About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Information doesn’t want to be free


by Massimo Pigliucci

It is more and more common these days to hear phrases like “information wants to be free.” I will go for the charitable interpretation and assume that people don’t mean that information actually has wants and desires, like a conscious creature. [If anyone truly thinks something like that, they may want to join the local chapter of the Cuckoo Club and certainly not read the rest of this post.]

What I take people to mean by that strange phrase is something more along the lines that in the era of the internet people have a right to completely free information. This is the sentiment that floated around most recently after the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, who was viciously prosecuted by an overzealous Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office for having downloaded academic papers from a pay site (which didn’t actually press charges) and threatened to distribute them free over the net (which he didn’t). [1] A broader version of the same discussion has been going on for years with regard to illegal downloads of music, movies and books.

I have very little sympathy for the music, video and publishing industries as such: indeed, with large industries of any kind. Which means that I am very much in favor of multiplying distribution channels, encouraging the flourishing of small publishers, and even preferring direct marketing by artists and authors.

But I truly don’t understand the idea that with the advent of the internet “information,” meaning pretty much everything that is not a material good, ought to be available for free. Why?

An important component of that idea is that things are different now with the internet, considered a special case when compared to any other means of distribution of information. But, again, why should this be so? The intuition seems to be that physical cd’s, dvd’s and books cost money to be produced, while everyone can copy any e-version of the same products quickly and at virtually no cost (you still have to pay for storage space and electricity to run the computers though). But this is quite naive. There remain plenty of significant costs to produce, say, an e-book. Let me walk you through the process as I experienced it first hand, with my latest book, Answers for Aristotle.

To begin with, of course, the author (me, in this case) has to have the idea and set aside countless hours to develop it. If time is money, and unless you are independently wealthy, there is cost #1.

If you wish to put out said book with a general (as opposed to an academic) publisher you will need a professional agent. Cost #2. (This one, of course, doesn’t apply for academic books, but everything else does.)

Once you get a contract and finish the book, the publishing house will give it to an editor to look over for style and content. Cost #3.

Assuming everything goes hunky-dory, the book goes into production, which means someone has to pay a copy editor and an index preparer. Costs #4 and #5.

Before the book can actually get published it will need a nice looking cover (cost #6) and a  preliminary publicity campaign (#7).

Finally, nobody will read the book unless it is properly distributed, which even online is still costly (just inquire with Amazon, #8), though I suppose we could eventually move to reduce (but not eliminate!) that cost if the publishers themselves begin to sell e-books through their web sites. (But then there is the very pressing problem that potential readers are far less likely to visit hundreds or thousands of sites rather than aggregators like Amazon or Smashwords.)

At the end of all this you have the nerve to get on a soap box and demand that my book (or music, or film) should be available for free? On what grounds, pray? Why shouldn’t my distributor, my publicist, my copy editor, my editor, and — frankly — I, not get paid for the work we’ve done?

It should be clear to readers of this blog, or listeners of my podcast, that I do make quite a bit of my work available for free. There aren’t even ads on my web sites! I have thus far produced more than 1,000 articles for the blog and taped close to 80 shows for the podcast, not to mention the countless public lectures that I give. For the latter I sometimes do get an honorarium, but more often than not I offer to do them at cost (i.e., only travel expenses paid). Many such lectures are taped and distributed for free on my YouTube channel and other outlets. But why should anyone demand that everything I do be made available for free? Shouldn’t that choice be up to the author (or musician, or director, or whatever) who actually produced the work? [2]

All of the above said, of course, I think that the crime of illegally copying or downloading music, videos and books (unless done on an industrial scale for reselling purposes) is a fairly minor one, certainly when compared to violent crimes, many white collar crimes, war crimes, and so on. So talk of years of jail time and millions of dollars of fines is ludicrous, and results from the pressure put on prosecutors by panic-stricken large corporations who see the clear and present danger of largely ill-gotten profits vanish overnight. Nonetheless, a crime it remains. And more importantly, an unethical thing to do, whether permitted by the law or not. I would very much like to hear any coherent ethical defense of the opposing viewpoint. But please don’t tell me that people have a natural right to free information. The very idea of natural rights, as Jeremy Bentham famously put it, is nonsense on stilts. Which just happens to be the title of my previous book...

———

[1] Despite the general gist of this post, I am extremely sympathetic to the idea that most academic papers should be made available for free, on the ground that much of the money and effort that goes into writing them comes from the public purse. Which is why many of my own papers are indeed available for free on my platofootnote.org site, and why I edit an online open access academic journal devoted to the intersection between biology and philosophy.

[2] Another complex, but related discussion here concerns the concept of copyright. My position in that regard is that copyright should rest only and exclusively with the author, not the publisher, on the grounds that s/he is the creative force behind the work (as opposed to the packaging or distributing forces). And I adamantly think that copyright should not be inherited by the author’s “estate.” My daughter didn’t write any of my books, I don’t see why she should be benefiting from them past my death. Instead, they should automatically enter the public domain.

97 comments:

  1. Aren't we just moving back to an older model? For example, how much did Aristotle receive for writing his books? I'm guessing: nothing. And yet the books got produced and distributed all the same.

    A similar dynamic operates in the blog world. Paid reporters from the media (who are almost all generalists) tend to be incompetent when dealing with complex topics like energy issues, while unpaid bloggers do a far better job. The unpaid media has a superior product.

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    1. There are plenty of modern art forms that we have grown to appreciate which would not be feasible to produce for free.

      This is particularly true in the case of certain types of movies, software, video games and music.

      It's also true to a lesser extent of particularly well-researched books. That older model is no longer feasible for the media we consume today.

