Destroying Hollywood for the sake of the internet is a myopic thing to do. The problem here clearly lies with the political system where money is proportional to political power. Even if you destroy Hollywood, it's only a matter of time before some other issue arises, where some other company wants some law that many of us don't, and lobbies both sides until it's passed. What we need is a radical upheaval of the campaign contribution system. Do this, and Hollywood, and every other threat in the future is neutralised.
Essentially, the pirate bay is in the wrong because they encourage piracy. It's as simple as that. It's the artists' right not to have their works copied, and the pirate bay has built their living around robbing them of this right. It is completely within their interests to make the problem significantly worse, especially given that it has earned them multiple millions so far. Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I like to think of them as a documentary film-maker filming the exploits of a serial killer. He watches, and profits from, every kill made. The serial killer will ask him about the locations of certain individual, and the film-maker will happily oblige him (after all, he wasn't to know they'd necessarily be butchered, right?). In fact, if anyone pulled the film-maker up on this behaviour, he would simply cite the many times the killer asked for the nearest petrol station or convenience store, painting himself as a dumb source of information that couldn't be held responsible for how the serial killer used his information. But, in the end, he knows exactly how the serial killer will use the information, and every time he commits another heinous crime, it's more money in the film-maker's bank.
When the film-maker is finally placed in jail where he belongs (but the killer escapes justice), the serial killer turns to this nice guy at an information kiosk (let's call him, say, Google). His job is to hand out lots of information to lots of people. The serial killer asks him about various locations of people and places, and he happily obliges, the same as he would any other customer. Google is aware that a serial killer is on the loose, but he has no more reason to suspect one person over another, and so instead of stopping (or severely restricting) service to everyone, he decides to keep his job and just deliver people what they ask for. Google may have aided the serial killer many times, but unlike the film-maker, Google really is just a dumb source of information. He has as much reason to believe the information he provides will be used for the benefit of everyone, rather than to murder people, and this is the source of his income. His position is perfectly morally justifiable.
Copyright is evil because it puts a monopoly on culture.
No, anyone can contribute to culture with or without copyright. You can't copy other people's contributions to culture, but you are free, and always have been free, to contribute your own original works. The monopoly has been on copying specific works, but then again, it's hardly immoral to put a monopoly on something that very likely would not have existed without it.
Why is it that the anti-copyright arguments almost always brush over or outright ignore the issue of the work existing in the first place? Oh right, because without doing that, there really is no moral or practical argument against copyright. Gotcha.
(I do agree that we need to release more to the public domain though.)
Go ahead, allow ACTA to be signed, ratified, and put into effect. THEN, go online, open up a website, and start building up a case AGAINST ACTA and it's proponents. Watch to see how fast your site is taken down.
OK, that's precisely what I'll do. You see, the correct way to support misinformation is with real information, not to put down those who seek real information.
Careful if you Web 2.0 about terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other criminal matters in any of 12 languages... Don't chat about insider trading - before big valuations.
This is good advice, but especially good advice when applied to publicly posting on the internet.
That is utterly incontrovertible. And so yes... he copied something. He copied the idea. But that is *ALL* that he copied. The original photographer does not own a copyright on that idea, he owns a copyright on the photo.
The second photographer did not copy the original photographer's photo. He copied the *IDEA* that the original photographer had.
I don't think it's that clear cut. If I start making a meticulous stroke for stroke copy of some painting, am I copying the painting, or am I copying the idea? How is it different, in effect, to a photocopier? Whether the splotches on the page arise from ink from a cartridge or paint from a pen, it doesn't really matter either way with respect to the purpose of copyright. The point is that the work is copied; the artistic merit is the original not the copy, and so the original artist deserves copyright whereas I do not.
