The problem comes from the false belief of entitlement to the media. The common argument that it’s the “only way” to obey certain content forgets the alternative, which is to not consume that content.
You aren’t entitled to watch what you want.
Obviously this is closer to “littering” than it is to murder, but technically it’s unethical.
* Steve sells secrets for a fee.
* I want to buy a secret from Steve but he refuses to sell to me specifically.
* Steve sells his secret to Bob.
* Bob is willing to tell Steve's secret to me for free, so he does so.
It seems to me that in this scenario everyone got what they wanted. Steve got to sell his secret to Bob and not to me, and Bob and I got to learn Steve's secret. I think it would be unethical to force Steve to sell his secret to me if he doesn't want to, but I don't see what's unethical in learning his secret from someone else even if he refuses to sell it to me directly.
If Steve didn't want me to have his secret at all he shouldn't be selling it to Bob or anyone else.
Basically, Bob agreed with Steve that Bob would not give anyone else the secret, and Steve only sold Bob the secret because he made that agreement, but then Bob turned around and gave it to you for free.
So Bob lied, and you know Bob lied, and you benefit from Bob lying, so it's unethical.
Again, all kinds of modifiers and caveats apply to the severity here. I really have little sympathy for Steve when he's a gazillionaire already, and the marginal value lost isn't meaningful enough to stop Steve from making more secrets, but technically speaking it appears to be an immoral act to pirate.
I reject that there's such a thing as "ill-gotten bits".
>So Bob lied, and you know Bob lied, and you benefit from Bob lying, so it's unethical.
If unethicality is transitive like this then the concept of what's ethical or unethical dissolves into meaninglessness. Everyone's actions affect everyone else in form or another. How many murders and thefts am I currently indirectly benefiting from just by existing, or by using this computer? Even if I count just the ones I know about and the ones I can infer, I think the number is too large to care about.
I'm willing to concede that Bob's behavior is unethical, but not that "my" behavior is, by transitivity.
We can look at law as an example of an application of ethical concepts; it's illegal to knowingly purchase stolen goods.
That said, if you don't believe in ownership of "bits", then you probably don't care about this even if it were unethical to you to obtain stolen goods.
You also probably don't have a great deal of respect for property ownership generally, or capitalism, so there are more foundational issues that can't really be resolved in this context.
"Stolen goods" are stolen because someone stole them and is now trying to give them to you, probably in exchange for money. If Bob purchases a secret from Steve and tells me "hey, do you want to hear this thing Steve told me? I'll tell you for free", at what point does the secret Bob tells me become "stolen"? How can an action that takes place after the acquisition of a thing have an effect on the legitimacy of the owning of the thing (in this case, a copy of the secret)? It seems to me that the only possible answers to these questions are "never" and "it can't", respectively.
>if you don't believe in ownership of "bits", then you probably don't care about this even if it were unethical to you to obtain stolen goods.
I believe in the ownership of bits. If we understand that control is a fundamental part of ownership, then it stands to reason that bits (or, more accurately, sequences of bits) are owned by keeping them secret. Therefore, if you reveal a secret you give up ownership of it, in the same way that you give up ownership of something when you hand it over to someone else.
That aside, do you think bits are exactly the same as physical goods? Why would you think that someone who rejects ownership of bits rejects ownership of property in general?
As for control, it is decidedly not a fundamental part of ownership. You are not, for example, able to control driving your car into another person willfully, but you do still "own" your car.
What it boils down to is the ethical obligation a person has to do what they said they would do. Are you ethically obligated to not lie? If so, when Bob tells Steve that he (Bob) isn't going to share Steve's secret with anyone else without Bob's permission, he would then break his word if he subsequently shared Bob's secret with you. You, knowing that Bob obtained the secret by lying to Steve, are complicit in Bob's lie, making you morally culpable.
This is obviously complicated by the infinitely reproducible nature of digital goods, hence why I said you don't care much for capitalism if you don't agree with this notion, as capitalism introduces the concept of artificial scarcity to protect Steve's incentives to continue to produce secrets. There are many arguments suggesting that Steve would produce secrets regardless of incentive, but for a capitalist, the protection of the monopoly is paramount.
No, it's not circular. A good is a stolen good if it has been stolen. That's not circular. There's a distinction between something being stolen and something being a stolen good, and the definition of the latter rests upon the definition of the former. I didn't define "stealing" because I didn't think it was necessary, as I thought we all know what it means. But it seems we actually don't agree on what "stealing" means. I think you "steal" something if you remove someone's possession of an item without their permission. If there's such a thing as agreement between two parties that if violated can void one of the parties rights to exploit an item then that's not stealing. When you purchase something you acquiring complete ownership over the thing. If there's strings attached that can turn the purchase into a "theft" then it's not a purchase. Perhaps it's a lease of some kind.
>As for control, it is decidedly not a fundamental part of ownership. You are not, for example, able to control driving your car into another person willfully, but you do still "own" your car.
You're using control in a different sense than I. What I mean is that you can decide what to do with the object as you like, with regards to the object itself. No, you can't drive your car anywhere you like, but you can sell or gift your car to anyone you like, and you destroy it you like, or you can leave it parked forever if you like. None of these are things you can do with a car you don't own, are they?
>You, knowing that Bob obtained the secret by lying to Steve, are complicit in Bob's lie, making you morally culpable.
Well, let's stick to one thing at a time, eh? If you have yet to convince me that my behavior is unethical, much less are you going to convince me that it's immoral.
>What it boils down to is the ethical obligation a person has to do what they said they would do.
I don't think a person has an ethical obligation to keep promises that are based on unethical grounds. Such as attaching strings to things that you sell. If you *sell* me a car and make me sign a contract that says I can't gift it to whoever I please, you bet I'm going to do whatever I please. Your contract is nonsensical and opposite to the notion of property. If you sell me something you relinquish all rights to the thing you sell me and acknowledge my right to do as I please with it. If you don't relinquish those rights then you can't call it a sale, and you have to price the transaction accordingly.
