Also, I don't quite know my feelings on this yet, but there is something real about some shows and movies being part of the milieu. Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks. It feels like you have to make more money to live in the same society.
This doesn’t compute. Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource. Secondly, there is by just one company who controls the majority or all content. In fact, having to subscribe to multiple services proves that there are multiple companies who provide tv shows and movies.
I don't think you can claim a coherent moral philosophy when the morality of an action depends on the legal jurisdiction you happen to be standing in.
“There are too many streaming services to choose from and I don’t like having to pay for competing services therefore there is a monopoly”
So it wouldn’t be a monopoly if there was one company that had all of the content you wanted?
> Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue
A third of one channel of distribution is not a “monopoly”
> Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
Yes the government must step in for the good of society because having a team of superheroes including a man who turns green when he gets mad is influencing society.
I think every citizen has the responsibility to choose to not follow unjust laws.
Sure they can; it's called a cartel when that happens.
The major content publishers have acted in concert to kneecap Netflix; pulling licensed content, no longer licensing popular new content, etc.
Conversely, not all immoral acts are illegal, e.g. cheating on a spouse.
> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.
Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
At any rate, "the law" is a body of rules so large and complex that likely almost no one actually manages to get through a month without breaking it a couple times.
I think, corporations gatekeeping huge parts of human culture is something that we can resist once in a while.
I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.
I mean - the natural state of these works has ALREADY solved that, they are easily copied and distributed. The only prevention is arbitrary law/policy that says we (the royal one) shouldn't.
So you're essentially arguing that no one has the right to a product, but they do - in a natural state, copying and sharing those items IS THE DEFAULT.
In fact - copyright law is insanely new, as far as laws go - dating back only about 300 years (1710 - Statute of Anne).
Personally - I think the whole thing was a mistake, and we've seen complete erosion of public access to works of all sort (not to mention education) under these new laws. That said - they're wildly successful if the goal is to subvert culture for private gains.
And it is sort of similar in the sense that, copyright law is over aggressive, honestly, many speed limits are set too low, violation is pretty wide-spread, and within reason it seems basically fine.
It breaks down a bit at the edges though, because extreme violations of speed limits can result in harm and death, while copyright is just lost profits.
But the "magnitude" is so low, I can't imagine caring when other people do it.
In what way does Disney "own" box office revenue. It spends the most and gets the highest return? I know there are some anti-competitive theatre negotiations at the margins, but at the end of the day anyone could invest in their own business and produce good movies - if they had the talent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
The current state of things is confusing, expensive, and user hostile.
I was trying to figure out how to watch Rick & Morty S6 the other night. It'll be on Hulu, but not for months. It'll be on HBO Max, too, but it's only downloadable for offline viewing on Hulu. Wanna watch it now? Need a cable subscription, even though Adult Swim's website says "now available on HBO Max".
I like the idea of any streaming service being able to license any show, if they can pay the fee. Another comment mentioned the Paramount Decree as a similar example.
The only coherent moral framework for the existence of copyright at all is that it is a societal level intervention to maintain financial incentives for the production of creative arts and livelihoods for creators. If the lion's share of the returns to the production of IP is being soaked up by gatekeepers like streaming services and publishers then the alignment of the principle to its aim starts to attenuate.
what about all the things that should have been out-of-copyright had large companies not purchased favourable laws? How many years after death are we up to now? Is this what people originally agreed to when copyright laws were created? Did they agree to the extensions or did the government do this for the "lobbying"?
What about public domain which was taken by for-profit companies and then copyrighted so you cant do the same?
What if the platforms competed on offering a better user experience or other affordances or price?
If there were some way to break the normalization of exclusive distribution, that would tilt things back in favor of the consumer, but I won't hold my breath for the legislation.
There's a litany of incidents where the FBI has raided homes just to snag one pirater.
With how politically weaponized the FBI has become in recent years, I personally would want to do everything I could to avoid attracting any attention from them.
Not worth it to watch some shitty trash TV or movie, personally.
Castigating modern streaming freeloaders might give a feeling of moral superiority, but it seems as futile as yelling at music downloaders back in the P2P days. It's using a bucket to drain the ocean of a widely accepted behavior.