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    2. Massimo doesn't mention that Stewart Brand's famous phrase has probably been misinterpreted all along by the Jay Rosens, Jeff Jarvises and Clay Shirkys of the world. There's free = gratis and free = libre, or per Southwest Airlines, free to move about the country. As I have blogged, it seems pretty clear Brand leaned toward, if not explicitly meant, primarily the second idea.

      Here's his WHOLE comment:
      "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

      Beyond that, Brand said information wants to be free. Per Massimo, he did not say it should be free.

      In other words, Brand, like Massimo and myself, but unlike Michael Shermer, knew his is/ought, or similar, distinctions.

      As noted, I've blogged about this before, most extensively here. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, among others that exemplify some of the "dark side of the Internet," per Evgeny Morozov, Nicholas Carr, etc., note that these folks want raw information to be nearly free so they can repackage it and sell it with their low overhead. Think of these folks as the Walmarts of information.

      More here: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2011/08/dark-side-of-internet-apple-google-and.html

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    3. Meanwhile, per Massimo's picture, the newspaper world is ignoring the Three Musketeers of Rosen/Jarvis/Shirky more and more: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/11/newspapers-continue-to-ignore-rosen-and.html

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  2. I haven't personally used the expression "information wants to be free." However, I take it to be referring to freedom from constraint, rather than freedom from cost. That is to say, I take it to be referring to freedom in the sense of the first amendment to the US constitution.

    As far as the cost aspect - I do think that ebooks are overpriced. When I look at the price at Amazon or Barns and Noble, the ebook price is often $0.99 less than the physical paper back book price. There ought to be far more savings than that in the lower costs of production, distribution, compared to physical books. I conclude that we are being ripped off by the publishing industry, with this ripping off aided and abetted by US Congress. We need saner IP laws.

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  3. I agree with the basic point that the medium is scarcely relevant to the question of who has the right to access the fruits of the author's labor. It seems very reasonable to say that, if I am producing content which people want and are willing to pay for, then I should be allowed to arrange things so that my work is only available to those who pay for it.

    The medium becomes relevant in a practical sense, however, because digitally stored content is more difficult to tie down (which is where the 'information wants to be free' idea fits in of course). It costs to produce it in the first place, but it doesn't cost anything to copy. It's a catchy idea – useful for promoting the cause of the internet activists – that information 'wants' to be copied (a personification not unlike Dawkins 'selfish gene', though with a positive rather than a negative connotation).

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  4. It's great to read your opinion in this topic.

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  5. Kevin,

    > Paid reporters from the media (who are almost all generalists) tend to be incompetent when dealing with complex topics like energy issues, while unpaid bloggers do a far better job. The unpaid media has a superior product. <

    I really don’t think so. Unpaid bloggers usually can’t do investigative reporting, which is what they feed on for their opinions. It’s good to have critical analyses of what the regular media produce, but blogging will never replace professional journalism. Or if it does, we will all be far the worse for it.

    nwrickert,

    > I take it to be referring to freedom from constraint, rather than freedom from cost. <

    No, that’s not the way people using that phrase mean it. Consider the mentioned tragic case of Aaron Swartz. He was trying to get certain kinds of information (academic papers) moving from a pay-per-view to a free model. Those papers were not constrained in any way that would violate the First Amendment.

    > I do think that ebooks are overpriced. <

    I agree, though not to the extent most people think. The major costs of production of a book are not the printing ones, but the authoring, editing, typesetting and publicizing. Those all remain very much in place for e-books.

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    1. @Kevin, let's take investigative reporting. It takes **months** and a LOT of money to do investigative reporting. Massimo is exactly right.

      That said, I think he's partially right in responding to @nwrickert ... many ppl do mean it in the "gratis" sense, but as I have already posted, Brand probably also meant it in the "libre" sense, and others have understood him to have meant it primarily that way.

      Wiki actually has a good page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

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  6. You are surely right. But I think there is a lot of confusion in this area and a lot of work to be done clarifying people’s rights.

    1) There is a difference between information, and a creative work which uses or presents that information, whether it be an encyclopaedia, documentary film, or book. Creative works are a product of skill and time and it is reasonable to seek compensation for that time and skill (The cost of production is immaterial unless you are fixated on cost plus pricing. It is a case of the market value of that work). As you say no one has a right to demand that such works are made available free. It is more obviously true for creative works that contain no information like music. Pragmatically given the ease of cheating over the Internet it might be better to adopt a different business model such as funding through advertising revenue – but that is a different issue.



    2) Information belongs to no one. If I discover that there is another planet I don’t own that piece of information. It is perfectly moral for someone else to discover that information for themselves. There is again a confusion over the specific case when it is information about how to do something e.g. the information that a particular chemical can cure a disease, which may be patented to encourage research. But what is patented is not the information (how can you make it illegal for someone to know something?) but using that information in certain ways. It is moral and legal to discover how a patented medicine works. It is generally illegal and possibly immoral to use that information to create your version of that medicine and sell it.



    3) It does not follow that if I have some information I am morally obliged to share it with everyone else free of charge. There is some information which there is a moral duty to share (fire in the building), some which it is immoral to share – the location of someone trying to escape from murderers etc. But I can’t see there is any general rule on any moral system I am aware of that says you ought to share all information you happen to have.



    4) Academic research is a special case – but not because of the internet. Where academic research has been funded by the taxpayer there seems to be a good argument that the taxpayer should have free access to see and use the resulting information free of charge.

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  7. Massimo:

    I agree with most of your post but I could try to mount a counter-argument to some of it.

    It's not entirely fair to compare the cost of a digital product with the cost of a physical product. While many of the costs of creation are shared, there is one important difference.

    For digital products, all of the costs go into producing the first instance of that product. It costs nothing to produce copies. For physical products, this is not the case.