>This is obviously complicated by the infinitely reproducible nature of digital goods, hence why I said you don't care much for capitalism if you don't agree with this notion, as capitalism introduces the concept of artificial scarcity to protect Steve's incentives to continue to produce secrets. There are many arguments suggesting that Steve would produce secrets regardless of incentive, but for a capitalist, the protection of the monopoly is paramount.
If you want to say that capitalism cannot exist without intellectual property rights then I'll have to ask you to argue for it.
What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
Besides, if one could enter into such an agreement, what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement, resulting in you knowingly possessing what then becomes Steve's secret again upon sale to you? To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements, I do think you'll have a pretty large problem with capitalism, even separate from intellectual property, as it questions the very nature of both freedom and ownership. Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
I don't know of any country in the world that allows anything and everything to be put in a contract and for good reason. Why do you think that it is so?
> Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
When you sell it? Absolutely not. Why do you think that you should have control over something when you sell it?
Assuming you're still here, what's the ethical difference between this and "by purchasing this DVD you agree to blah blah"? In neither case did anyone agree to anything.
The point, of course, is that there is no agreement in either case. You agree to do something when you agree to it, not when I claim that you agreed to it. You can argue the opposite legally, and you might even win, but you can't argue it ethically; absent a crisis of conscience halfway through, someone who intended to pirate a movie and then went on to actually pirate a movie did not agree not to pirate a movie a priori.
Absolutely not. That would be absurd.
I get why you're taking this position - If I agree to not do X and then do X, you can call me unethical even if X is harmless. So, if you can show that pirates somehow agreed not to pirate, you can declare that those pirates are unethical without having to show that piracy itself is unethical. The problem with this position is that it uses semantics to contradict reality. You're asking us to imagine someone who picks up a DVD in a store and reads the sticker on the side and loudly declares, "What nonsense, I'm going to go pirate this movie right now!", and claiming that ethically he is somehow agreeing to the license, and that when he goes home and uploads it, that he is somehow breaking a promise not to pirate it despite having explicitly promised do exactly that. That's an obviously contorted position.
If piracy is bad, it's because of the ramifications of the actual act of piracy, not because a corporation fooled me into pinky-swearing not to do it. Companies try to tell us what to do all the time, you can just ignore them; boilerplate legalese has no moral or ethical valence. However, I will also say that I appreciate the time and patience you've put into this thread, you've been nothing but civil and in good faith, so thanks for that.
Additionally, it undermines capitalistic incentives to create intellectual works, but that's what drives creators of work to stipulate conditions when they sell copies of their work. But it's the deception, not the undermined capitalistic incentives, that make piracy immoral.
And thank you for your compliment! I'm fascinated by the idea that so many people fight so hard to find ways for piracy to be a moral act when, to me, it's infinitely easier to accept it as an immoral act and do it anyway. Do people really operate in life expecting to always do the morally correct thing? That's wild, to me.
And lots of them! Could a restaurant declare, "By purchasing this sandwich, you promise not to give us a bad review on yelp"? If not, how is that different? Would that license apply if the sandwich was free? What if someone else bought it for me? If I make you a sandwich and stipulate that you must declare it to be delicious, and it isn't, is it more ethical for you to break my "license" or to lie?
I got more! What about DVD region restrictions? If I buy a movie in America and the license requires me to buy a second copy to watch in Asia, am I ethically obligated to do that too, even though that doesn't have even a fig leaf of moral justification beyond the manufacturer's profit motive? Is it unethical to skip the unskippable ads? For that matter, how does this license magically transfer itself from the rightsholder to the manufacturer, warehouse, retailer, and thence consumer? If I sell it used to my friend John, has he "agreed" to a contract with whoever originaly published the media through the magic of transitive association? What if I give it away for free, or throw it away and someone picks it out of my trash?
We're not done! Does this magic travel backwards in time? What license did I agree to when I inherited my Dad's old Beatles albums on vinyl? Bandcamp offers seven different licenses for music, is it one of those or a different one? Am I allowed to watch in in Asia, or is it region-restricted too? If not, how do you know?
We haven't even discussed immoral licenses. What if the license says, "By purchasing this you agree not to show it to any filthy stinking [ethnicity] people", can I ethically ignore that? What about those Taylor Swift albums that she doesn't own the rights to, can we pirate those? What about a trans person who wants to read Harry Potter, is it more ethical for them to purchase the books or to bootleg them? Can I download Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book"? OJ Simpson's autobiography? Henry Kissinger's?
Etc, etc. You get my point, I hope, which is that the seemingly simple "piracy is bad because it's unethical to ignore a shrinkwrap license" position is actually fraught with contradictions and argumentum ad absurdums. Whereas, the inversion - breaking the license is unethical because piracy is bad - is blissfully free of these problems. It allows exceptions, as in "OK, Henry Kissinger is fair game but you still have to pay for books not written by mass murderers" without compromising its central premise. The only downside is, it requires you to demonstrate that piracy is bad in itself, which requires a discussion of the different ways it can help and hurt different artists in different circumstances, rather than a tidy one-line proof that all pirates everywhere are bad, QED.
This is a long thread and post and sometimes with all the hypotheticals it's easy to be misunderstood, so to be sure that I am actually taking a stand (as opposed to just throwing rocks at yours) I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker. That the license claims it constitutes an "agreement" is simply false by any reasonable definition, as proven by the fact that people regularly purchase media who demonstrate their failure to agree with it by word and action. The only purpose such licenses serve is that some corporate lawyer somewhere decided it might help them win some hypothetical lawsuit; it is the ethical and legal equivalent of wearing a t-shit reading, "By reading this shirt, you agree not to rob me."
Could such a contract exist?
edit to add: it sounds like Bob just signed an NDA.