That said, most people don't pirate movies or shows these days, even if they might not have qualms against it- they simply share streaming accounts. Is that illegal, or even against EULA? The platforms don't seem to mind.
Have they? Or perhaps trash media is the bottom of their list of priorities? Maybe they are overloaded with cases and need more support? There are many more possible explanations than "shown they are unwilling"
You can take a look at some recent current and pending antitrust cases on the DOJ's website:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...
In fact there was just recently action taken against Disney, which forced it to sell of major parts of 21st century before it was allowed to proceed with the merger.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...
Production companies shouldn't be able to own streaming platforms, and streaming platforms shouldn't be able to become production companies.
monopoly power of the same resource
Yet educational books are copyrighted all the same, and scientific journals fight tooth and claw from preventing open access even if morally they should (eg. when publishing results of research paid for by public months).
You just drew an imaginary line (entertainment products) to defend an artificial law (copyright). Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.
Copyright creates an artificial scarcity (literally, in the 21st century, where copying is costless). Compare that with natural laws, such as against killing, stealing, etc, known for thousands of years, with obvious reasons for existence.
We can argue to what extent copyright promotes creation, and we can agree to respect it because of its positive effects (if any).
But we should never mistake the "nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted works" dogma for a law of nature.
> culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
What is culture if not total sum of all art, science, and other human accomplishments? And as we now stand, all modern art (and much of science) is being locked up behind copyright for decades.
Solve that.
I think poor kids growing up with parents living paycheck to paycheck should have equal opportunity to become a great filmmaker as trust fund kids.
That should be where we start this conversation, not hand wringing over making sure billion dollar media companies don't have their business models disrupted.
It’s not remotely the same amount of harm, but mass violations of copyright seem to be able to end series and potentially production companies. Netflix and Hulu appear to be making go/no-go decisions about a series after the first few days/weeks of viewership data.
Do you apply the same standard to other laws? If too many people do it, we must legalize it?
Copyright anarchy and copyright abolition are absolutely coherent moral frameworks.
I have a magnet link. It brings me information. You don't want me to have that information? Up yours.
Oh you made it did you? Should've thought about my BATNA before deciding how to put it on the market.
For the record, I'm quite a bit more moderate than this would imply. But copyright is a weird wrinkle to "encourage the useful arts and sciences", it's has no basis in natural rights, the opposite in fact: the State intervenes in my natural right to do things with my own computer and the Internet connection I pay for, in order to encourage the making of more cinema and so on.
I think the same argument can be made for pirating. It's harming no one as long as it remains a minority action. If the entire population felt the same as you, the movie/game/show industry would take a huge crash.
My personal believe is that morals shouldn't rest on other people not doing what you're doing for it to be ok morally. It needs to be applicable for 100% of the population for it to be moral. (barring obvious exceptions like handicapped people using handicap stalls, etc)
"Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education"
This is YOUR take. MY take is NOTHING should be copyrightable. People will still go to concerts and movie theathers. If anything, copyright stiffles production and innovation.
EDIT: I forgot to remind you that copyright is different from trademark. I think trademark is constructive, but copyright is not.
Lysander Spooner goes on to expand this theme greatly.
Foundational essay, well worth a read: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/spooner-no-treason-no-vi-t...
How about you solve your business model that relies on the generosity and goodwill of people not to take an infinitely distributable good.
Maybe it isn't morally coherent but I am all for resisting the US government's pro monopoly positions by pirating from said monopolies. True resistance will never be legal in a framework where the rules are dictated by authoritarian governments or in this case corporations.
Content will still be created.
You seem to operate under the misapprehension that I'm saying that if a crime is widespread then it is not a crime. What I'm saying that it may not be a crime, or the current approach of prosecution of the crime is wrongheaded and should be reevaluated. And most importantly, the root causes should be examined to determine how society should progress.
If burglary and shoplifting is happening everywhere because we live in pre-revolutionary France and the sans-culottes are starving and stealing bread to survive, well. We've all read A Tale of Two Cities. Or for a later period of the same country, we've all seen Les Miz. Crimes must be analyzed in their social context.