    There is therefore an important distinction between copyright infringement and theft. If I illegally download a product, then I have not denied anybody access to the product. If I illegally steal a book, I have denied the bookshop the access to that instance of the product, and they will have to pay to replace it.

    I could also attempt to make the case that in some cases, piracy is not immoral, at least from a utilitarian point of view.

    If I am a moral individual and I truly believe that I would never judge the product to be worth the legal price and yet I have some level of interest in acquiring it, then as far as I can see I have no rational reason to deny myself that product if I can easily acquire it illegally. This is simply because nobody benefits from my compliance with the law, whereas I benefit by ignoring it.

    However, I realise you are not a utilitarian, and so I suggest a counter-counter-argument from a virtue ethics position.

    The problem with the utilitarian argument is that we are not all perfectly moral individuals, nor can we be certain what we would do if we could not acquire the item illegally. Whatever we believe, it might be the case that were the item not available illegally, we might have purchased it. Once we start down the road of breaking the law for utilitarian reasons, it becomes the norm, so we perhaps become less willing to pay.

    For these reasons, it may be best from a virtue ethics standpoint to live by the principle that it is immoral to illegally download copyrighted material.

    I'm just saying it's perhaps not quite as cut and dried as you make out.

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    1. > For these reasons, it may be best from a virtue ethics standpoint to live by the principle that it is immoral to illegally download copyrighted material.

      I disagree here, because it depends on what you do afterwards. I really like the shareware principle of try and buy even for other kinds of IP like music. You try, if you like, you buy a "legal" copy, if not you delete. The download might be formally illegal, but I can't see it as morally wrong: nobody loses money, the artist is actually better off than he would be otherwise, because through trial you find and buy stuff that you would have never found otherwise. (At least not anymore - once upon a time you could go to a record store and listen to the LPs. But only those they had in stock.)

      Not sure if that works for books as well - as long a they don't invent affordable and lightweight bathtub-ready e-readers I am not interested in ebooks anyway... ;-)

      Cheers
      Chris

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    2. >There is therefore an important distinction between copyright infringement and theft. If I illegally download a product, then I have not denied anybody access to the product. If I illegally steal a book, I have denied the bookshop the access to that instance of the product, and they will have to pay to replace it.

      In the case of both the physical bookstore and the e-bookstore, however, you are denying others access to the product in the non-causal sense that, if-counterfactual everybody did as you did, no incentive would exist to create the product in the first place.

      (This is not standard utilitarian ethical reasoning, but it is an important patch.)

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    3. I agree.

      Perhaps I should have said "... it is immoral to illegally download [and keep] copyrighted material", at least in the case of products such as music which are used repeatedly.

      The problem is that you can only judge some goods once you have consumed them, for example books and movies. If you are not in the habit of re-watching and re-reading them, then once you are in a position to judge whether they are worth buying, you have already enjoyed the benefit of them.

      If you are scrupulously honest, you could base your decision to purchase (and then never use) on how much you had enjoyed it. However few people are honest enough to pay for something they will not use. Even if they do, they have no way of knowing if they are actually paying as often as they would if they could not have consumed the product illegally.

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    4. Ian:

      "you are denying others access to the product in the non-causal sense that, if-counterfactual everybody did as you did, no incentive would exist to create the product in the first place."

      Right, so then the question becomes "do I value the existence of this product enough to pay this amount for it?"

      And if the answer is "No", then by the utilitarian argument you have no rational reason to pay for it even if you still have some desire to acquire it.

      A nice example might be a holocaust denier's book. You might want to acquire it so that you can understand the arguments being put forward by holocaust deniers so that you can argue against them.

      However, you have no desire for the product to exist. In fact you would prefer if it did not exist. In cases like this, it might be the more moral choice to acquire it illegally rather than pay for it and so support views you find repugnant.

      On the other hand, stealing a physical product is typically more straightforwardly immoral.

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    5. >However, you have no desire for the product to exist. In fact you would prefer if it did not exist. In cases like this, it might be the more moral choice to acquire it illegally rather than pay for it and so support views you find repugnant.

      Interesting point. I guess I agree; free-riding on e-books is not immoral with full generality. However, it seems to me that getting books one vehemently disagrees with for the sake of arguing with them is a pretty atypical motivation for book-buying. I don't know about you, but I only buy books that agree 100% with my preexisting opinions. ;)

      (And it would be a stretch to rip off a book that one merely moderately disagreed with; e.g., Massimo should not rip off Sam Harris even if he thinks that Harris is writing bad philosophy.)

      Anyway, I agree with you, but see many ways for this type of reasoning to turn into a self-serving rationalization a la "the record companies make millions anyway."

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    6. @Ian,

      //if-counterfactual everybody did as you did, no incentive would exist to create the product in the first place.//

      So now you are going to go out and actually vote and be irrational?

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    7. One other point regarding Disagreeable Me's utilitarian argument; for most people, it's simply not possible to buy everything that they'd like to read or watch or listen to, etc. This is most clear in the case of someone who has very limited funds, obviously, but it applies to everyone since everyone has an upper limit on what they can spend. If I can afford to buy one new music album, but there're two I'd love to get, it seems to me that it's totally harmless to buy one and get the other illegally, as per the utilitarian argument - it hurts nobody, and it helps me - shored up by the fact that I simply couldn't have paid for both even if I'd wanted to. And this *always* applies, because all of my money is always going somewhere, to benefit someone else, no matter how I spend it (even if I leave it in the bank, that's doing the bank a favour.) Another example: say there's a band I love but I haven't been able to buy their new CD yet, but they're also touring here. It costs the same for the CD as it does for a ticket to the show. If I go to the show, I can get the CD for free illegally, but if I buy the cd, there's no way I can go to the show. I'm supporting the same artist the same amount in either case, and it's all that I can afford to support them...from a utilitarian perspective it seems pretty clear that it's at least morally 'okay' to go to the show and get the CD for free.