In other words, are there implicit rules that govern any given exchange beyond those that are explicitly stated before the exchange occurs? Really, rules that govern social interaction generally. Do those rules exist?
> do you believe in implicit agreement to contracts? This might take the form of, e.g. an expectation of refund if this DVD ends up being blank, or the belief that the DVD won't contain a virus or cut you when you grab the edge.
In a word, no. I expect the DVD to work and not have a virus because consumer products are usually subject to an implied warranty of merchantability (which is very much not an ethical agreement but a legal obligation imposed by courts). The idea of a corporation replacing a faulty product because it's the right thing to do sounds like something from a children's book with talking badgers who wear waistcoats and serve tea. The real-world DVD manufacturer would dump toxic waste in my back yard if they thought the savings would exceed the fine.
> they still exist as a set of expectations and assumptions that come with social interactions (including product sales).
Purchasing a product from a corporation is not a social interaction. Not sure what else to say beyond referring you to the definition of "social."
> In other words, are there implicit rules that govern any given exchange beyond those that are explicitly stated before the exchange occurs? Really, rules that govern social interaction generally. Do those rules exist?
There are implict rules for all sorts of situations, sure. People tend to disagree on what they are, which is why we have so many explicit rules, e.g. copyright law and the CFAA and so forth. But sure, implicit rules can exist. "Don't fart in a crowded elevator" might be one. Another might be, "If you have a point to make, explain it clearly as opposed to dragging it out with leading rhetorical questions." What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?
> People tend to disagree on what they are, which is why we have so many explicit rules, e.g. copyright law and the CFAA and so forth.
If this is an explicit rule attached to every sale, then by purchasing a copyrighted work, you're consenting to that part of the agreement, yes? And if not, then how is this an explicit rule?
Keep in mind that regardless of whether or not law is an accurate reflection of morality, once it's part of the agreement, you consenting to it via purchase means you accept it, presuming as you said that it is indeed part of every sale agreement.
First, breaking a law isn't by itself unethical. You can argue otherwise if you like, but a) it opens up a whole slew of absurdities (e.g. exploiting a software bug on a slot machine for profit is unethical IFF it's on a network that crosses a state line - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Kane), and b) you'd be abandoning everything you've said up til this point.
Second, copyright law is not a rule that is "attached to every sale," whatever that means. (If it were, you could get around it by shoplifting!) You need to stop blurring the lines between legal rules and ethical rules, because it's led you to confuse the difference between agreeing to a rule and being subject to it. So, let's make that explicit. I'm subject to copyright law. Doesn't matter if I agree to it or consent to it (it's not even clear what consenting to a law means), I'm subject to it regardless.
Now, you can certainly argue that there are ethical laws that we are all subject to as well. But, you are not arguing that! (correct me if I'm wrong, of course) You are arguing that there is an ethical law against piracy that pirates have agreed to, without wanting to, and I'm telling you, that's not a thing that can happen. You can't agree to something against your will.
So, you gotta make a choice to make this whole line of reasoning coherent. This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse? If so, I think they very clearly are refusing it, and if not, you cannot meaningfully claim that they agreed to it.
Are you familiar with Thomas Hobbes?
> What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?
> This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse?
People. People. People. Corporations are made up of people, owned by people, and creators of works are people. And those people have rights, just like you.
And no, you can't really opt out of the social contract other than by opting out of society. This is a feature, however, not a bug, and participation in society without adherence to the social contract is called "Free riding."
Intellectual property pirates fall into the category of "free riders" or people who benefit from the social contract but do not adhere to it.
Second: do you claim it is inherently immoral to break laws or not? I've assumed the answer is no despite your dodging the question, but I don't see where you're trying to go with all this discussion of the social contract, if not there. There's more I'd say, but I hate typing out "if you think X then I would respond Y, but if you think Z then I would reply with W" stuff, I'd much prefer a straight answer to this.
Really, by accepting the idea that corporations are more than just a group of people, you're acquiescing to their conceit. Their trick of making themselves something "special" or more complex than just "people making choices" is part of the problem, IMO.
And no, breaking laws is not, itself, immoral. But laws represent agreements between parties, or conditions upon which an interaction is predicated. There's an implicit presumption that a transaction will comport with the laws it's governed by unless stated otherwise. I don't have a problem stating otherwise, but relying on that presumption because it's to your advantage with no intention of following through on your end is immoral.
Nope. Recall that I said, "corporations are not part of [the social contract], any more than a scorpion is, or a calculator." Do you suppose I'm disgusted by calculators?
For the record, what corporations share with scorpions and calculators is that they lack agency, but I don't think it matters here anyway. Your whole position is that piracy is immoral because the people who pirate stuff promised (at some point, in some sense) not to, and I don't think your position or my response to it really hinges on whether that promise was made to a corporation or a person.
> And no, breaking laws is not, itself, immoral.
Great, we agree on something! The problem is, this contradicts your position up to this point. "Piracy is immoral because it involves breaking laws" cannot co-exist with "Some laws can be ethically broken." The former is what you've been claiming all along, and the latter is what you just conceded, and they can't both be true. And NB, you can't get around this with something like, "Well sure there are some exceptions, but it's still usually immoral to break laws" because the position you're arguing against is that piracy is one of those exceptions. You can't use a rule to disprove an exception to that rule.
Bottom line, I don't think this line of thinking is going to go anywhere. I can't help noticing that you seem fine with the idea of judging actions by consequences when it comes to corporate employees:
> "...those people who are responsible for whatever the consequences of their decisions are, good or bad."
All I'm arguing is that the same is true of pirates. Whatever you say in response must, at some point, deal with the fact that some people think pirating music is morally equivalent to stealing a bike and some people think it isn't. That, and not some abstract matter like how one interprets Hobbes or whether corporations have feelings or whatever, is the core of the dispute and also the thing you're trying to skirt around. Well, it was an admirable effort and I thank you for making it because I enjoy debates like this, but I don't think it's working. No shame in that! Trying to demonstrate that piracy is bad without arguing that piracy is bad was always a bit of a tall order.