Now, I know the photo was taken from a different angle. But, again, this is just a derivative work. I cannot take a copyrighted song, play it sound for sound, but sing over the top of it, without expecting to be sued for copyright infringement. What am I copying, parts of the work, or the idea? The photographer copied most of the important parts of the art in the photograph, just changing enough to make it evident that another picture was taken. As far as I see it, that's a derivative work. Whether it was taken with a camera or copied with a photocopier (just like whether my painting was by hand or by print) is a red herring, totally removed from the purpose of copyright.
Any politician who stands up against this corruption won't get any campaign contributions and therefore they will effectively vanish from the political scene. There will be no media coverage of them
You mean, except the greens who have very publicly refused corporate campaign donations, and consistently promised to severely limit campaign donations in general?
For the sake of argument, let's say the White House is taking these petitions very seriously. Would you expect them to formally respond to a question like this? Would you expect them to say "Come on guys, be serious"? Or maybe go on a defensive spiel about how they really are listening? Basically, their not responding is completely consistent with them actually taking the petitions seriously, so this petition's being ignored is proof of nothing.
And it is a sad state of affairs when only corporate pressure can bring the government to protect freedoms as basic and important as marriage.
After many, many years of tireless effort of many people to change the hearts and minds about homosexual marriage, and before it actually has any kind of positive effect, you're attributing our progress towards gay marriage to a corporation speaking in favour of it?
Wrong. Once you legally redefine the word marriage all sorts of follow on side effects begin. Tolerance ends and acceptance on pain of government begins. Catholic Church doesn't believe it is right? Tough. Won't matter once the law changes, they will give em a full church wedding and place a child in their care through their adoption agency or the Justice Dept cornholes em. And the fun only begins in those obvious places. We will be cleaning up the messes in the laws for fifty years.
I honestly cannot believe you just pulled the government oppression card. How exactly do you think homosexuals feel? Some church believes gay marriage is their right? Tough! If they marry them, the Justice Dept crawls all over their ass. The "pain of government" that you would feel is the forcible removal of the iron fist of Christianity's moral oppression on the issue of marriage. Oh, you can no longer dictate who gets married in all churches rather than just your own? Boo fucking hoo.
It's rather funny actually, your comment. You write from a libertarian bent, citing "the pain of government", yet your post is so completely anti-libertarian. It resembles the stock standard template of any powerful and oppressive group scaring the public into allowing them to keep their power. Something along the lines of, "If you don't less us control this, there'll be anarchy! Exactly the worst possible scenario could happen! That liberty is not worth the massive drop in security, right?"
Your argument is flawed since if purchased media (CDs, DVDs, etc etc) followed any of the regular rules surrounding other types of things that we might buy, then we would be well within our rights to make as many copies of the media as we like and hand them out for free to our friends.
Sure, but we're not buying within the "regular rules". We're buying goods that are copyrighted, and copyright works by changing the "regular rules" for a specific class of cases. Whether you agree or not, this is simply the way things are. We cannot reasonably derive our morality from assuming the world is the way we want it to be, in lieu of the way it actually is. And given that copyright is the way things are, we have no entitlement to copy copyrighted works.
But we can't do that, because software producers insist that they are not *selling* us the media, but rather granting us a licence to *use* the media. And hence we believe, quite fairly in my opinion, that we are entitled to another copy at a nominal fee if we lose our original. And of course plenty of companies do honour that view, including those who don't deal in media at all.
It depends on the license. It's perfectly possible to have a license that affords no replacement condition.
If honourably discontinuing your responsibilities in the deal is the aim, then this would be the morally correct way to do it: live according to the law until it changes, and dispose of the law when everyone is properly forewarned. This is about where the discussion on morality ends. Whether people actually want life without this law is another matter, for another discussion, on another day. Right now, I'm happy to leave it at this.
But wait. As far as I know, most people don't consider entitlements to be a moral excuse. So what you're saying is that we're all terrible people because we don't buy every work we can possible afford.