      One issue with the argument is that people who create stuff that is essentially data, will always get the short end of the stick: if someone can buy either a beautiful guitar, or buy all the CDs they'd like, they're going to opt for the guitar and then download the music, then rationalise it as "well somebody was gonna get the money either way, and they couldn't both, and the guitar maker deserves it as much as the music artists, and I'm not hurting anyone by getting to hear the music as well"

      And I do agree with Ian's concerns about where that leads and self-rationalization etc, but as someone who has been pretty damn poor at some times - and able to imagine all the people out there who are as well - the copyability of data and its distribution through the internet can be a HUGE boon to someone's life, if they're willing to go that route. For people who would otherwise simply not be able to pay for such things, free (illegal) access to them can massively improve their life, and maybe even well-being. I think that fact should probably be part of the overall argument

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    8. @IAN:
      >..In the case of both the physical bookstore and the e-bookstore, however, you are denying others access to the product in the non-causal sense that, if-counterfactual everybody did as you did, no incentive would exist to create the product in the first place.<

      You are assuming that no alternative exists to compensating the author at point of sale, or that the desire to share knowledge might not ITSELF be an incentive. As I have written, alternatives to the current monopoly rents via copyright DO exist.

      Also, I'm not sure the "if everybody did as you did" argument holds water:
      If everybody became a philosopher, who would fix my car or perform heart surgery on me? Is it therefore immoral to be a philosopher?

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    9. >You are assuming that no alternative exists to compensating the author at point of sale...

      That's true, and that's an option to which I'm open. The proposal you linked below was interesting, but I'm not sure if it's practical.

      >...or that the desire to share knowledge might not ITSELF be an incentive.

      I think that the fact that somebody is *trying* to charge you for intellectual content is a really good sign that whatever desire they have to share knowledge is not in itself *enough* of an incentive to make it worthwhile for them (and the others involved) to create, package & distribute all of that intellectual content gratis - which is perfectly legitimate! There are opportunity costs to creating intellectual content.

      This is really obvious if you imagine going to your local greengrocer and telling them they should give you food for free, because sharing tasty parsnips with the world is its own reward.

      Actually, here's an analogy that's even closer to the IP case. The closest bakery to me bakes excellent bread. When it's closing time, they dispose of the day's unsold bread - possibly by throwing it out, possibly by giving it to soup kitchens - I'm not sure how.

      Anyway, suppose I show up one minute before closing time and ask for a couple of loaves for free. After all, they're just about to throw them out, right? It costs them nothing to give me a loaf, just like it costs the creators of IP nothing if you make a copy of an e-book. Maybe I start to do this every day - hey, I'm hardly Jean Valjean, but every dollar saved on bread is another dollar towards my kid's education, right? Maybe other people start to catch on, and pretty soon there's a big lineup at the door a minute before closing time, of people who want some free bread. And for some mysterious reason, the bakery has less paying customers during the ordinary workday... and a year later there is no bakery...

      >Also, I'm not sure the "if everybody did as you did" argument holds water:
      If everybody became a philosopher, who would fix my car or perform heart surgery on me? Is it therefore immoral to be a philosopher?

      No. The quick way to see why not is just to notice that there is nothing parasitic about being a philosopher, but there is something parasitic about freely downloading e-books.

      The long answer is that being a philosopher (and in general, specialization) is prosocial thanks to the market. You exchange your philosophizing effort with a third party for some Tokens (these Tokens have the magical power to convert philosophy into heart surgery) and the surgeon exchanges their surgery effort for your Tokens (which the surgeon wants because of their magical ability to convert surgery effort into bread or tickets to chariot races or whatever).

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    10. Ian:

      You're right that illegally acquiring a work you disagree with is an unusual case, however it's just an extreme example of the more common situation where you don't value the existence of a work at the cost of legal acquisition.

      Another example might be downloading The Da Vinci Code, 50 Shades of Grey or Twilight just to see what all the fuss is about and so you'll understand the frequent references to them in popular culture, even while being fairly confident that you would find them to be rubbish. In these cases you don't have any moral objection to the content, but neither do you especially care that these products exist.

      And the same might be true for content that you do like. You might get value from using Adobe Photoshop, but as a hobbyist who is just messing with it a little in your spare time you are not the target audience and so cannot afford to spend hundreds of dollars on it.

      Your tragedy of the commons argument would apply if none of the professional artists and graphic designers that constitute the target audience paid for it, but since you're not one of them it doesn't really work.

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    11. TBYITBSITBH:

      I agree with much of what you're saying, but I think you've made one mistake in particular.

      >This is most clear in the case of someone who has very limited funds, obviously, but it applies to everyone since everyone has an upper limit on what they can spend.<

      Once you are wealthy enough, your bottleneck in consuming content is time and not money. If you have time to listen to a piece of music, you can afford to buy it. Your argument therefore doesn't apply to people who are above a certain threshold of wealth.

      I also want to point out that I agree fully with those who point out that the utilitarian argument leads one open to self-rationalisation. I just think it's important to realise that the utilitarian argument means that there is a fundamental distinction between illegal acquisition of digital products and theft.

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  8. I definitely believe ebook authors/publishers should get paid per unit delivered if that is their choice. (Another example of a cost is if you have an audio version made: You have to pay the narrator!)

    I'm agnostic about the model of deciding instead to provide free or lower cost ebooks with embedded ads. It's not totally crazy:
    http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/Column/Flexing-Your-Content/Advertising-in-Ebooks-Heresy-or-Genius-77412.htm

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  9. Massimo,

    I fully agree with the main post, so just a side question: on the matter of your feeling your daughter ought not to inherit your IP rights to your writing, what about real estate? I assume you would be okay with your daughter inheriting any real estate you own, even if she made no mortgage payments, so what's the relevant difference? I ask because I find the question puzzling myself.

