason to doubt. Current publisher are just plain wrong and don't deserve people to feel bad over them.
It's not even close to an alternative.
It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.
Most people in academia have neither.
That's different than "no time."
If someone truly has no time to wait a week or two for an ILL request (I'll assume the local public library offers it as a free service) they they have no time to read the paper, no time to carry out research, and no time to write up the research.
How then do they plan on taking on a new project when they have no time?
It's not quite that dire. DeepDyve [1], which is kind of like Spotify for academic journals, provides online access to 12 million articles from 10000 peer reviewed journals. You can buy access in blocks of 5 articles for $20, or unlimited for $40/month ($30/month if you buy a year at a time). They also have free 5 minute previews so if you are not on one of the unlimited plans you can get some idea if you want to buy a particular article or not.
The stand I take with Scientific Papers is much different - these papers are backed by institutions which are commonly tax-payer funded or non-profits. As a citizen, you have already paid for the funding of this research and not being able to access that data doesn't seem fair.
It's like if you paid, before hand, to see a movie created, but never allowed to watch it.
Scientific research, on the other hand, is paid for, not by "me", but by "us" - by the pooled tax money of millions of people. I, as an individual, do not have the money to "buy a ticket" to all the research that we, as a group, have paid for.
What really needs to happen is that we, the taxpayers, put pressure on the government to insist that all government-supported research publish the results for free online somewhere.
Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.
Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test.
You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.
It's pretty obvious that there is a revenue stream that disappears when choosing open access over a paid viewing model.. To cover that - when an author publishes a paper and wants to use the open access model, they pay the journal. The costs come from administering peer review.
The true cost of publication is unknown - "Diane Sullenberger, executive editor for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, says that the journal would need to charge about $3,700 per paper to cover costs if it went open-access. But Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper. Many publishers say they cannot estimate what their per-paper costs are because article publishing is entangled with other activities" - also from [0].
[0] - http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
side note: I fully support open access, but using current publication system and open access would either push some costs on the scientists writing the papers which would be covered by taxpayers in the case of gov-funded research.
If you're really poor, then as a citizen, you probably haven't. This is a spot where wealth inequality, copyright and culture collide interestingly.
If you are poor a movie or book costs a much larger percentage of your disposable income than someone who is rich. As a society we kind of do have to answer the question of whether poverty should exclude people from culture (or science in this case). So it does become a moral justification. I support the moral right of the starving to steal from the well fed, and count it a moral failing of the well fed that there are permitted to be starving while they luxuriate in their wealth.
But what would I care if some 13 yo kid in a developing nation watches it on the internet? They will never be able to pay for this movie. There is nothing to be made from this.
And, you know, entertainment has value. Sure, my script could be fluff, but maybe i have a disabled kid in it, and this brings a lot of internal growth and strength to some.
It's a tradeoff, and it isn't clear what the answers are (again, IMO). Rights of the creator to control the destiny of their creation vs the rights of humanity. In the US we have decided that libraries are legal, for example. I can read and consume movies endlessly and never pay a cent, legally. Also, I can open a used book and CD store, and resell products. That hurts the economics of the publisher and producer, but is a net gain to humanity (IMO). Publishers don't get a dime of the money from my used book store, yet it is legal because we have determined that in this case the rights of the consumer trump the rights of the publisher. A different nation, or different time, might lead to different decisions. Let's not get too 'judgey' over people that fall in a different place on that spectrum.
OTOH, if there is no way to get paid at all, movies in their current will essentially disappear - essentially no one is going to do a Hollywood type production as a hobby. So, conundrum.
Personally, I will never judge somebody that thirsts for information, can't pay for it, and downloads it instead. There is no harm to the producer other than "I want to control my creation". I recognize that desire, but I personally think there are bigger things in play here that trump that.
Do not conflate that with the more general piracy issue. The way these journals work is basically coercion: scientists are kept in a loop where they have to publish in the traditional journals because that's what gets the funding, and the funding sources use the same system because they (haven't bothered to create another|are afraid to|are lazy). To top it all, university libraries are forced to pay exorbitant annual fees to access the articles that their own staff wrote, corrected and reviewed for free (they even do the pictures for them). And all this is running on taxpayer money, yet the journals don't report to anyone. It's a mad system if you think about it.