The reason this conversation won't progress is that you're more or less ignoring all of ethics and philosophical thought as it's been laid out in the past 500 years, instead substituting your own opinion, as if that were even approaching equality. Of course we won't get anywhere if you can't address the obvious relationship piracy has with the concept of "Free riders", for example.
> The expectation of compliance is part of the social contract.
Ethics requires that we act ethically regardless of what the law says, period. You can't something something Hobbes your way out of that.
> The reason this conversation won't progress is that you're more or less ignoring all of ethics and philosophical thought as it's been laid out in the past 500 years, instead substituting your own opinion, as if that were even approaching equality.
Huh? I'd be perfectly happy if CDs and DVDs were sold according to 500-year-old philosophical ethics. The "you might own the disc but you're only allowed to do what I say with it" stuff is comparatively very recent.
> Of course we won't get anywhere if you can't address the obvious relationship piracy has with the concept of "Free riders", for example.
Why am I supposed to address this? Was I asked to at some point? You've spent a solid week arguing that piracy is unethical specifically because the people who do it have somehow agreed not to. Are you now pivoting to the position that it's unethical for reasons pertaining to the consequences of piracy? If so (and far be it from me to accuse you of not reading my comments, which would be very rude) can I remind you that I clearly and explicitly agreed with that?
> ...I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker.
The correct course of action, the moral course, would be to decline the transaction on moral grounds. If you don't like copyright law, you shouldn't buy products that require its adherence, and you shouldn't pirate products that require someone else to deceive in order to obtain.
And if you can't figure out how to deal with the basic logical issues with your position, logical issues that people 500 years ago were able to navigate, that's more of a positional issue for you than it is any problem of mine. And why should you care? Because you seem to want to be correct here, and that's the only path forward. You cannot maintain your position justifiably without addressing the issues I've brought up with said position.
Your position re: "the sticker" is a substantial retraction of your initial argument, that piracy is not immoral. It's also incorrect. The "sticker" presents a reminder of the social contract's obligations, which only makes it further immoral that, despite the reminder, a person still willfully deceives their way into possession of a copy of a work.
That was my original argument, from a week ago. You can go look at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38453647
Don't know how I could've made it any clearer. Genuinely curious whether/how you will update as a result.
And sure, we can call that your original argument. It's still wrong.
You are right though, that I thought I was a lot more curious than I was - I forgot about this until I saw you peddling the same line of goods in a new thread this morning. Best of luck :) I will close by saying thanks for being civil, I hope you experienced this conversation in the "Let's have a friendly tussle over this relatively obscure point for fun and to understand the world better" spirit in which it was intended. For future reference, you can enhance that good-natured spirit greatly by not accusing people of being upset. Also wouldn't hurt to pay a little extra attention when someone says, "Just to avoid misunderstanding I'll try to clearly summarize my position...", missing that caused a lot of unnecessary repetition.
My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.
Don't do stuff like this. Communication via text between strangers over philosophical topics is hard enough without it. Assume good faith.
This argument has only ever been about one thing: you made a claim that there's an easy way to show that all piracy is unethical regardless of the details, and I said that was wrong. That's it. However, when somewhere along the way you get the idea that I'm also arguing that piracy is always ethical, it's not sneaky or underhanded of me to point out that I'm not. It's not impossible to imagine a world in which that would cast some of the things I've said in a new light; "your reason for believing X is wrong" is materially and non-trivially different from "X is wrong."
> My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.
Wrong on both counts, but it looks like you found a new thread full of people who agree with me and still want to discuss it, so no great loss I'd imagine.
It was a mistake to entertain dense contracts of adhesion with parties who were never really expected to understand them (who hires a lawyer before spending $15 on a movie?). UCC should add anything reasonable that copyright law doesn’t already cover. Infringement is a tort with statutory penalties even without any contract.
It's a contract that the rights holder is trying to say you've agreed to implicitly by buying the DVD, but you've never actually agreed to anything.
If I tell the checkout clerk at Walmart verbally "I refuse to abide by the terms of use for this DVD and I will make copies and distribute them as I please", that clerk has absolutely zero obligation to refuse to sell me the DVD and would probably just be like "sure man whatever"
So it's not actually a condition of sale.
It's supposedly a condition of viewing/usage of the content on the DVD, but I never agreed to it and the content is in my possession so...
I've actually worked at retail stores that sold CDs, DVDs and Videogames. At no point during any kind of training was I told to take any action to limit piracy of content that we sold to customers.
If this was part of Retailers contract, then it would certainly be part of sales associate training.
Since it's not, I'm going to have to firmly assert that it is Definitely Not "almost certainly an explicit clause" like you claim.
Besides, even if it weren't in the contract, the product is covered by copyright law. No person who owns content that can trivially be made worthless absent copyright law would ever allow a copy of their work to be made. That's the agreement you enter into when you purchase a copy of the work.
If such a contract exists then the retailer has to uphold the contract
The associates at the point of sale are the people who are in the best position to uphold the contract
To uphold the contract they would need to receive training. They wouldn't have to know the exact language of the contract, but there would be a procedure in place that the retailer could use to demonstrate that they are upholding the contract to the best of their ability.
Since such training doesn't exist, then it's likely no such contract exists either.
So where you worked, prospective customers were allowed to copy media before purchase?
Nothing prevents anyone from entering into such an agreement, but it can't be called a "sale". Like I said, perhaps it's a lease of some kind, but selling something and putting special conditions on the transfer are mutually exclusive. If you sell me something then I own it, can I do whatever I want with it (destroy it, gift it, sell it, etc.); if can't do whatever I want with it then I don't own it, and you haven't sold it to me.
>what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement
At this point we're probably talking about contract law, not ownership rights, so "violation" seems perfectly adequate.