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  10. I agree, as always, Massimo. I have long held exactly this view, and have been constantly surprised to discover, over and over again, that many of my peers are so easily swayed by the freedom rhetoric. I chalk it up to a desire, on their part, to feel "hip" and progressive.

    Seven years ago, I started teaching basic IT-skills to high-school kids. Almost all of them feel strongly entitled to free access to music, movies and games via pirate sites on the Internet. When asked to rationalize their behavior, most frame it as laudable civil disobedience.

    As an aside: I recently finished "Answers for Aristotle". I found the first part of the book, in particular, extraordinarily well-written, refreshing, and satisfying. I will dig into "Nonsense on Stilts" shortly. I plan to use material from both of these books in my teaching. (Honoring your intellectual and economic rights, of course.)

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    1. Seems to me that people who in some sense want content to be free come in several varieties. While some who find it "laudable civil disobedience" to get content through hacking and piracy don't really know what they're doing, others - who might not generally have a problem with IP rights - are consciously targeting corporate systems and entities that they find oppressive or otherwise evil: such people know they are stealing and they get satisfaction from it, as e.g. retribution for past price-gouging, ill-treatment of artists, and so on. Generally, this domain (Massimo's topic) is one that touches on civic anger regarding corporations and corporate interests generally in our society (cf. Occupy Wall Street). Not to say that I necessarily agree with it but the idea that corporations sometimes set themselves up as expensive pay-walls between people and goods, such as creative work and healthcare, that do not add a lot of value, is not so far-fetched.

      Perhaps a third kind of person who wants content for free, and who represents a different sort of problem, is one who finds so much good content on the web that she becomes reluctant to pay for anything. This puts the would-be content seller in the position of needing to have something very special on offer. This is creating a situation in which any new entrant into the content realm needs to become a web celebrity and sell their content as a "get more" addendum to their free online content. On this matter I think the web is still in a sort of gold rush period wherein 99% of content entrants don't have a chance of getting anywhere. As the difficult of the content business becomes clearer in the general population, the web may become a little less cluttered, making things a bit easier for the more serious.

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  11. In the wikipedia article you linked to, Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase, said:

    "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

    So it's more a statement of "as the costs of production and distribution decrease, so will price." And when costs aren't at perceived-to-be-reasonable levels, there is tension. He was observing a dynamic, not claiming that theft was ethical.

    There is no doubt that this idea has been subverted to justify people's desire to take other's work without paying for it, but I don't think that was the original point.

    A modified version of this was a rallying cry of the early free software movement, and it was used as the driver to say "because there is such a huge potential need for some core computer tools, we will make them ourselves and give them away." As in, compilers (programs which make programs) are so useful, they *should* be free, so let's let that happen. To them, it was not an argument for "so let's steal the ones that already exist."

    I see it also related to how, in the digital age, it's much harder to keep secrets. Stealing 1,000 documents, for example, would once have taken serious effort. Now, it's a thumb drive or email-delivered virus away. Keeping secrets has always been hard; in the information age, it's exponentially harder. (See Wikileaks, etc.) The idea that Senator such-and-such approved some heinous operation has some inherent "potential energy". If it leaks, major things can happen. In that sense it "wants to be free."

    (P.S., happy actual purchaser of your book; I feel like I got more than full value for my money.)

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  12. Massimo, I'm basically with you on this. I just have a related question for you: How do you feel about public libraries?

    Of course, the owner in that case is the public or community, and not the individual borrower (who would have to violate the library rules and the law in order to keep a personal copy), but the content nonetheless seems to meet a criterion of "free information" - that is, the individual consumer (who may or may not even be a taxpayer) has full access to the content (albeit, only for the borrowing term, usually measured in weeks) without personally having to buy it.

    And, the effect is that you as a producer/author get a cut, but not as many cuts as you would if every individual with an interest in your work were to purchase a copy.

    [Of course, some potential readers might only develop a serious interest in it because they see it displayed on a library shelf and figure "Why not give it a try? It won't cost me anything to borrow it (so long as I return it on time)." And I know that I've bought many a book after having read part of a library copy, but perhaps not as many as I've bought because I couldn't find a library copy.]

    ReplyDelete
  13. Yes, great post, I pretty much agree with you here. It seems like there is a jump being made from the *ability* to freely copy music, books etc. to a position that one *should* freely copy those things. It's as if shoplifting were to become easy and untraceable, and then the shoplifters demanded that stores "adapt" to this new contingency by giving food away. (I confess I had a similar entitled attitude when I was younger.)

    One thing I might want to press you on:

    >I have very little sympathy for the music, video and publishing industries as such: indeed, with large industries of any kind.

    Why not? It seems odd to treat size per se as some sort of moral failing.

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    1. @ian:
      > It's as if shoplifting were to become easy and untraceable, and then the shoplifters demanded that stores "adapt" to this new contingency by giving food away. (I confess I had a similar entitled attitude when I was younger.)<

      Again, it is not as if there are no alternatives to compensation at point of sale and no compensation at all.

      If it were indeed possible to shoplift food without paying for it, it would behoove government to adopt a new method to compensate the people who produce and stock food.


      Delete
  14. Disagreeable,

    > It's not entirely fair to compare the cost of a digital product with the cost of a physical product. While many of the costs of creation are shared, there is one important difference. <

    I acknowledged that, but the difference is actually less than people think.

