On Charles Arthur's P2P moral dilemma.
An article on the Guardian about the morality of file-sharing has annoyed me. Not the article itself, more the attitude of some of the commenters.
The thrust of Charles Arthur's article is this: is it less morally acceptable to illegally download a TV program if you happen to know the person responsible for the original?
My opinion was that both the "file sharing" and "friend" elements are canards. If a shopkeeper tells you that they're closing down because of shoplifting then there's no real defense for the stolen shirt that you're wearing. One commenter took issue with my view:
"My shopkeeper friend would then not have the shirt to sell to a customer; what he has lost is not merely some abstract idea of a "notional" sale (which in reality may never have been made in any case), but a physical item of enduring value for which he has paid but which he no longer has an opportunity to sell. None of this is true of filesharing - which is why it is not theft, of course, but copyright breach." - Eurojohn
There are several points here that annoy me.
Firstly, arguing that any sale was "notional" because one might not have bought the shirt/DVD which one is currently wearing/watching is absurd. It's essentially saying, "I value your product enough to steal it, but not enough to pay for it.". There's a Seinfeld bit about how you should have to pay for a meal in advance because you resent paying for it afterwards - why would I pay for a meal when I'm not hungry? Why would I pay for a film that I've already seen? You pay for the meal because you ate it and you pay for the film because you watched it.
Secondly, he suggests that filesharing is ok because the thing being taken is insubstantial and infinitely reproducible. Here he's confusing the medium, which is infinite, with the abstract which is not. What follows is my verbatim response...
[..]
Bits have no intrinsic worth, but the arrangement of them into an episode of House is something that took time, skill and money - that is something that's worthy of compensation to the creator.
If I have a tutor who teaches me French, should I not have to pay because no physical item has changed hands?
You might say, "No, because I'm paying for the tutor's time and skill.". Well, that's what you're paying for with the episode of House; the fact that it's time shifted and changed format is of little relevance. You might expect to pay less because the cost is being borne by many people, but there's a world of difference between less and none at all.
Your argument boils down to, "I shouldn't have to pay for something, because my having it doesn't prevent someone else from paying for it". That's clearly unsustainable and not any way to run a just society. If you've taken something of value from another person then you should pay a fair price for it.
[..]
The third thing which I'd like to bitch about, which I only noticed on a second reading, is his assertion that filesharing "is not theft, of course, but copyright breach". Yes, it's not "terrorism", it's "freedom fighting" and that meat isn't "mechanically recovered", it's "robotically enhanced". The makers of our mythical Film X produced it and chose not to put it online. At some point a person went against their wishes and ripped it; to my mind that's theft. Downloading a version of that original rip, however many times removed, makes you complicit.
If film studios chose to impose draconian DRM and insane pricing then the correct response is to not buy the product. I'm sure that p2p will eventually force studios to start selling their products with no DRM and at a reasonable price, but I'm also sure that it's a morally low route for us to be taking.
Disclosure After reading this back I noticed that I'm a horrible two-faced liar with a rather large pile of mp3 I took from a colleague a couple of months back. This pile has now been deleted, I feel very bad about myself and am going to be buying them all back from Amazon.
5 Comments On This
You’re still skirting around a lot of TV show filesharing (which was the context): it happens while the show is airing (often on a free-to-air channel).
I don't disagree for a second that downloading when you could get off your rear and buy the series on DVD (or, y’know, not watch it) is the semi-mythical “potential lost sale” (and in any case morally broken), but the scenario as presented didn’t contain enough information to make any sort of a judgement call as to whether it was more closely aligned with using your PVR—or, if you're old-fashioned, DVD recorder—or to ripping a copy from a mate’s DVD because you’re too cheap to buy it yourself.
Unless you’re arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to time-shift, of course (which would be silly, as it has the blessing of the broadcasters and agreement of the content rights-holders), or worse: that how you time-shift makes a difference to anybody’s bottom line, ratings families excepted.
Gavin
I'm all for time shifting, but there's a continuum where it stops being time shifting and starts being theft.
I missed Heresy. Heresy is available on the iPlayer. I want to listen to it on my way to work, so I download it. Not theft.
BBC 2 used to show Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4 years ago. I pay a TV license. Ergo, I can download episodes of Buffy from Pirate Bay. Theft.
I'm not suggesting that I can make that judgment, or even that a judgment can be made, but for some people to suggest that there's absolutely no moral problem with filesharing materials where the author has indicated that they don't want it to happen is,IMHO, wrong.
Gavin
Bugger, hit submit too early.
The other point about timeshifting is that it's only timeshifting if you have access to a legitimate copy.
I have a DVD - I rip it so I can watch it on my laptop. I'm personally fine with that. I've paid the maker and am just timeshifting.
I have a DVD that I bought in a pub. That's not timeshifting, that's sourceshifting.
Fair enough—
I think there's a clear difference to most right-minded individuals between grabbing something from BitTorrent that's a few days old (because BitTorrent and the like can often be far more convenient depending upon your setup than some Flash– or AIR–driven doohickey) , and something that's old enough that it's been released on DVD or iTunes or whatever.
I'm not sure “filesharing materials where the author has indicated that they don’t want it to happen” entirely nails it, though: the BBC (and Kudos and Tiger Aspect, and whoever else) will tell you that you most definitely can’t under any circumstances, even though to any sane person would think “well, it was on last night, iPlayer has it, what’s the moral dilemma here?”.
“Aha!” (they say) “you might keep it longer than the permitted seven days!" But, of course, if I'd recorded it on my trusty VHS, I could keep it for as long as I pleased, and nobody who was taken seriously complained that VHS was going to kill the TV industry.
In ye olden days, people did hang to VHS tapes of good TV series for months, even after official videos had been released. Pretty much everyone did it to some extent, just like most tech-savvy people have torrented some TV series or other and have it sat burned to DVD in a disc wallet. It doesn't make it right, of course, and the scale—I suspect—makes a difference, but this whole debate treats filesharing of TV as some new evil phenomenon when it patently isn't.
People are only talking about stamping it out in any sort of serious way because they think it's possible to actually do, when it was clear in the VHS days that such a thing would be a pipedream.
As for protesting at the stupidity of content rights-holders: there are a few cult classics which only really gained that status because people hung on to VHS tapes and lent them to their mates. This isn't a justification, mind, just food for thought, and none of it makes the “downloading a series of Buffy from The Pirate Bay” scenario any less wrong.
Regarding timeshifting—
The loudest complainants in the TV industry are those who produce broadcasts for the free-to-air channels, where (depending upon when it's downloaded) a sizeable chunk of the downloaders are those who would definitely have had access to it, but were busy doing something else.
This isn't universal, of course (I started watching House when it first aired in the US, which was a good couple of years before it showed up here in any form, purchasable or otherwise), but it does make things look far more illicit than they actually are when you look at statistics and whatnot.
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From Aug 7th, 2009.
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Aug 7th, 2009