>To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
Just as example, when someone misses a payment on a purchase and it's repossessed, they're not said to have "stolen" the item, they're said to have "defaulted" on the debt. Your usage of the word "theft" is one I've never seen before.
>If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements
You can enter into all sorts of agreements that entitle you to limited prerogatives over something. Those agreements go by different names, and so does the relationship between you and the thing that the agreement is about while the agreement is current. "Contingent ownership" is a term that refers to nothing that exists, as ownership involves total decision power over something, and a sale is a particular agreement that involves the transfer of that power in its entirety.
>Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
Yes, again, you can enter into agreements with other people over something you own and impose whatever terms you like without transferring ownership of the thing. It's not a sale until you relinquish all rights over the thing. Hell, you can even do a sort of timed sale where you reserve the right to claw back the thing for a limited time; in such a case one could not say the sale is complete before that time elapses, and before then the person doesn't have complete ownership.
If Bob violates his agreement, breaks his word, and you know he did that but accept Steve's secret anyway, is that immoral, to you?
Any law or contract that attempts to treat strings of bits as equivalent to physical items is fundamentally flawed.
This, therefore, means you don't believe in the enforceability of contracts, or that someone is free to make agreements as they see fit. That's kind of a problem in a capitalistic society, as contracts run, well, everything more complex than a simple transfer of ownership, which IP rights are not.
Besides, we're not really talking about the legality of any of this, we're focusing on the morality. In this case, the morality of asserting you won't do something, and then doing that anyway.
To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
I would say that video piracy (if by that we mean watching what we want) is ethical, but is sometime not legal.
It means don't believe in the absolute enforceability of contracts. If a contract contains clauses that require the physically impossible to happen, such a contract cannot possibly be enforced in its totality.
>To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
Your question is too abstract to answer. If Bob promised Steve he wouldn't release the slaves, I'd say it's outright immoral to keep that promise. If Bob promise Steve he would make another payment in 30 days, it's probably at least unethical to not keep that promise, absent any additional circumstances. If Bob promise Steve he wouldn't do something with Bob's own property, I'd say Bob is within his right to do whatever he wishes, regardless of anything else.
And no, watching Avengers: Endgame is not on the same moral level as freeing slaves. I will not cede that ground.
The moral (if you insist) act would be to not offer a nonsensical contract. If I want to do something and I have to agree to a nonsensical contract to do it then I'll agree to it and then do whatever I want. If the other party doesn't like then next time they can offer a reasonable contract, and if they don't I'll just do it again. Sorry, but you don't get my firstborn just because you put it in an EULA that I had to agree to when I installed your software.
>And no, watching Avengers: Endgame is not on the same moral level as freeing slaves. I will not cede that ground.
Interesting. However, the one who made a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable clauses in a contract was me. The way you posed your question in your last comment implied that you think that, if you've already entered into an agreement not to do it, pirating a movie and freeing slaves are ethically equivalent. It would seem that respecting your word to you trumps everything else, no matter what. If that's really what you think, then fine, I can respect that. However, if it's possible that you could enter into an agreement that would require you to act in a way that you find unacceptable and you would rather breach the agreement than act in that way, you will need to concede that what you find unethical is not breaching the agreement per se, but the specific manner in which the agreement is breached.
In other words, in such a case we have a simple difference of opinion. You think slavery is bad and pirating is bad (perhaps to different degrees, but still, they're bad), and I think slavery is bad and pirating is not bad. That there's an agreement or whatever else is just a distraction.
(1) since there are some moral justifications to break a contract,
(c) therefore all justifications for breaking contracts are moral
I don't think you believe that, and I don't think you believe I believe that, either.
Stealing: perpetrator has 1 apple, victim has 0 apples.
Piracy: perpetrator has 1 apple, victim has 1 apple.
A better analogy is required than "possession of stolen property". Saying it's stolen is like saying "someone copied the movie, and therefore the studio can no longer stream it".
Right. Unauthorized use of property that does not deprive the owner is trespass [0], not theft.
[0] to land for real property, to chattels for tangible personal property; trespass to intangible personal property is usually a whole mess of specific statutory torts and/or crimes with names that don't have "trespass" in them for particular classes of intangible personal property.
They literally are, the act of stealing a good that makes it a stolen good. There is nothing circular about that, its linear from A to B, with no loop back.
It's perhaps not helpful, because what you really need is not to just to define "stolen good" but to define "stealing", and so the definition is unsatisfying. But, that's solvable, "stealing", or "theft", is the act of intentionally taking the personal property of another without permission and with the intent to deprive the owner of the property.
> You can however contingently be sold a good, which means you are only allowed to have the good if you agree to certain conditions. Once you violate those conditions, you are forfeiting your ownership of that good if that's what you agreed to (and it is in the case of most digital content).
That's not a contingent sale, its conditional license where the original owner remains the owner. (If the original owner has the right to claim the property back but it does not automatically revert with an action to exercise that rgight, then it is still probably a conditional license, and that is the most simple way of doing that, but it could nearly-equivalently -- but for the additional complication in execution -- be a sale, part of the consideration of which is a commitment made to the original owner and secured by a lien against the property.)
> as capitalism introduces the concept of artificial scarcity
Artificial scarcity is older than capitalism.
And yes, we get into the difference between ownership and licensure in... another comment somewhere, I don't recall specifically where.
And can you say more about the introduction of artificial scarcity predating capitalism? I'm sure you're right now that you say it, but I'm curious what you think is most relevant.
>"Stolen goods" are stolen because someone stole them
There's nothing tautological about that. I'm laying out the relationships between the words "stolen" and "steal", and between "stolen" and "stolen good". The sentence isn't void of information, particularly in a discussion where you were arguing that something could become stolen retroactively regardless of the manner in which it was acquired. You can't have in your possession a good that nobody stole, that is also a stolen good because of actions you took after it came into your possession. That's nonsense. If you have such a confusion of ideas, I have no option but to state the obvious: something is stolen if someone stole it.