    > If I illegally download a product, then I have not denied anybody access to the product. If I illegally steal a book, I have denied the bookshop the access to that instance of the product, and they will have to pay to replace it. <

    True, but you are still denying the author, publisher, publicist, typesetter, etc. their income. In violation of their expressed will...

    > then as far as I can see I have no rational reason to deny myself that product if I can easily acquire it illegally. <

    Except you gave a perfectly good virtue ethical reason not to do it. Besides, that sort of approach seems far too prone to easy self-rationalization.

    Paul,

    > on the matter of your feeling your daughter ought not to inherit your IP rights to your writing, what about real estate? <

    Good question. to begin with, I’m in favor of very steep, graduated inheritance taxes, on the ground that they help leveling the plane field for the next generation. But I also think that the difference between real estate and copyright is that the latter, but not the former, benefits the public at large to a degree that it trumps my daughter’s expected benefits from my work.

    Josh,

    > He was observing a dynamic, not claiming that theft was ethical. <

    I know, I did not attribute the idea that theft is ethical to Brand. But a number of people seem not to have read the second part of his explanation...

    > because there is such a huge potential need for some core computer tools, we will make them ourselves and give them away <

    To which, of course, I have no objection, and indeed sympathize with. It’s when the author of the software does *not* agree to make the product available for free that we begin to have problems.

    > Keeping secrets has always been hard; in the information age, it's exponentially harder. (See Wikileaks, etc.) <

    Agreed, but I wasn’t referring to secrets (I am actually sympathetic to Wikileaks), but rather to commercial products that are available for purchase.

    mufi,

    > How do you feel about public libraries? <

    I strongly support them. Library ownership of materials is regulated in a way that is understood and agreed by publishers and authors. And it does public good.

    chbieck,

    > I really like the shareware principle of try and buy even for other kinds of IP like music. You try, if you like, you buy a "legal" copy, if not you delete. <

    But that’s ethical only if the author has agreed to let you do that, which more and more authors actually do (both for music and e-book samples).

    Ian,

    > Why not? It seems odd to treat size per se as some sort of moral failing. <

    With size (of an industry) comes extraordinary power, as in “too big too fail,” or simply as in being able to crush small competition and reduce everything to a minimum common denominator (McDonald’s, Wallmart). So I’m against it.

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    1. > But that’s ethical only if the author has agreed to let you do that, which more and more authors actually do (both for music and e-book samples).

      I'd argue that (at least for music) that agreement is implicit in fact that it is published. See my record store comment - I don't see a ethical difference whether you listen to the record in the store (and then buy or not) or at home (and then buy or delete).

      Delete
    2. >With size (of an industry) comes extraordinary power, as in “too big too fail,” or simply as in being able to crush small competition and reduce everything to a minimum common denominator (McDonald’s, Wallmart). So I’m against it.

      It seems to me that political discourse usually goes much better when we stick to the specifics of individual cases, and usually goes much worse when we try to situate a case inside an overarching political narrative. So I agree with you that Walmart and McDonalds are problematic, but to dislike a company *merely* for being big is just politics by pattern-matching. One might compare it to libertarians disliking "regulation" independent of trivial questions like whether the regulation is needed or not.

      Anyway, your post is about copyright so I promise not to say anymore on this score.

      Delete
    3. Ian, that sort of is a follow-up to our made-in-China discussion. Being big is generally a consequence of limited liability charters, which when introduced 19th was actually considered morally problematic by some economists/philosophers. (I think Adam Smith wasn't around anymore, but JS Mill was.)

      But you are right, is off topic ;-)

      Delete
    4. I seem to have lost some words. It should say "...when introduced in the 19th century..."

      Delete
    5. Massimo:

      "I acknowledged that, but the difference is actually less than people think."

      Well, ok, but your acknowledgement basically amounted to stating that it was naive. You didn't get into the subtleties of the distinctions between goods which are free to copy and those which are not.

      "True, but you are still denying the author, publisher, publicist, typesetter, etc. their income. In violation of their expressed will..."

      But that's beside the point. If I simply refrain from buying instead I'm still denying them their income, no matter how much they express their will!

      "Except you gave a perfectly good virtue ethical reason not to do it. Besides, that sort of approach seems far too prone to easy self-rationalization."

      Well, I would say that self-rationalization _is_ the virtue ethical reason not to do it. But this is quite unlike the argument against theft. Theft is always wrong in principle because of the harm it does to take something that cannot be replaced for free. Downloading copyrighted material you would not have otherwise purchased is in my opinion not wrong in principle because you are harming no one.

      The trick is in being sure that you would not otherwise have purchased it. For me, this makes downloading copyrighted material morally dubious rather than morally wrong. Do you see this distinction in the moral categories also or do you think it amounts to the same thing?

      Delete
    6. Massimo (in response to mufi):

      I'm not sure why libraries are OK but downloading stuff isn't.

      What if I'm an author that would prefer people to buy my books rather than read them for free in the library? And even if authors and publishers consent to allow their books to be used by libraries, then why should they do so?

      Genuine question: if you didn't want your books to be distributed to libraries, could you prevent it?

      Doesn't illegal downloading of books also provide a public good? Citizens get information, knowledge and entertainment for free just as they do at the library.

      As far as I can see, the only important distinctions between libraries and filesharing are legal and cultural ones, not moral ones. There's also the issue of scale.

      If people only shared files with their immediate friends and those friends did not redistribute, then you probably wouldn't be too concerned about it. It would be much like lending books.

      So if you don't have a problem with libraries or with lending books, or with second-hand book sales, then it seems to me to be inconsistent for you to think that illegal downloading is fundamentally immoral (like theft).

      Delete
    7. Massimo (in response to chbieck):

      "But that’s ethical only if the author has agreed to let you do that, which more and more authors actually do (both for music and e-book samples)."

