Five Justifications for File Sharing
It never fails that when I talk about maybe buying an MP3 player, everyone starts to volunteer to transfer everything from their MP3 player to mine. Meanwhile, the record companies and movie studios would have you believe that “stealing” a song or a movie is the same as stealing a car. First off, there is a significant difference in that when I steal you car, I have it and you don’t. In other words, we can’t both have it. Stealing a song is more like stealing my idea. In effect, it is copyright infringement rather than larceny. Both acts fit the general dictionary meanings of the words “steal” and “theft”, but they are certainly different. Of course, if you don’t believe in private property, which is a morally defensible position, then there is no such thing as stealing. Of course, to be morally consistent, you need to give me access to anything of yours ours that I want.
Most people, however, believe in the fundamental concept of private property, just not as it pertains to copyright protections on books, music, movies, software and so on. As near as I can tell, the main reasons for this are the ease with which one can make copies and the unlikelihood of getting caught. As someone who would probably be out of a job if not for copyright protection, though, I object to these practices for a few simple reasons, perhaps best looked at through the excuses that I hear from file sharers.
Really, is there something wrong with making you a copy?
A lot of people still profess that they didn’t realize that this is illegal, which seems like a stretcher to me as Huck Finn would say. Surprisingly, some of these people actually claim ownership of intellectual property themselves, but they simply don’t see the relationship between downloading an illegal copy of a song and someone infringing on their patent on a bacterium. I have doctor friends with incomes well into the six-figures who don’t see a problem with stealing the work of an indy artist who is struggling to get by on $20,000. Someone earning $200,000 per year can literally buy a CD with their earnings off nine minutes of work. I just don’t see how that is ever morally defensible. In any case, even if you have a reason to believe that it isn’t wrong (see the next item), it remains illegal.
I don’t believe in copyright
Fine, I don’t believe in paying you for doing your job either. In other words, if you don’t believe in copyright, you’re welcome to release all your work into the public domain, but that does not give you the right to release all of *MY* work into the public domain.
The record companies charge too much for their CDs
So boycott them. In a free market, it is your right to refuse to buy anything that you find to be overpriced and it is my right to put whatever price I want on that item. For example, I had a domain name that people kept wanting to buy and kept offering me $200 or so. So I put a for sale sign on the domain saying not to contact me unless you were willing to pay $5,000. As I said in the for sale notice, “Think that’s too expensive? Then find yourself another name, because that’s what it’s worth to me.” That pretty much stopped the trickle of feeble offers until eventually someone came along and offered me over $1000. Since I wasn’t doing anything with the domain anyway, I sold it to him. I personally don’t buy much music because I think that, in fact, most CDs do not provide value to me commensurate with the cost. That belief gives me the right to not buy the CD, but it does not give me the right to steal it. Think about this analogy: the price of gas is too high and most of the profits go to oil companies, not the station attendants and the oil field workers, so I’m just going to steal gas from now on. You can apply that to pretty much any product.
The studios take it all and the artists don’t get their fair share
So you’re going to punish the studio by punishing the artist? It may be true that record companies are ripping off musicians, but if you boycott the major labels, the fundamental distribution model will eventually change. In the meantime though, that artist has entered into a contract believing that contract will maximize his income from his work. Whether that assumption is correct or not, that artist has the right to expect that fans will actually pay for the privilege of owning copies of his recordings. As small as his cut is, that is why he signed with the record label in the first place. Just because the system is broken is no reason to cheat the artist out of the small remaining portion that he gets.
I’m not actually taking anything from anybody
Yes you are. Let’s say I slave away in front of my computer to create a cool little software application that you decide you like, but not well enough to pay my asking price. So you decide to grab a copy without paying. You have stolen my labor just as surely as if you hired me to build a house and then decided not to pay me.
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