And you absolutely can have in possession something that was stolen that you did not steal, as the nature of your relationship with a good can change in ways other than possession.
>"Stolen goods" are stolen because someone stole them
is not the same as
>"Stolen goods" are stolen because they're stolen
Nor is it the same as
>"Stolen goods" are stolen because you stole them
If you have in your possession an item, either it's stolen or it's not stolen. If it's not stolen then it can't become stolen without leaving your possession. What makes it stolen or not stolen is not anything you do with it from now, but how it was acquired. That's what my statement was meant to emphasize. Is it obvious that something is stolen because someone stole it? Yes, but it's what I'm forced to state by the topic of this discussion.
You can easily possess an item that hasn't been stolen, but upon some eventuality, no longer belongs to you that you still possess. An expired library book, for example, or a rented car.
Perhaps you've entered into an agreement involving collateral that you've violated. An item you've maintained possession of will no longer be yours when the collateral becomes the property of the person you've entered into the agreement with.
The purpose of copyright was a tradeoff: exclusivity, for a while, but then cultural content is available and preserved. The latter part of the deal has been broken. And this is a deal with no teeth. There's no penalties to the copyright holder for something just becoming completely unavailable, despite that availability being part of the original intent.
So, if they let down their end of the social contract, anything goes.
> You aren’t entitled to watch what you want.
The rights holder is not entitled to stop me from sending certain streams of bits in all circumstances.
Edit: While calling IP "property" can be a useful abstraction in some cases, it leads you astray in others. For example, the only way to measure "losses" from piracy is as loss of potential sales since the owner is not deprived of the "property" in the process. But what are the losses when media not available in a given geography is pirated in that geography? There was no "potential revenue" that could be recognized there because the media was not for sale. Thus one could argue that the losses are precisely $0.
That's what pirating is based on; you've explicitly agreed not to make available content for others when you agreed to purchase the content.
By providing content for pirating, you are breaking your word. Further, by consuming pirated content, you have a reasonable assumption that the person providing you with the pirated content obtained that content through deception, which ropes you in on the culpability of the ethical violation.
Nobody's freedom of speech is violated because nobody has been compelled to do or say anything! Rather, you are knowingly benefitting from the deception of others.
If it’s unethical, it’s somewhere around running a stoplight that’s plainly not registering your presence and hasn’t turned for ten full minutes, with perfect straight mile-long views either way and not a car or person in sight. Not really unethical at all.
But I don't think most people would argue that everyone should pirate IP.
That's a good follow-up question though; for those who believe pirating is ethical, do you a) believe everyone should pirate, and b) if not, what makes your pirating acceptable but other pirating unacceptable?
If everyone litters in public areas where trash cans are reasonable to expect, but have not been installed, a likely and good outcome is that trash cans get installed. (But in a more accurate analogy, the trash cans would cost negative money to install!)
It's up to them, and when you take that decision away from them, you commit an immoral act.
However I'd posit that media businesses "knowingly get into the business where it's easy to copy your content". If you don't want your content to be reproduced easily, then don't get into a business where it is virtually costless and harmless to make millions of copies immediately very easily. You're not entitled to put people in jail because you willingly chose to take part of a business that's at the mercy of technology.
To me this is like deciding to open up a grocery and then getting upset at the amount of produce you have to throw away because it goes bad when people don't buy it all, that's just a known factor of the nature of the business. If you don't like it, you're not entitled to shape the world to your liking. Get into blacksmithing or glass working instead.
A chance to bring up my favorite philosophical concept, the "is-ought problem" aka "Hume's Guillotine"! [0]
> An ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred based on purely descriptive factual statements.
If you consider public domain to be the default, then you do have an inherent right to consume content. The limitations placed on this right are done for a purpose, to promote more creation via sales. And if sales won't happen, then there's no reason for the copyright.
But if you've already put 50 thousand copies out into the world, it should stay available in some reasonable form.
Except to say that's still enough people to count as public in my book.
If you want to talk about something more realistic, I'm game.
In that case, then I don't comprehend your "nope" at all. Mass market sales are public distribution.
Mass market sales are not a public distribution, just a wide distribution. You must agree to the terms of the sale in order to access the media. You give your word you will not violate those terms, when you purchase it.
Morally speaking, either you believe someone can control their property, or you don't believe that. Sometimes that control involves letting many, but not all, people access that property. If you believe media moves out of someone's control without their consent merely through distribution, then you necessarily do not believe in ownership.
Which is fine, but there is no quasi-ownership concept. Either a person owns and thus controls something, or they do not. Besides, does private property become "public" just because millions of people go there? Does a rental car suddenly become public property once it's passed 100 renters? This concept cannot exist alongside ownership.
Plenty of media doesn't have terms, it just has default copyright. And that's a good thing.
> Morally speaking, either you believe someone can control their property, or you don't believe that. Sometimes that control involves letting many, but not all, people access that property. If you believe media moves out of someone's control without their consent merely through distribution, then you necessarily do not believe in ownership.
Without their consent? Of course not. They have to consent to the distribution.
I believe in limited ownership for ideas.
I'll mention the public domain again, because you haven't addressed that. If you make a movie, eventually it's going to become owned by the public. That's not negotiable.
> Either a person owns and thus controls something, or they do not.
Fair use is also a restriction on the ownership. A big one. So if it's this simple, then "they do not" must be the correct answer for how the world already works.
> go there, rental car
Those are physical items. They don't act like IP. If we apply physical rules to IP, then anyone can copy anything because it doesn't affect the original.
(1) when media has stipulations attached to its distribution that you agree to when you purchase access to the media (specifically the stipulation that you're unable to share the media with others), and
(2) both breaking agreements you've made as well as knowingly benefitting from someone else breaking agreements are immoral,
(C) you must therefore agree that piracy of content with said stipulations (most mainstream content) is immoral!
When 1 and 2 don't apply, C doesn't apply, sure. But when 1 and 2 apply, C also applies.