      That's begging the question that authors should have the right to prevent you from copying their creation. chbieck's argument was that it is ethical if you are only doing it for sampling purposes. You can't assume it is unethical in order to refute this.

      Delete
  15. Massimo:

    You seem to beg the question by assuming that
    1) creative work absolutely MUST be rewarded
    2) the current copyright law set-up is the only workable method to reward.

    It is not a given that creative work MUST be rewarded. If you wouldn't write your book unless rewarded, where is it written that your book MUST be written? Many others would be (and are) willing to write books made available for free. Look how many people write long and numerous posts on this blog without being compensated. I'm not saying a system of non-compensation would be better --- and no doubt we would get more and better books by offering compensation. I'm just pointing out that a rewards system is not the only game in town -- people are willing to do it for free.

    Even if we determine that creative work SHOULD be compensated, there are alternative ways to reward the author and still allow people to make copies via the internet. See economist Dean Baker's many comments on the subject [ e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/the-surefire-way-to-end-o_b_1224165.html ]

    To your credit, you anticipate my arguments somewhat in your notes 1 & 2 where you make exceptions for academic papers, and feel revisions should be made to copyright law to exclude inheritance.

    P.S. When we consider patent laws (in connection with prescription drugs) the current system leads to very pernicious effects that are deleterious to the health of the population. Both patent and copyright laws should be radically revised.

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    1. Hi Tom:

      Agree with much of this, however I think you may want to consider the difference between works which are feasible to produce for free and those which are not.

      For example, it is impossible for a blockbuster-type movie to be produced for free. If you enjoy these movies, then is it immoral to download them for free?

      The rewards system is the only game in town that will allow such works to be created. If we agree that the creation of such works improves the world, it is therefore not unreasonable to argue that piracy is immoral.

      Delete
  16. Many people indeed expect to get information for free over the Internet. And there are also costs involved in producing the information, which someone must borne (e.g. the author or the reader or the tax payer). But what is mostly at stake is not the existence of the cost, or the righteousness of the expectation of getting free information, or of getting paid for authorship; but whether payment for such costs can be enforced in any way.

    In the pre-Xerox, pre-digital era of printed books, say up to 1950, you could not get the contents without its printed container. Even for public-domain contents (say Chaucer's Tales), one still had to pay for the book, for one could only read Chaucer in a printed book, and producing and distributing books was costly, even when the author was getting nothing. For more recent authors the situation was similar, only the book must cost some 10% more in order to pay authorship royalties. However, and this is essential, the author's share could only be collected because it was included in the retail price.

    Nowadays contents are easily reproduced and accessed. It is difficult to enforce a payment for accessing such information. Information has de facto become a public good.

    In Economics, a good is "public" when access to it cannot be practically impeded (opposite to "private goods", where somebody can actually hinder access to the good, and "club goods" accessible by some but not all). Public goods may be rival or non-rival. Moonlight is a non-rival public good: my seeing moonlight does not interfere with yours; instead, fish (albeit free) is a rival good: the trout I caught is mine, the one you got is yours.

    Freely accessible information is not only public, but also non-rival (my downloading a pirated copy of a book does not keep others from doing likewise). In such cases, enforcing ownership is pretty difficult.

    A book can nowadays be easily digitized at negligible cost, and shared over the Net, even if doing so might be construed as a crime. Books have gone xeroxed since the 1950s, and little could publishers do; digital copies are even easier to make (and access harder to impede). Even if it were theoretically possible to enforce the law in a particular case (jailing the culprits, and forcing servers to erase pirated copies) the costs of doing so are likely to exceed foregone royalties, and to be easily circumvented by someone else uploading another copy at some other server, this time in say Bhutan or North Korea. Only wholesale piracy might be economically worthwhile to prosecute, and even that would be probably fruitless.

    Goods that should be kept private (not accessible to others without permission), but which are in fact easily accessible at no significant cost and without a practical way of stopping access, are (from an economic point of view and as a matter of fact) public goods, in this case non rival, even if the law says otherwise. And here, as in other matters, reality ultimately trumps theoretical or legal ownership rights. An ownership right that cannot be enforced will collapse, even in a police state (remember zamizdat books in the USSR) and more so in a democratic society with a market economy.

    For the cost to be covered, probably some alternative model may emerge (e.g. "open access" journals where authors pay the journal and then the papers are freely accessible).

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    1. Hector:

      This was a great write-up of the situation as I see it also.

      I'd also like to add that I don't think that authors have a natural moral right to be compensated for their work.

      This is because authors often are not. I could write a book and sell no copies, while Massimo could write a book and sell tens of thousands, despite having done approximately the same work.

      I think we give authors a legal monopoly on the distribution of their work for much the same reason that we give inventors patents. It is done for economic reasons to encourage the production of work that provides a benefit to the public in proportion to the size of the benefit (measured in sales).

      So when that legal monopoly is made redundant by the fact of electronic distribution, perhaps it is time to find new ways to fund the creation of works rather than relying on sales.

      However, the economic reasons for giving authors these monopolies have become so established that they have come to be seen as moral rights. This is why illegal copying of material is seen as equivalent to theft when it clearly is not.

      As for alternative models for funding creative work, I wonder whether the future might lie in crowdfunding models such as Kickstarter.

      Delete
  17. Tom,

    I really don’t think there is any begging of the question in my post.

    > the current copyright law set-up is the only workable method to reward. <

    Agreed, and pointed out. But I’m concerned with the ethics of the situation, not the current (flawed) implementation of the law. Same goes for your comment about the patent system.

    > It is not a given that creative work MUST be rewarded. <

    I’m not sure what you mean by this. Is it a law of physics? Of course not. But it seems to me to be a minimum ethical standard that unless an author/publisher agrees to make the work available for free there is a moral obligation not to steal it.