Although you make a good point that piracy of one thing may be dissimilar to piracy of another thing, both acts are still considered piracy. That is why I asked a question about generic piracy.
its not free. taxpayers have paid for it (and are not getting it for aforementioned reasons)
Edit: The parent's reply was "yes" when I replied.
Edit2: I am unsure which "free" you are referring to. Maybe all knowledge should be "libre", but I hesitate to say all knowledge should be "gratis".
If I fund my own research, and ask Springer to publish it for me, then why are we forced to make it unrestricted?
Does this rule only apply to journal articles, or does it also apply to books on a research topic?
So arguably to some measure, taxpayers pay for H-wood productions too... (or for that matter, the products of any corporation which leverages tax giveaways, trade tariffs, or any other government - provided handout). Government $ is taxpayer $.
I believe it actually is, morally speaking, but it's just not a very good one in this example.
"In the face of multinational, highly profitable corporations citing mere copyright when human rights (“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”) are at stake, civil disobedience of the kind Sci-Hub is a great example of, becomes a societal imperative."
I agree, papers should be cheaper, but should they be universally free via sci-hub... I dunno.
Suppose something is funded by US taxes. It could be harder to restrict access to only citizens than to make it available to the world. For example, should a US citizen who is overseas (eg, on a 6 month sabbatical) be able to access the system?
Or it could be that only downloads from the geographic US are allowed, but further distribution is not prohibited.
Consider an existing journal article written by a US government employees. That work is in the public domain. It is not possible to infringe on the copyright ("pirate") the paper because there is no copyright protection, and in the US there is no "sweat-of-the-brow" protection for non-creative additions like OCR'ed text added to the PDF.
I think it would be an excellent test case to take all of the papers from sci-hub, extract those where the author is a government employee, and have a "public domain sci-hub" version containing only public domain articles.
The lawyer bill would be rather high, so I'm not going to do it. You would likely also have to show that you were actively filtering out papers which weren't in the public domain, and of course reply to DMCA. I can't figure out a business model which would support that. Still, I think YouTube and similar sites show that such a site is not fundamentally illegal.
Did you read the article?
Publishers are the ones doing the stealing (yes stealing not piracy, because piracy at least leaves the original accessible).
There is no direct effect of piracy on the author of a work. There is no physical carrier particle for piracy, and no sense organ for "being pirated"; pain receptors do not immediately fire. The indirect effects may include decreased numbers of purchases of copies of that work, unauthorized derivative works being created, people experiencing the work that would not have been able to otherwise, and so on. It is not obvious to me that the net sum of these is negative (or positive, for that matter), so the question becomes: why do I think it's permissible to expose the author of a work to these indirect effects?
We need a moral understanding of the world to answer this question. Traditionally we start with notions like property and autonomy: you can't take someone's stuff, and you can't force someone to do something, or manipulate their body without their consent. However, a piece of data is not property; it's an idea. This is evident when we look at simple data, such as the numbers 0, 1, or 2. They're mathematical concepts. Then we can look at bigger numbers, such as the AACS key, 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640. Any cutoff at which we might decide numbers stop being ideas and start being something else (such as property) would be utterly arbitrary, and the goal of our morality is to be just, not arbitrary. Thus, if we want to make it impermissible to pirate files, we have to make it permissibile to censor ideas. Western society generally has come to consensus that censorship is impermissible except, some hold, in cases involving deep physical or emotional harm or suffering, such as child abuse. It seems clear that the indirect effects of piracy do not fall into this category, so these objectors need not be concerned. The real worst-case indirect effect is destitution (starving on the street), and Western morality does not compel one to prevent destitution. You can even look at the notion of "competition" in the market as encouraging one to indirectly work toward the destitution of our competitors, and view piracy as a competitor in the market for copies of the work. Even for those who truly consider it unacceptable to let someone go destitute (who might also argue the immorality of capitalism), it's possible to engage in piracy while working to prevent eventual destitution of creators through other means.
Traditionally in these arguments one then moves the goalposts from moral permissibility to desirability, saying that "although we consider it technically OK to pirate, mustn't we agree that it's not the optimal behavior?".