And I believe that sometimes copyright goes too far, and that breaking it in those cases is not immoral.
So I definitely don't agree with your first postulation, and I might not agree with the second one depending on how that's interpreted.
In particular, a rule that would stop me from watching a movie with friends should never be enforced or enforceable. So a flat-out "no sharing" is not a moral rule. And a rule that stops me from sharing the movie contents when copyright has lapsed is also immoral. I feel like the average person would solidly agree with me on those two statements.
And then on top of that, I suggest a situation where it would make sense for copyright to lapse without being immoral to the creators. And while under the current legal system it doesn't lapse, that's a legal truth that doesn't dictate the morality of acting like it lapsed.
That's fine, but it's not very compatible with capitalism.
> Fair use is also a restriction on the ownership. A big one. So if it's this simple, then "they do not" must be the correct answer for how the world already works.
Ownership has restrictions, and ownership on ideas has the most restrictions.
This is very compatible with capitalism.
No version of what you've said supplies sufficient exception to remove a person's ability to stipulate conditional use of a thing.
Fair use is a whole category. And there's also public domain, eventually.
I could definitely frame my suggestion, for downloading when purchase is unavailable, as a type of fair use or public domain, or something in between.
If it's fair use, does that make it compatible with ownership?
I think it's compatible with ownership.
> No version of what you've said supplies sufficient exception to remove a person's ability to stipulate conditional use of a thing.
Are you familiar with the first sale doctrine? You are largely not allowed to stipulate conditional use of media you are selling.
You get the tools copyright gives you, and that's it.
This goes beyond digital/physical goods, and beyond copyright. You give your word as part of the agreement of sale that you won't do something, except you then go and do that very thing. That is not a moral act.
It is a great concept, and it mostly blocks additional rules when selling books, movies, etc.
You should not be able to ask for these things if you're selling a normal media product. Those restrictions are immoral.
And it is not a moral act to agree to terms you believe are immoral and then deliberately break them. Two wrongs don't make a right.
We're talking about the rights people get when they buy copies, aren't we? Aren't you implying a situation like someone buying a bluray and uploading it to the internet?
> And it is not a moral act to agree to terms you believe are immoral and then deliberately break them. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Mmmmm, I think it depends on how immoral the terms actually are.
And for our purposes, the consequences of not consuming a work does not rise to whatever level may be necessary for duplicity to be justified. Viewing a movie is almost never worth lying over, based on any cultural norms I'm familiar with.
Well, the reason I mentioned first sale doctrine was because it puts massive restrictions on what the copyright owner is allowed to demand in a contract, not because it allows pirating in particular.
Because my argument is that we could place a couple additional restrictions on copyright without violating the concept of ownership.
It's already heavily restricted. A little bit more restriction wouldn't break things.
And because it makes it far less likely they would try to ask for a direct no sharing promise, or that they would be allowed to ask for that. So the moral dilemma of lying won't be a problem.
Besides, you agreed not to do this! That's the immoral act. First sale doctrine or no, agreeing to not do something and then doing it is immoral.
Why is "people can copy it for critique" compatible with ownership, and "people can copy it after a certain number of years" compatible with ownership, but "people can copy it when you're done selling it, or in places you won't sell it" not compatible with ownership?
I really don't understand.
> Besides, you agreed not to do this! That's the immoral act. First sale doctrine or no, agreeing to not do something and then doing it is immoral.
I don't think I've ever agreed to something like that on top of copyright.
Are you applying this idea to existing media, or suggesting it would become the new normal?
And I think first sale doctrine would get in the way of a contract clause that does almost but not quite the same thing that copyright does. But I'm not an expert there.
If you buy media, thus agreeing to US copyright law, and then violate it, how is this a moral act?
But again, setting aside US copyright law, how would it be a moral act to agree to something and then act in opposition to that agreement (given the low stakes of what's involved here)?
But I keep talking about changing copyright. Why do you act like those terms would still apply if they were changed? That's why I thought you were talking about terms on top of copyright. It's really hard for me to follow your arguments.
> But again, setting aside US copyright law, how would it be a moral act to agree to something and then act in opposition to that agreement (given the low stakes of what's involved here)?
I have never made a promise to follow the law as part of a purchase.
And I have never had the rules of copyright copy-pasted into a purchase agreement either.
It's just a given that copyright is the law.
If I break the law later, I am not breaking a promise to the seller. There is no moral failure on that front. What matters is whether breaking the law is itself immoral. It does not break any agreement.
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.
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.)
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!).
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.
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.
Otherwise, we're in agreement. I just don't think "small immoralities" are equal to "no immoralities."
Pirating something, I see as gaining access to something when the official or preferred channel is either unreasonably expensive, or the product itself is unknown.
Piracy is an effective way to try before you buy, at your own pace. On one hand, sure, once you pirate something you don't need to buy it, but my own dabbling has resulted in MORE purchase activity, not less. I could buy games or movies or shows knowing I would enjoy them and be satisfied with my purchase.
There were totally games and whatnot that I downloaded, tried, and then ignored or deleted. Was anyone really damaged by that? I see that as the equivalent of window shopping. It's what you do after you try it that forms the ethical stance, in my opinion.
Are you a struggling student pirating AfterEffects or something else so you can earn money and then buy a real copy? Some might say that's ethical pirating because there's an intent to be legit about it but there are obstacles. "Don't buy or get it" one might say, and forever lock themselves out of opportunity.
Choosing to keep a pirated version of something is as much a social and political commentary as it is a technical violation of monopoly. Someone who can afford something they pirated, that they liked and kept, may be seen as a cheapskate.
But honestly, there are many games and music albums and shows I would never have tried out if I didn't have an easy and accessible means to just give'em a whirl.
So you could say I see no harm in "explorative" piracy, or pirating that then gets deleted when you find out you don't like it. In the rights-owner's world, that person should be out money, and disappointed in their purchase! Seems like more moral harm than making sure you like what you're buying.