That, or I'm not saying what most people say (or at least I'm not using the same terminology). Actually, I think you find, if you actually explain what entitlements actually mean, most people would agree. Otherwise, like I said, you get Santa from Futurama: almost any action is immoral. There must be some mechanism that people use to distinguish between harmful moral actions and harmful immoral actions. Every action we do has some kind of detrimental consequences for someone else, but for most things, they are considered things that we have some kind of a right to do. Hence the role of entitlement.
One must remember those who decided to go into debt with their money and time was the band, not us, and nobody promised them anything.
We promised them implicitly with our laws. We may not have drafted them ourselves, but while we live under them (and reap their benefits), we are responsible for them.
Well, it's not exactly clear in general. I was more referring to a specific action occurring that could cause harm, or at least could cause harm, in order to debunk your absurd inaction theory of morality. But if you want a specific answer for this study, I read it as evidence that:
a) Piracy doesn't currently kill all demand b) More significantly, music fans are almost all pirates
There needs to be a fair bit more to establish that piracy is not harmful. I also consider it fairly possible for piracy to become ever increasingly harmful as it becomes more of the social norm, and as people realise that it's not socially expected to repay people for their work. So, in short, it doesn't completely convince me that it's harmless.
It can lead to that. But, again, we're not responsible for the artists' need for sales - he chose that path, not us. We can't be held accountable for other people's poor decisions.
He chose that path on the good faith that you would abide by what we promised him, and that wouldn't copy his work without his permission. You subsequently made the decision to disregard his good faith expectations, and in breaking this promise, you are completely responsible for all consequences that occur. As yet another example, your employer promises (but not personally, but it's not like that's any excuse to weasel out of it) to abide by the law and deliver your pay cheque as agreed when you started working for them. If they decide not to pay you, they are responsible for negative consequences. The courts would completely agree if you decided to sue; you could charge them for damages for any misfortune that beset you after they stopped paying you.
Read it again. It's not the absense of action (file sharing isn't absense). It's the potential for such absense that results from my action.
I read it the first time, but I read it again. Exactly what is wrong with the potential for absence? I have already argued fairly comprehensively both that potential factors into harm, and that an absence of action does not excuse you morally from the consequences of your decision. Do you have something particularly against their combination that is not present in their parts?
You still haven't found a real analogy.
Actually, I haven't been arguing by analogy. I've been avoiding analogies deliberately, for this very reason. The aptness of analogies are almost completely subjective. All it takes is a stubborn debater to simply continue to point increasingly trivial differences between life and the analogy, and the analogy simply becomes more pro
Replace "pirate" with "second hand sale" or "lend".
We have now determined that lending is hamful (what are we teaching to children?!) and should be made illegal.
Or we can agree that "potential harm" is not the same as actual harm.
No, think back to my original argument, before we went off on this tangent about harm. Harm is only sufficient to make an action immoral if there is no entitlement behind it. With lending and second sale, we are entitled to these actions (to varying degrees given the laws and customs of the society you live in), so much so that it outweighs the harm. If we made only truly harmless actions morally good, you basically get Santa from Futurama. That aside, lending and second sale does indeed harm artists, as does simply choosing not to buy from them. It's an unfortunate, but unavoidable truth.
Also, I'd like to see a definition of "potential harm" that encompasses shooting guns and launching ICBMs, but not purposefully devaluing someone's assets without their knowledge, let alone permission.
Yes, but it's still not sufficient. Your analogies are flawed, because the harm is caused by the actual action, and not by the "potential absense of an action" that can be caused by the one being discussed.
Well, there is a definite act of copying. Copying causes people to demand what they copied less, which results in the artist being starved of money. I'm not seeing any kind of clear distinction here.
That aside, it is a very shallow and narrow-minded definition of causality when you exclude inaction. For example, can I morally be excused for running over a blind kid (with a puppy) because I cannot be held responsible for my decision not to brake? Or could my favourite restaurant be excused for deciding not to clean their crockery? Perhaps my failure to stop my finger moving was responsible for the aforementioned brains on the aforementioned whitewash? You can see, with such a vague distinction, the definition can easily be co-opted to justify many clearly immoral acts.
