Slashdot Mirror

Almost every single rationalization or justification that I've ever heard for why a person might pirate, other than supporting the abolition of copyright entirely, can be found on the list of ethical fallacies, and it gives a person some measure of pause to at least carefully consider the premise that just because one *can* do something, does not necessarily mean that they *should*.

I'm probably going to modded into slashdot hell for saying this, but that these alleged studies that somehow show that piracy doesn't harm the sales of works are entirely irrelevant.... if one believes that copyright is a good thing at all, then one has a ethical obligation to respect it, even if they do not agree with the means by which it is being implemented. If you pirate, you either advocate the complete abolition of copyright or are a hypocrite. Period.

if everybody else is doing it, and you might not fare as well by not doing it, you'll probably find yourself doing it or suffering for not having done so.

Using the Ethics Scoreboard as a reference point, I find that the only real difference between the Futility Illusion (point #10) and this argument is that where the former typically tends to imply that it is all but inevitable that someone else will behave badly even if one tries to behave ethically, this argument actually fallaciously attempts to strengthen its own position through an appeal to emotion by alleging that it should be considered futile to act ethically because some personal harm or suffering is likely, or at least is more likely, to befall one who chooses to act in such a manner. It further suffers from some of the same weaknesses as the Futility Illusion itself.

Also, I'm not sure why you have the perception that I'm trying to be a "smug ass" about this, or have been trying to talk down to anyone. If that's your perception, then I can only suggest that you are wrongly projecting some preconceived idea that you may have about what my agenda supposedly is for saying what I did.

Ah...the "everybody does it" excuse, otherwise known as the Golden Rationalization. As for suggesting that one is somehow foolish to try and live with integrity when others are cheating.... Well thats just a variant on an ad hominem, called Poisoning the Well.

Hanging a person over a balcony with an implied threat to let them fall is quite definitely qualifies as a threat against a person's life, and that *IS* illegal. Even if no "permanent" harm was done, their actions fail on points 5, 6, 7, and 9 in The Ethics Scoreboard list of ethics fallacies.

Do excuses #5 and #12 look familiar?

Piracy fails on no less than half of the fallacies on this page. Do numbers 5 and 12 would look particularly familiar to you?

I'm not saying that people don't have every right to be pissed off about having their privacy invaded.... I'm saying that when violence is *ever* the defaut response to simply being angry about something that is not physically threatening in any way, shape, or form, then there is already a problem with the emotional maturity of that particular person.

I'd be inclined to not include Buzz Aldrin in that category because the person that he assaulted was physically stalking him, and deliberately creating a situation where Mr. Aldrin did not have the physical freedom to ignore him or walk away (since he and his camera crew simply followed him when he tried). That said, I think Mr. Aldrin should have told them to leave him alone, or he would place harassment charges on them if they tried to follow. It's not like he wouldn't have had a legitimate case against them.

Anyways.... supposedly, human beings are a civilization... so maybe people should try acting civilized. Your neighbor being an asshole should never be any justification for you to be one. See ethical vigilantism (point 12) on the ethics scoreboard.

Also... I'm hysterical how, exactly? Because I compare the threat of so-called "acceptable" violence today that would caused by what ultimately amounts to a mere a difference in beliefs (one person places more value on their privacy than another person places on the same person's privacy) to an example of violence in history over what also fundamentally amounted to a mere difference in beliefs?

His goal was to help people by closing the security hole. He contacted Google, but they didn't fix it. What would you have done to get the hole fixed? No one was harmed here, after all.

What I would have done? Warned as many people as I could that the numbers they see on there may not be accurate. Even if no deliberate deception was involved in them, they could be out of date and incorrect, because there are no safeguards in place to prevent errors.

And saying that nobody was harmed as a means to justify the act is something that The Ethics Scoreboard refers to as a "Results Obesssion", and an example of a slippery slope argument:

Many argue that if no tangible harm arises from a deception or other unethical act, it cannot be "wrong:" "No harm, no foul." This is truly an insidious fallacy, because it can lead an individual to disregard the ethical nature of an action, and look only to the results of the action. Before too long, one has embraced "the ends justify the means" as an ethical system, otherwise known as "the terrorism standard."

Closely related to The Results Obsession is the "white lie" syndrome, which embodies the theory that small ethical transgressions are not ethical transgressions at all.

Both carry the same trap: the practice of ethics is based upon habit, and one who habitually behaves unethically in small ways is nonetheless building the habit of unethical behavior. Incremental escalations in the unethical nature of the acts, if not inevitable, are certainly common. Thus even an unethical act that causes no direct harm to others can harm the actor, by setting him or her on the slippery slope.