Depends on the country, actually. In Poland, as in some other European countries, it's legal to download copyrighted content without paying for it. It's only illegal to distribute it without the copyright owner's permission.
Now that we can agree that law can not be followed 100% of time let's kill the comparison with genocide.
People, if they were entertained at all, were mostly self-entertained back then - they played instruments and such. There was hardly if any passive content consumption back then. Before 1710 there were no novels (novels as literary form weren't invented yet), obviously no movies, video games or music recordings. There was practically nothing to protect, apart from musical scores or theatre plays.
Like others have mentioned, media is heavily shaping culture today, and is responsible for a large amount of cultural dissemination and public discourse. And today, to be a patron of the arts, you are looking at an increasingly large library of works which you need affordable access to. Knowledge shouldn't be pay-to-play.
With companies like Disney eating the lion's share, we should worry about what kind of legal landscape a continued, coordinated lobbying effort could lead to. Remember the shock around the DMCA? We still have massive and systematic abuse issues because of it. A chilling effect is well-established.
With the way Microsoft, Apple and other vendors are moving, locked down computing platforms are becoming a silent reality. Thanks to corporate astroturfing efforts, cloud fingerprinting is being normalized as the moral choice. What's next, screen fingerprinting to ensure our greedy, multi-headed subscription serpent overlord always gets its piece of the pie?
Eventually, unchecked corporate lobbying in areas like IP will lead to an inscrutable system of governance hiding behind the opt-in curtain, which completely sidesteps the ever-evolving system of rights envisioned by our past democratic visionaries.
I find it amusing that you reduced the works of Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, the entire Renaissance, the whole Library of Alexandria and indeed, the Bible, to "practically nothing."
I fail to see how, say, the Nth installment of Marvel movies is somewhat more worthy than all of that.
Movies which, I might add, are already hugely profitable, even though they're massively pirated.
As you point out, there are plenty of utilitarian and/or consequentialist arguments for piracy. From an academically philosophical perspective, these aren't "right" or "wrong" arguments, they're just from a different school of philosophical thought than some other arguments which may dismiss concerns of utility or consequence.
a consequentialist might say: "Piracy is fine because the DMCA causes chilling effects which are bad, regardless of the wishes of the author."
a utilitarian might say: "Knowledge is good for society so piracy provides greater utility for mankind, more than it harms a few authors."
but a deontologist might say: "we have to respect the rights given to someone to reproduce their work, regardless of bad consequences"
All of these are academically valid arguments, regardless of which one any of us subscribe to.
The sheer amount of work and content you are dismissing as "nothing apart from musical scores or theatre plays" is mind boggling.
It's a completely different set of arguments from someone like us who can object on aesthetic and philosophical grounds, vs. a poor kid from Brazil who just wants some cultural exposure.
Some time ago, I saw one friend kick another off of his minecraft server -- and when I objected, he said it was his server, which he paid for, and he could do what he liked. As indisputible as this was, I couldn't escape the impression that the other friend, having invested months of time into building things in that world, in some sense owned those things, and that this was a moral consideration that changed the circumstances and made them different from someone who had spent five minutes in the server.
At one time I ran a gaming ladder for a small community. And while it was undoubtably mine -- I developed it and paid for it and was central in running it -- as the accumulated history of the community on the ladder grew, as the ladder became central in the life of that community, I couldn't escape the impression that all of that data and history was theirs, maybe even more than it was mine. And indeed, a previous ladder in the same community had been run by someone who saw it (very rightly) as his and ran it how he liked -- and after some unpopular decisions, the community reacted by perceiving him as a tyrant. Is this an odd intuition? I think it's one we've all voiced at some point in this era, even if we couldn't defend the idea logically.
I think this philosophical tension is at the center of a lot of struggles in our age. Facebook was certainly made by certain individuals -- they can certainly do what they like with it. And yet I can't escape the impression that the platform wasn't made by them alone -- that what it has become, both in the larger society, and in my personal circles, is what we made it by use. I don't know exactly what that implies from a moral standpoint, only that the intuition of ownership Locke desribes seems to me somehow to apply, and to be describing something real.