What is important here is the fact that you make a decision, be it to take an action, take a different action, or shrug and walk away. The fact is that we are not inert objects moving through space, and we do not simply stay predictable until an external force is applied to us. We have the ability to make decisions, and regardless of what those decisions are (be it to act or not to act), we are responsible for the decisions we make. At this point, I truly hope we agree on this point at least, because anything else would make me despair for the human race.
My point is that piracy can not harm any more than other legally and socially accepted actions can, like buying used, borrowing or even abstaining from obtaining the work.
Therefore, either all are to be criminalized, or none of them.
It's a fine point, but clearly not one that I share. Like I said, I require more than simply the causing of harm in order to justify making something illegal. There's also the point that piracy is, in one sense, the most harmful, since it is the one that people are most likely to choose over buying. Don't get me wrong, if second sale was as harmful as piracy, I would judge the harm of second sale to outweigh the entitlement of people to have the right to it. But, as it turns out, in order to have a successful second sale market, there needs to be plenty of first sales, and plenty of people want a first hand copy more than a second hand copy, so there is more justice in having it legal than illegal. For this reason, I am fine with banning piracy but not second sale.
Not really. Perhaps immediately afterwards no, but then again, in the split second before my gun going off, and the realisation that the bullet is speeding towards my victim's face, the victim's life appears exactly the same. In the longer term, the financial value of their work has been sapped. Every person who has the probability of their buying the work even slightly diminished by their decision to pirate instead has harmed the artist at least by the opportunity cost, i.e. the difference in probability multiplied to the price of the item.
It's easy enough to see this effect when measured in large quantities. Suppose there is some band who are so talented and popular, they have the potential to surpass the Beatles. Now suppose everyone has access to high speed internet, and everyone, except the very first customer, had opportunity to gain a copy for free. Further, suppose that the act of downloading instead of paying does not harm the artist. Then, everyone naturally would choose to download the same product, while keeping their own extra capital. There would be no imperative to give charitable donations to the artist, because this act of downloading does them no extra harm over buying the music.
However, when we take a look at the bigger picture, suddenly we see this immensely popular and talented band, of which many hundreds of millions of copies had been copied, and of whose music many hundreds of millions of people had enjoyed, are left with $20 instead of millions of dollars, for thousands of dollars outlay. Already, the cumulative choice of all their fans to take the "harmless" route of copying has resulted in them in debt for thousands and millions (in fact, billions, given the numbers) less than they could have been had the fans chosen to buy instead. One choice ends with a far more negative scenario, while the other choice ends with a far, far more positive scenario. Therefore, the cumulative choice of the former is harmful, in that it makes the person's life worse than it could have been.
Now, from experience, people have some trouble with this definition of harm, so I'll push the point a little further (even if it isn't necessary). At this point, people tend to object to the uncertain projection into the future to define harm. I think that it's well enough defined to be functional. Let's say I launched, 3 seconds ago, a bunch of ICBMs at the US, aimed at the commercial centres of several of the largest cities. So far there have been no casualties, no panic (as I have alerted no-one), no money spent trying to rectify the crisis, nothing. However, I think a reasonable person would have no trouble inferring here that I have already caused harm to the US, simply because there is no other action or time which causally links me to the immanent deaths. Sure, there is the point where the bombs go off, but I didn't explicitly make them go off there, rather I programmed them and launched them so they would go off there. It was my initial action that caused the harm to happen. As another quick (and disturbingly similar) example, we say the person harms another with a gun when the trigger is pulled, not when the brains splatter on the whitewash. Either way, projection into the future is often necessary to satisfactorily define harm, which is why I have no objection to it.
In any case, we have at least established that the cumulative choices of fans can harm the people they idolise. I see no objection to distributing a portion of the responsibility of that harm to each of them, thus proving that piracy at least can be harmful. Whether it is in practice or not is another matter, but given the uncertainty on this issue, I would tend to award the artists their legally guaranteed right to decide for themselves, and honour their decision (while persuading them to change their minds).