I stand by the points I made previously that people shouldn't just blindly trust everything they see online, and that "nobody was hurt" should not *EVER* be considered a justification for doing something that was still, in the end, an ethical infraction.

The means should not have to be justified by the ends... the means should justify themselves. If he can't make that happen, then it doesn't somehow become his fault for not doing anything further, because the situation was not something within his realm of control in the first place. If it bothered him that much, he could have started up an education program warning people about the dangers of trusting the numbers that are on google maps, and advising them that not only can they be considerably out of date and incorrect, but that there are absolutely no safeguards to prevent people from putting up deliberately false numbers, which may be used by phishing scams. If someone doesn't understand his point without it happening to them first, that's hardly the fault of the person who's trying to educate people... one might as well blame the police programs that teach young women maneuvers in self defense for not actually trying to rape young women who don't come to their classes just so that they will finally understand the importance of learning such skills. I trust you can appreciate the absurdity of this example.

But no... he felt he needed to commit a deliberate deception as part of of an effort of trying to make his point, misrepresenting himself and his phone number to unsuspecting people, and without any authority whatsoever, essentially commit an act that by all rights, IMO, should have been fraud. Nope. Not somebody I'd have any respect for.

Of course such armed theft is worse. But arguing that something isn't *AS* bad as something else in attempt to justify the former does not, by itself, necessarily mean that what you are trying to justify isn't actually bad at all.

And consider, from The Ethics Scoreboard

Behavior has to be assessed on its own terms, not according to some imaginary comparative scale. The fact that someone's act is more or less ethical than yours has no effect on the ethical nature of your conduct. "There are worse things" is not an argument; it's the desperate cry of someone who has run out of rationalizations.

What I find interesting is practically every excuse that pirates offer for what they do can be found on the Ethics Scoreboard site, I've just linked to above.

This is the principle that bad or unethical behavior justifies, and somehow makes ethical, unethical behavior intended to counter it. The logical extension of this fallacy is the abandonment of all ethical standards. Through the ages, we have been perplexed at the fact that people who don't play by the rules have an apparent advantage over those who do, and "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" has been the rallying cry of those who see the abandonment of values as the only way to prosper.

The very concept of ethics assumes that winning isn't the only thing, Vince Lombardi to the contrary, and that we must hold on to ethical standards to preserve the quality of civil existence.

Although maxims and aphorisms cause a lot of confusion in ethical arguments, this one is still valid in its simple logic: "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Of course, if you are now going to argue that violating copyright isn't actually wrong, then why did you bother to imply that copyright could have been worth respecting if the government and content makers did?

Anyways....

If copyright has value, it stands to reason that breaking it is wrong... for *EITHER* party. If it had no value, then please try to consider exactly why a vast majority of content makers that *DO* make freely available content decide to explicitly utilize copyright instead of putting their works into public domain.

Why should anyone else show respect for it? Because copyright is preferable to the alternative... and that alternative isn't public domain. That's why it's bad.... for *BOTH* sides.

Legitimacy allows a person to live one's life transparently... without any necessity whatsoever to keep something secret because it might be perceived as as wrong by society.

Downloading television shows isn't perceived as wrong by most of society; it's illegitimate in that it's illegal, not societally unacceptable. The things you have to conceal and the things which are illegal aren't the same, though there is a lot of overlap between them.

I do not advocate that people should not be entitled to privacy, only that people who are acting responsibly do not do things, even in private, that if something should happen that it ever did become public, they would not be prepared to be held accountable for.

That's too bad, because such a principle is at odds with reality. There's always been things which are "don't ask, don't tell", things which many people do but would subject them to shunning or punishment (by others who do the same or similar things) if they were to be made public. Hypocrisy isn't limited to individual actions. I don't like it much myself, but to fail to recognize it is folly.

However, downloading TV shows isn't in that category. It's malum prohibitum -- something which does not violate societal standards, but is merely against the law.

I simply put it forward that for programs on network TV, the illegitimate avenue for acquiring content does not hold any *significant* advantages over a completely legal one, unless one has a personal agenda that is specifically geared against patronizing the companies that broadcast such content.

Apparently it does, since ordinary people (not just media-company hating geeks) do use The Pirate Bay and other illegitimate avenues for acquiring content on network TV. If there weren't any significant advantages to doing so, they wouldn't do it.