For one thing, you've already "lost the argument" by moving the goalposts. But if we look at this as an attempt to, rather than pick a winner for an Internet fight, come to a more comprehensive understanding of the world, it is clear why this question immediately comes to mind. People are worried that we'll starve our artists and musicians and authors and programmers, or have to subsist on what little art, literature, and software we can skim off of independently wealthy authors, crowdfunding, and preorders. They see the creative output of the current world and worry we're going to change circumstances in such a way that makes that level and quality of output impossible.
My answer to this concern is that there's a huge amount of creative work being done right now that is illegal, and operates via happily evading enforcement. Even the portion of this that is legal, protected by "fair use" clauses or licensing agreements not converted into machine-readable form, is often deleted by automated systems which cannot process intent; this happens widely on YouTube. There's another large category of creative work that is simply not done out of fear of breaking copyright laws. This is every TV show that ever failed to win licensing rights, and a bajillion pieces of unwritten software; this is unreleased albums rotting in archives because samples couldn't be cleared to release them. It is not justifiable to short these authors and works, who are being censored now, for the sake of those who wield copyright and censorship as silencing weapons. I do not have the hard numbers (and honestly this is not a numerical question) to say the world would be more musical, literarily richer, or have better software without copyright. If this is a question that can be objectively answered, I can't exclude that its answer may be negative. But I do have an argument that says the only ethical option is for us to move toward inhabiting that world.
Obviously, the loss is kind of abstract for the publisher but it isn't for the small college that spends half or more of its annual acquisition budget on journal subscriptions and is then locked out of what it spent tens or hundreds of thousands on (depending strictly on which publisher locked them out until they can demonstrate that abuse as been shut down.)
Sure, if you're Hardvard or Stanford library, you can play hardball with the publisher and get your access restored immediately but if you're a small institution, someone's week in the library just got ruined to satisfy the platform owner that abuse has been shut down... For now. It really hurts the small institutions who can least afford it.
Your comparison implies that the "rich" pirate eventually pays.
1. Paying for information is immoral. You don't want to make withholding information from you profitable for people. You don't want to encourage this kind of behavior.
2. When I wan't to play a game or watch a movie I want to do just that. I don't want to play "decide if the thing's worth the price". It's tiresome and unnecessary.
3. In most cases I wouldn't want to consume the information I'm pirating if my information environment haven't been polluted by advertisement to make me want the thing. You pushed some information on me that I haven't sought without paying me for the use of my brain so I won't pay you for the information you are trying to sell.
4. Some software is priced at levels directed at corporations. Entities whose income levels vastly exceed their sanity. I'm individual. I can't afford that even if I'm rich for an individual. I still want to check out your software and maybe even use 5% of it's capabilities. I won't restrict myself just because you haven't thought how to satisfy me, neither I'll require that you think about me.
5. I'm a student. You'll get your money from the corporations that will hire me after I learn your software. Isn't that why you push your software in my school?
6. No. I won't play "pick the correct version/licence" so I can get the software as individual, student, scientist, whomever... I won't fill registration form. I'll just pirate the full version. It's easier and I don't want to stumble at artificial barriers.
7. Sharing is caring. I won't withhold the information I have from my friends especially if it effortless to share. I'll happily use information shared by my friends.
8. Business is trying to manufacture morality around copyright. "you wouldn't steal a bear.." and such. Listerine made you think your breath stinks. Flushable wipes people told you flushable wipes are necessary for you and flushable... Enough is enough. They can't be allowed to tamper with definition of theft.
9. Copyright makes lawyers flock to software. Lawyers tax everything they flock to. You should do anything you can to make lawyers move somewhere else or better yet stop being lawyers.
10. Copyright makes creativity very hard. You can't remix things without thinking "Do I have right to do that?" Not many people object to giving credit where credit is due. Many are prevented from acting by unknown, potentially exorbitant price they could pay for creating something that uses thing they took from internet. This kind of poisons creativity for a lot of people.
... I guess I'm out.
Any other creative moral justifications?
Or what are the moral justifications of not pirating software (beyond the obvious, creatives should be rewarded for they creation, and bit more sketchy, investors should get return on their investment)?
What criteria do you default to when defining the "poor" class?
Remember that you assume that being poor allows you to break any moral principle.
Your assumption that I am morally unimpeded because I am poor is wrong though. By assuming too much about me I am glad to see that you understand irony.