You don't need to be entitled to receive what others are voluntarily sharing with you (that's how P2P works).
Certainly, but you aren't entitled to it. There is no injustice if it happens to be not available to you.
The question is why some people feel entitled to prevent others from doing what they want with their legally bought property.
Well, the copies the OP downloaded was not his legally bought property, but I think you mean more generally about the government preventing copying of works. The entitlement comes from the general entitlement of people in a democratic society to prevent the harmful behaviour of other people. This principle trumps the freedom to use your legally bought property in any way you like. For example, if you buy a gun, this does not give you license to shoot someone with it. If you buy eggs, that does not give you license to pelt them at cars. There's plenty of precedent for prevent people from using their property in certain ways. In fact, you can't really prevent anything if using property the way you wish is an (to borrow a patently American term) inalienable right because property can be factored into any criminal activity.
Slashdot Mirror
Destroying Hollywood for the sake of the internet is a myopic thing to do. The problem here clearly lies with the political system where money is proportional to political power. Even if you destroy Hollywood, it's only a matter of time before some other issue arises, where some other company wants some law that many of us don't, and lobbies both sides until it's passed. What we need is a radical upheaval of the campaign contribution system. Do this, and Hollywood, and every other threat in the future is neutralised.
Essentially, the pirate bay is in the wrong because they encourage piracy. It's as simple as that. It's the artists' right not to have their works copied, and the pirate bay has built their living around robbing them of this right. It is completely within their interests to make the problem significantly worse, especially given that it has earned them multiple millions so far. Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I like to think of them as a documentary film-maker filming the exploits of a serial killer. He watches, and profits from, every kill made. The serial killer will ask him about the locations of certain individual, and the film-maker will happily oblige him (after all, he wasn't to know they'd necessarily be butchered, right?). In fact, if anyone pulled the film-maker up on this behaviour, he would simply cite the many times the killer asked for the nearest petrol station or convenience store, painting himself as a dumb source of information that couldn't be held responsible for how the serial killer used his information. But, in the end, he knows exactly how the serial killer will use the information, and every time he commits another heinous crime, it's more money in the film-maker's bank.
When the film-maker is finally placed in jail where he belongs (but the killer escapes justice), the serial killer turns to this nice guy at an information kiosk (let's call him, say, Google). His job is to hand out lots of information to lots of people. The serial killer asks him about various locations of people and places, and he happily obliges, the same as he would any other customer. Google is aware that a serial killer is on the loose, but he has no more reason to suspect one person over another, and so instead of stopping (or severely restricting) service to everyone, he decides to keep his job and just deliver people what they ask for. Google may have aided the serial killer many times, but unlike the film-maker, Google really is just a dumb source of information. He has as much reason to believe the information he provides will be used for the benefit of everyone, rather than to murder people, and this is the source of his income. His position is perfectly morally justifiable.
Now, let's see how much this gets torn apart.
If it is agreed in the terms under which you agreed to work for them, then yes, they definitely should!
No, anyone can contribute to culture with or without copyright. You can't copy other people's contributions to culture, but you are free, and always have been free, to contribute your own original works. The monopoly has been on copying specific works, but then again, it's hardly immoral to put a monopoly on something that very likely would not have existed without it.
Why is it that the anti-copyright arguments almost always brush over or outright ignore the issue of the work existing in the first place? Oh right, because without doing that, there really is no moral or practical argument against copyright. Gotcha.
(I do agree that we need to release more to the public domain though.)
What exactly is it about his post that makes you think this? I'll give you a hint: if it's because it's anti-piracy, then his point is proven.
OK, that's precisely what I'll do. You see, the correct way to support misinformation is with real information, not to put down those who seek real information.
This is good advice, but especially good advice when applied to publicly posting on the internet.