Some of the excuses you'll find in this list may look familiar.

To claim someone is using an excuse to justify unethical action, you must first establish that the action is unethical. Personally, I don't let either the legislature or Jack Marshall determine what I think is and isn't unethical.

Wow... two excuses in one. "Everybody does it", and "it's not that bad"... Most pirates tend to focus on just one rationalization at a time, then later move the goalposts to defend their actions from a different point as their argument starts to wear thin. Color me suitably impressed.

Some of the excuses you'll find in this list may look familiar.

And yeah... I see copyright infringement, any copyright infringement, as unethical, because the research I've done into the subject shows me that copyright has historically been extremely good for society as a whole (it played an enormous part in the popularization of literacy, for example), and how without it, I can all too easily see that society would be lead down a path where *EVERY* work published by somebody who is not sponsored by the government would then have to compete for popularity with the spam, cheap porn, and cat videos.... of which there seems to be an inexhaustible abundance.

But, as I said above, I don't expect to change anybody's mind.

... from here.... shows significant use of fallacy #1, with a hint of #4 and #5 in there as well. Also, although not listed on ethical fallacy sheet... I notice that he also uses a hand-me-down from the all-too-common conspiracy theory fallacy, when he accuses people who support his termination of actually having an ulterior motive for doing so without substantiating that position with even a single argument.

Really, if you have to use fallacies to support your position, is your position actually really a sustainable one?

Those are the words of somebody who is feeling more than just a tad defensive, and trying to justify their own actions because of how they know it would look.

I'm not saying he was lying, but from where I sit, it sure looked like he was just trying to make excuses.

It just seems to scream points #7, #9, and #14 from this list, and raises some red flags, at least.

I don't ever recall advocating long copyright terms either... I only suggest that if copyright is valuable to society, then infringing on it is bad for that same society. Lengthening copyright is almost certainly harmful to society as well, but I think that point #5 at http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/rb_fallacies.html adequately addresses the notion of responding to one bad thing with another, and I personally share that position.

Alek O. Komarnitsky
(December 2007)

This is a first: an Ethics Hero who emerged from the shadow of an Unethical Website designation. Back in 2004, Alek O. Komarnitsky received national attention for a whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his Christmas lights on from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek's design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on were only an illusion, the Scoreboard weighed in with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. Alek objected, and has maintained a spirited defense of his stunt in e-mail exchanges with the Scoreboard. But you can't keep a Christmas spirit down. At a significant cost in time and money, Alek figured out a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights, at http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam---the very same site that the Scoreboard previously deplored. He has done this for a couple of years now, but has added a new feature in 2007. To quote Jolly Old Alec himself "There are three live webcams and X10 powerline control technology system so web surfers can not only view the action, but also *control* the 17,000 lights. Heck, you can even inflate/deflate the giant Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Homer SimpsonWhile people around the world (157 countries last year) enjoy seeing the lights ON, environmentalists will be happy to know that they can turn the lights OFF with a click of the mouse. Better yet, this is the 4th year I'm using 100% Wind Energy and even though that is "clean" energy, I even did a Carbon Offset contribution for the 0.61 Tons of CO2 for the ~MegaWatt-Hour of power consumed; that's about the same as one cross-country airline trip. Finally, by providing viewing via webcam, you don't need to burn fossil fuels by driving around to see Christmas lights - Al Gore would be proud! But HEY, the $3/day in electrical costs are well worth the joy it brings to people (especially the kids) when they see the display in person and/or on the web. And new this year is a Hi-Def option, so gather your family around the large screen" The website, Alek reminds us, is free, and also exists to raise awareness of Celiac Disease,which afflicts his two sons as well as many others. He says his lights have raised nearly $20,000 for the cause. I've visited Alek's site, and it is fun, and you can turn the lights on and off, as well as inflate and deflate Homer. You win, Alek! The Scoreboard hereby pardons www.komar.org, and declares you a true Ethics Hero, and a damn persistent one, I must say. Thanks from all us kids, and a very Merry Christmas to you! You've certainly earned it.

Nah, his scam was a little more recent than that. I knew I remembered that site from somewhere.

Recording off the radio for one's own enjoyment isn't violating the copyright holder's exclusivity because you aren't redistributing it, and the copy that you made was from one that was legally distributed to you already (because the radio paid a royalty license to broadcast the song).

As for trying to justify "stealing" back from the RIAA just because they've "stolen" first... if you are genuinely interested in the moral high ground on that matter, see excuse #5 here.