I think the same applies to this issue. George Lucas made Star Wars. Without a doubt. But what Star Wars was in 1977, and what it was in 1997, and what it was in 2017, are entirely different things. Some of that change was wrought by Lucas himself, but a lot of it was wrought by us -- the culture that watched it, and talked about it, and adopted it into the milleu. In 1977 it was cool, but in 1997 it was something much closer to literature, to required reading. (And in 2017 it is something else -- one of the niche kingdoms again, and perhaps yet different rules apply.) Can one person own that? The community seems to have generally rejected Lucas' rightful ownership over the series, which I take as a general consensus that, even if we can't philosophically defend why we think this, even if it's happening on an intuitive moral level, people broadly agree that at this point the world owns Star Wars more than the creator does. That people are looking at its maintenance less like a private estate, where the owner can do what he likes, and more like a public government, where the citizens are right to regard bad behavior as equating to illegitimacy. (And Disney owning it seems like a legal quirk that has nothing at all to do with moral intuition.)
Cultural works in general seem to follow this path, from private to public, from entirely owned by the creator to entirely owned by the community. But the ability of that community to actually guarantee access is different than it used to be. Decades ago, Lego was part of the universal landscape of childhood. At one point it was owned by The Lego Group, but at some point it seemed to be owned by everyone, taken for granted in the cultural landscape -- and no one had the power to tell a kid who was interested that he couldn't play with Legos. But Minecraft fills that niche now, and a hundred other things fill a hundred similar niches, and it is absolutely easy for a corporation to stop a kid from playing -- a power so obscenely socially costly as to chill the behavior of parents. Does that seem intuitively like a tyrannical, if not an evil, change in the world? It does to me. But I don't think the pirates are right, either -- I do think ownership means something. We don't have good rules for this. We have moral intuitions, but no ethical heritage.
I don't know where the line is. I don't know what models apply. I don't know what all this means morally, let alone legally. We need a Locke to tell us. But I cannot escape the impression that Locke has a point here, and that consumption may be its own form of creation, and that figuring out how to deal with all of this in a fair way remains one of the most novel and interesting questions of our age.
Being totally opposed to copyright and also choosing to consume content that was only made in the expectation of copyright-enabled paid business models is where it breaks down, in my mind. There's a vast world of freely available content out there, as there would be in a no-copyright world, but if that's not enough for you, or you find benefits from consuming the content produced by the commercial industry enabled by copyright law, how consistent is your belief that copyright should be abolished? Seems like you just want to freely enjoy the benefits without upholding your side of the bargain in that case. I have not seen a case that the budgets to produce those things would be there in a "everything is free for everyone" world.
Ideally with a formalized way of declaring an earlier expiration, or directly to public domain.
I think that the bigger issue is that poor kids cannot consume the same media that richer kids in their school consume and this can turn them into outsiders automatically. Imagine the feeling to be the one kid in class that cannot watch the show that everyone else is talking about, because your parents are too poor to afford subscriptions.
Torrenting copyrighted material is illegal because you necessarily share files as you download (if a peer asks for a piece) but direct downloading or streaming via HTTP or Usenet etc. is legal. Hosting those files via HTTP/Usenet etc is not though.
You're arguing there is TOO MUCH competition not too little and that a centralizing force needs to help improve consumer experience. Fair, but not your original point.
Other people's expectations are none of my business.
CostCo gives me free samples with the expectation that I'll buy something. That's on them, whether I buy something is on me.
A guy writes a poem. It's in the expectation that his lover will choose him and not his rival.
That's not his paramour's responsibility. She can do what she wants.
A guy writes a TV show, in the expectation that I'll subscribe for ten bucks a month to get it, and with the legal arm of the law to threaten me if I watch it any other way.
First off: Fuck that guy, and second, still not my responsibility what the person who created something expected.
Here are just a few examples off the top of my head, to whet your appetite:
- The OG superhero story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh
- A fairly popular adventure story you might have heard about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey
- This one even has "comedy" in its name, if you needed convincing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy
People do still have the right to use libraries, though that is being threatened by digital restrictions in ebooks and other media.
In the US we seem to forget that copyrights and patents exist to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" - not to ensure a perpetual revenue stream.