I don't think it's that clear cut. If I start making a meticulous stroke for stroke copy of some painting, am I copying the painting, or am I copying the idea? How is it different, in effect, to a photocopier? Whether the splotches on the page arise from ink from a cartridge or paint from a pen, it doesn't really matter either way with respect to the purpose of copyright. The point is that the work is copied; the artistic merit is the original not the copy, and so the original artist deserves copyright whereas I do not.
Now, I know the photo was taken from a different angle. But, again, this is just a derivative work. I cannot take a copyrighted song, play it sound for sound, but sing over the top of it, without expecting to be sued for copyright infringement. What am I copying, parts of the work, or the idea? The photographer copied most of the important parts of the art in the photograph, just changing enough to make it evident that another picture was taken. As far as I see it, that's a derivative work. Whether it was taken with a camera or copied with a photocopier (just like whether my painting was by hand or by print) is a red herring, totally removed from the purpose of copyright.
You mean, except the greens who have very publicly refused corporate campaign donations, and consistently promised to severely limit campaign donations in general?
Why? I assume he'd pull viewers, right? I'm sure the person who approved of this will regret it all the way to the bank.
For the sake of argument, let's say the White House is taking these petitions very seriously. Would you expect them to formally respond to a question like this? Would you expect them to say "Come on guys, be serious"? Or maybe go on a defensive spiel about how they really are listening? Basically, their not responding is completely consistent with them actually taking the petitions seriously, so this petition's being ignored is proof of nothing.
It shows.
After many, many years of tireless effort of many people to change the hearts and minds about homosexual marriage, and before it actually has any kind of positive effect, you're attributing our progress towards gay marriage to a corporation speaking in favour of it?
I honestly cannot believe you just pulled the government oppression card. How exactly do you think homosexuals feel? Some church believes gay marriage is their right? Tough! If they marry them, the Justice Dept crawls all over their ass. The "pain of government" that you would feel is the forcible removal of the iron fist of Christianity's moral oppression on the issue of marriage. Oh, you can no longer dictate who gets married in all churches rather than just your own? Boo fucking hoo.
It's rather funny actually, your comment. You write from a libertarian bent, citing "the pain of government", yet your post is so completely anti-libertarian. It resembles the stock standard template of any powerful and oppressive group scaring the public into allowing them to keep their power. Something along the lines of, "If you don't less us control this, there'll be anarchy! Exactly the worst possible scenario could happen! That liberty is not worth the massive drop in security, right?"
Gayness(MS) = Gayness(AIDS)
MS = Asexual multi-billion dollar corporation
===> Gayness(MS) = Gayness(Asexual multi-billion dollar corporation) = 0
===> Gayness(AIDS) = 0
QED.
If you want to help solve the world's problems, you can contribute in two simple steps:
1) Pick up a nice sharp knife
2) Stab yourself in the balls/uterus
If you can still have kids afterwards, you're doing it wrong.
Curses! The League of Shills will not be pleased!
I'm glad someone figured that out :-)
I think you might be confused about the definition of the word "shill".
I've heard that there is another archaic meaning to this word, but I haven't seen it used in any sense other than the modern sense.
Sure, but we're not buying within the "regular rules". We're buying goods that are copyrighted, and copyright works by changing the "regular rules" for a specific class of cases. Whether you agree or not, this is simply the way things are. We cannot reasonably derive our morality from assuming the world is the way we want it to be, in lieu of the way it actually is. And given that copyright is the way things are, we have no entitlement to copy copyrighted works.
It depends on the license. It's perfectly possible to have a license that affords no replacement condition.
If honourably discontinuing your responsibilities in the deal is the aim, then this would be the morally correct way to do it: live according to the law until it changes, and dispose of the law when everyone is properly forewarned. This is about where the discussion on morality ends. Whether people actually want life without this law is another matter, for another discussion, on another day. Right now, I'm happy to leave it at this.