If the owner of AfterEffects doesn't want to allow students to use their software, that's their right as the property owner. Students have no entitlement to that software. Violating the owner's property rights is an immoral act.
"But it's law", I don't care, law is religion for the ruling class and judges are essentially priests. They work on doctrine, adjacent to indoctrination. They operate with the attitude that the judge, and by extension the state, can do no wrong. That's already operating from a place of moral invalidity.
If I shared something to the world, even under license, and people copied it endlessly, I'd be told that I have personal responsibility, and what did I expect to happen when I shared. Victim blaming, essentially.
But the moment it's a business, the moment money's involved, suddenly we aren't entitled to anything and business deserves every last dollar they can squeeze.
The understanding is flipped. Businesses are second class entities to citizens. They deserve no more consideration than an individual, and indeed already enjoy too many privileges they've done nothing to earn.
They aren't entitled to money.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Businesses are ultimately owned by people, and in reality, a "business" sale boils down to one person exchanging goods for payment with another person. Sometimes those goods are digital, and sometimes those digital goods are only sold contingently. By agreeing to the contingencies, you're giving your word to someone that you will abide by the conditions of the sale.
Or are people not free to enter into contracts, in your view? I strongly disagree with that, but that's the only way what you're saying would work, based on my understanding.
That established, what business contracts are entered, executed, and completed ethically and with equal respect to the rights of the contracting parties? Very few, if any. In practice, the ability to enter a contract is the ability to go into moral debt and be slave to a document.
So no, I don't think contracts should be entered freely because most contracts are actually one-sided as fuck and generally have no room for negotiation.
Ownership is also an illusion; government can confiscate anything it wants and there's no recourse. They can even take your home if the right boxes are checked. So how exactly is that tenet being respected?
On some level, yes, I see that there should be respect between an object someone works for and them. The issue is the value of each person's labor is completely subjective and up to the opinions of owners. There is no benefit to being working class, for example. There is only benefit for owners under capitalism, and even that gain comes at the cost of screwing over your neighbors.
It is not a system that can take the entirety of a human group and raise them up. It picks a handful, plays "Some of you May Die", shrugs, and leaves the citizens to themselves to fight over resources.
Freely enterable contracts mean one-sided contracts will be allowed. That's not a freedom worth protecting, because it invites exploitation. Just the same, allowing endless exclusive ownership means the owners control everything, and will create ways to block entry to their class or other efforts at equality. Capitalism does nothing to address its weaknesses, and were it not for extreme sacrifice from the working class and token placating acts of regulation from government, it could not function as a legitimate economy or way of life. It rewards the worst in humanity, and then has somehow convinced most of society that it's okay to fuck each other over.
Conversely it is unethical to retain the rights to shared cultural artifacts and _not_ provide a way for people to access them.
I'm papering over some grey area where if it's not available for purchase but you could get it from the library, maybe via inter-library loan, then maybe in aggregate it's better ethically to do that.
Furthermore, in a world where everyone pirates, everyone is still free to give money. You can pirate and buy a steam game or a bandcamp album. They're not mutually exclusive. Here the littering analogy breaks down again.
I don't believe "everyone should pirate", I think the model of ownership as archaic, it is trying to uphold an old model of material goods, through power alone, into a technological model.
If I make a ceramic cup, and you steal it, I don't have it anymore. I can't drink my tea or look at it and smile.
If you made an exact replica of it, if I find out and I'm petty maybe I'll be mad, or maybe I'll fantasize about how you were maybe gonna buy it from me, but I sure can't complain that you took my cup away from me.
Being able to reproduce media at virtually no cost is a new concept. As such, it deserves new mindsets, not old models based around material goods.
I believe this exposes that the new model should be one of higher trust, where customers use their money as reward, not to obtain.
In regards to b) I think it's pretty simple. A steam game currently could take 20% or 2% of minimum wage based solely on where you live. There's emulated games too, what benefit, what real consequence is carried upstream to anyone that deserves it, when I take my time to find a used copy of an old game, buy a used CD reader, and rip the game legally, as opposed to two clicks from a torrent site. Show me the real harm, where in that chain is anything of consequence being done? Is it just about performing the dance that the authorities tell you to do?
Littering leaves behind something that costs money (effort) to deal with. Trespassing is a better analogy: temporarily using something that doesn't belong to you, in a way that is undetectable if no one catches you in the act.
For some technical definition of ethicality on which I'm sure we can all agree :)
[1]https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/fai... [2]https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/27/17292836/gta-4-soundtrack-...
It is difficult for me to tell from context the definition of "to pirate content" you (and others) are using. Pirating content means: using copyrighted materials to which you hold no rights for the purpose of making money.
Most important to the conversation: "pirating content" does not include the act of watching a video; listening to a song; reading something; etc that is online. Just as it is not illegal to listen to a song being played in the park; or to watch a movie being broadcast against the side of a building; or to read a book left on a park bench.
If you try to sell any of those things, then that is illegal. But you can listen or watch or read all you want. In the public park or the public internet.
If you have something that indicates otherwise, I would be very appreciative if you would provide me the details so I can read it directly. Thank you.
If I'm not entitled to media, why are they entitled to have no 'piracy' with digital technology? If you decide to spread information, don't be surprised if it spreads.
If you violate a law that doesn't benefit anyone, who is harmed?
Furthermore the people involved in making the content put a lot of time and effort into making this work of art. (Whether it is good art is for the perciever to decide) and now the distributor is preventing audiences from viewing/accessing the art for no good reason. Is that ethical?
I see torrenting as a case of civil disobedience. Yes it is not legal, but it IS ethical. It is protesting stupid laws and policies. When distributers don't let you legally access content, they should get fucked over, and people should pirate it to send a message: "We would have paid for this, but you didn't want to let us. So fuck you, we will get it for free then. See how much blocking legal access helps you."