That, or I'm not saying what most people say (or at least I'm not using the same terminology). Actually, I think you find, if you actually explain what entitlements actually mean, most people would agree. Otherwise, like I said, you get Santa from Futurama: almost any action is immoral. There must be some mechanism that people use to distinguish between harmful moral actions and harmful immoral actions. Every action we do has some kind of detrimental consequences for someone else, but for most things, they are considered things that we have some kind of a right to do. Hence the role of entitlement.
We promised them implicitly with our laws. We may not have drafted them ourselves, but while we live under them (and reap their benefits), we are responsible for them.
Well, it's not exactly clear in general. I was more referring to a specific action occurring that could cause harm, or at least could cause harm, in order to debunk your absurd inaction theory of morality. But if you want a specific answer for this study, I read it as evidence that:
a) Piracy doesn't currently kill all demand
b) More significantly, music fans are almost all pirates
There needs to be a fair bit more to establish that piracy is not harmful. I also consider it fairly possible for piracy to become ever increasingly harmful as it becomes more of the social norm, and as people realise that it's not socially expected to repay people for their work. So, in short, it doesn't completely convince me that it's harmless.
He chose that path on the good faith that you would abide by what we promised him, and that wouldn't copy his work without his permission. You subsequently made the decision to disregard his good faith expectations, and in breaking this promise, you are completely responsible for all consequences that occur. As yet another example, your employer promises (but not personally, but it's not like that's any excuse to weasel out of it) to abide by the law and deliver your pay cheque as agreed when you started working for them. If they decide not to pay you, they are responsible for negative consequences. The courts would completely agree if you decided to sue; you could charge them for damages for any misfortune that beset you after they stopped paying you.
I read it the first time, but I read it again. Exactly what is wrong with the potential for absence? I have already argued fairly comprehensively both that potential factors into harm, and that an absence of action does not excuse you morally from the consequences of your decision. Do you have something particularly against their combination that is not present in their parts?
Actually, I haven't been arguing by analogy. I've been avoiding analogies deliberately, for this very reason. The aptness of analogies are almost completely subjective. All it takes is a stubborn debater to simply continue to point increasingly trivial differences between life and the analogy, and the analogy simply becomes more pro
No, think back to my original argument, before we went off on this tangent about harm. Harm is only sufficient to make an action immoral if there is no entitlement behind it. With lending and second sale, we are entitled to these actions (to varying degrees given the laws and customs of the society you live in), so much so that it outweighs the harm. If we made only truly harmless actions morally good, you basically get Santa from Futurama. That aside, lending and second sale does indeed harm artists, as does simply choosing not to buy from them. It's an unfortunate, but unavoidable truth.
Also, I'd like to see a definition of "potential harm" that encompasses shooting guns and launching ICBMs, but not purposefully devaluing someone's assets without their knowledge, let alone permission.
Well, there is a definite act of copying. Copying causes people to demand what they copied less, which results in the artist being starved of money. I'm not seeing any kind of clear distinction here.
That aside, it is a very shallow and narrow-minded definition of causality when you exclude inaction. For example, can I morally be excused for running over a blind kid (with a puppy) because I cannot be held responsible for my decision not to brake? Or could my favourite restaurant be excused for deciding not to clean their crockery? Perhaps my failure to stop my finger moving was responsible for the aforementioned brains on the aforementioned whitewash? You can see, with such a vague distinction, the definition can easily be co-opted to justify many clearly immoral acts.
What is important here is the fact that you make a decision, be it to take an action, take a different action, or shrug and walk away. The fact is that we are not inert objects moving through space, and we do not simply stay predictable until an external force is applied to us. We have the ability to make decisions, and regardless of what those decisions are (be it to act or not to act), we are responsible for the decisions we make. At this point, I truly hope we agree on this point at least, because anything else would make me despair for the human race.
It's a fine point, but clearly not one that I share. Like I said, I require more than simply the causing of harm in order to justify making something illegal. There's also the point that piracy is, in one sense, the most harmful, since it is the one that people are most likely to choose over buying. Don't get me wrong, if second sale was as harmful as piracy, I would judge the harm of second sale to outweigh the entitlement of people to have the right to it. But, as it turns out, in order to have a successful second sale market, there needs to be plenty of first sales, and plenty of people want a first hand copy more than a second hand copy, so there is more justice in having it legal than illegal. For this reason, I am fine with banning piracy but not second sale.
Not really. Perhaps immediately afterwards no, but then again, in the split second before my gun going off, and the realisation that the bullet is speeding towards my victim's face, the victim's life appears exactly the same. In the longer term, the financial value of their work has been sapped. Every person who has the probability of their buying the work even slightly diminished by their decision to pirate instead has harmed the artist at least by the opportunity cost, i.e. the difference in probability multiplied to the price of the item.
It's easy enough to see this effect when measured in large quantities. Suppose there is some band who are so talented and popular, they have the potential to surpass the Beatles. Now suppose everyone has access to high speed internet, and everyone, except the very first customer, had opportunity to gain a copy for free. Further, suppose that the act of downloading instead of paying does not harm the artist. Then, everyone naturally would choose to download the same product, while keeping their own extra capital. There would be no imperative to give charitable donations to the artist, because this act of downloading does them no extra harm over buying the music.
However, when we take a look at the bigger picture, suddenly we see this immensely popular and talented band, of which many hundreds of millions of copies had been copied, and of whose music many hundreds of millions of people had enjoyed, are left with $20 instead of millions of dollars, for thousands of dollars outlay. Already, the cumulative choice of all their fans to take the "harmless" route of copying has resulted in them in debt for thousands and millions (in fact, billions, given the numbers) less than they could have been had the fans chosen to buy instead. One choice ends with a far more negative scenario, while the other choice ends with a far, far more positive scenario. Therefore, the cumulative choice of the former is harmful, in that it makes the person's life worse than it could have been.
Now, from experience, people have some trouble with this definition of harm, so I'll push the point a little further (even if it isn't necessary). At this point, people tend to object to the uncertain projection into the future to define harm. I think that it's well enough defined to be functional. Let's say I launched, 3 seconds ago, a bunch of ICBMs at the US, aimed at the commercial centres of several of the largest cities. So far there have been no casualties, no panic (as I have alerted no-one), no money spent trying to rectify the crisis, nothing. However, I think a reasonable person would have no trouble inferring here that I have already caused harm to the US, simply because there is no other action or time which causally links me to the immanent deaths. Sure, there is the point where the bombs go off, but I didn't explicitly make them go off there, rather I programmed them and launched them so they would go off there. It was my initial action that caused the harm to happen. As another quick (and disturbingly similar) example, we say the person harms another with a gun when the trigger is pulled, not when the brains splatter on the whitewash. Either way, projection into the future is often necessary to satisfactorily define harm, which is why I have no objection to it.
In any case, we have at least established that the cumulative choices of fans can harm the people they idolise. I see no objection to distributing a portion of the responsibility of that harm to each of them, thus proving that piracy at least can be harmful. Whether it is in practice or not is another matter, but given the uncertainty on this issue, I would tend to award the artists their legally guaranteed right to decide for themselves, and honour their decision (while persuading them to change their minds).
Certainly, but you aren't entitled to it. There is no injustice if it happens to be not available to you.
Well, the copies the OP downloaded was not his legally bought property, but I think you mean more generally about the government preventing copying of works. The entitlement comes from the general entitlement of people in a democratic society to prevent the harmful behaviour of other people. This principle trumps the freedom to use your legally bought property in any way you like. For example, if you buy a gun, this does not give you license to shoot someone with it. If you buy eggs, that does not give you license to pelt them at cars. There's plenty of precedent for prevent people from using their property in certain ways. In fact, you can't really prevent anything if using property the way you wish is an (to borrow a patently American term) inalienable right because property can be factored into any criminal activity.