    > I'm just pointing out that a rewards system is not the only game in town - people are willing to do it for free. <

    Correct, and this blog is a good example of it. But the key words here is “willing.”

    > there are alternative ways to reward the author and still allow people to make copies via the internet. <

    Again, agreed. But they need to be negotiated with authors and publishers.

    Hector,

    > whether payment for such costs can be enforced in any way <

    That’s irrelevant to the ethical aspect of the discussion, which is the only one I’m interested in. And see Ian’s comment about shoplifting.

    > In Economics, a good is "public" when access to it cannot be practically impeded <

    Again, I care not at all for economics, in this context. I am interested in ethics, where a good is public if the authors agree to make it so.

    > reality ultimately trumps theoretical or legal ownership rights. An ownership right that cannot be enforced will collapse, even in a police state <

    You are talking as if ethics didn’t matter at all. We all do everything we can get away with? You must have a pretty glib view of humanity, my friend.

    Disagreeable,

    > The problem is that you can only judge some goods once you have consumed them, for example books and movies. <

    Hence the idea of sampling authorized samples. Or relying on reviews. Or just taking your chances...

    chbieck,

    > I'd argue that (at least for music) that agreement is implicit in fact that it is published. See my record store comment - I don't see a ethical difference whether you listen to the record in the store (and then buy or not) or at home (and then buy or delete). <

    That seems disingenuous to me. At the store, you can’t walk out and keep the record, at home you can. As for implicitness, I would actually argue that it’s easy to read through agreements pertinent to online purchases and verify that not only there is no such implicit agreement, but there is an explicit prohibition against the practice.

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    1. Massimo (in your responses to Tom, Hector and chbieck):

      I think you're taking it for granted that it is unethical to transgress against the author's wishes about what can be done with their work.

      I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, but I do think you are begging the question and it might be good to back this up a little more.

      In particular, why is it necessarily unethical to go against an author's wishes where this transgression does not materially affect them (e.g. sampling a piece of music by downloading it illegally and then deleting it because you don't like it)?

      Delete
    2. Massimo:
      "> The problem is that you can only judge some goods once you have consumed them, for example books and movies. <

      Hence the idea of sampling authorized samples. Or relying on reviews. Or just taking your chances..."

      Yeah, which was kind of my point.

      Delete
  18. Regarding eBooks there is one big disadvantage to buying one online, the ability to share it. You can lend and borrow a physical copy of a book but not a digital copy of it.

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    1. As I pointed out in an earlier comment, the issue of lending is an interesting one.

      Why is it immoral to download a book without paying for it, but acceptable to borrow a physical book from a friend?

      Either way the author does not get compensated.

      Delete
  19. Interesting discussion. Just to weigh in on the title, I always took it to mean something more banal, like "Information is hard to contain" (so don't even try, since you'll have to be too authoritarian and eventually lose).

    Software is a weird case here, because you have copyrightable material that also implements a patent. Additionally, you have a fairly strong free software movement, but also an industry with very rich, very litigious major corporations with patents that should be too trivial to exist.

    While I tend to agree with Massimo's post regarding copyright, I am starting to think that patents in particular do more harm than good, so much so that, even if it wouldn't be *the best* solution to eliminate them, it would still be *better* than what we have now. We've reached a point where many people cannot use or sell their own inventions without a fleet of lawyers.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Massimo,

    > That seems disingenuous to me. At the store, you can’t walk out and keep the record, at home you can. As for implicitness, I would actually argue that it’s easy to read through agreements pertinent to online purchases and verify that not only there is no such implicit agreement, but there is an explicit prohibition against the practice.

    I might be misreading you here, but you seem to be saying that the ethical follows from the legal. No argument on the store, but my point is at home that I _don't_ keep it, which makes it ethically equivalent to listing in the store, legality aside. That I could keep it is irrelevant, since I don't.
    Additionally, most of the time downloading the only way to sample, as stores are dying. That's more of a practical matter, of course.
    To put it differently, IMO it is not the downloading that is ethically problematic, it is the keeping without paying.

    Cheers
    Chris

    [NB: The shareware principle that is adhered to makes IP creators, even unwilling ones, better off than they would be without downloading. I know that this is a utilitarian argument, but I do find it strange that virtue ethics would arrive at a conclusion that has a harmful effect, even if it is onlm harm in the form of opportunity cost.]
    [NB2: I am well aware that the discussion is theoretical, since it is unlikely that more than a handful of people would actually be honest with the shareware principle.]

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    1. Just to say that I agree completely with your reasoning in this specific case.

      As I have mentioned on other comments, I also think that Massimo is conflating ethics with legalities to a certain extent. The author's wishes seem to me to be irrelevant as long as you are honest about deleting things if you don't buy them.

      Massimo seems to be assuming that it is necessarily unethical to transgress against the wishes of the author, but he has not yet explained why.

      Delete
  21. Wow, lots of opinions on this one, but I haven't seen mine expressed here. The difference here is that technology advances have made the marginal cost of each good's production much lower. Even DVD's, CD's, and books cost much less than they used to, and it's harder to justify high prices because "they only cost a little bit to [re]produce!", but when we look at niche technical books, in particular, the prices are often very high just because the prospect of making money is so low. The means of production is also in a lot more hands.

    Now, the trick really is to set the price for your intellectual property such that you're sure to cover your up-front, static costs (that don't rise with each copy produced). This removes economic barriers to entry for the creative market, which means it's both flooded with even more crap, but it also opens the door to many viable business models. I don't think the publishing industry is going to die, but some publishers will die because their marketshare will shrink. Hiring your own editor at ethical pricing is going to run you somewhere between $2k-8k. Access to vanity presses and ebook publishing is also fully automated and they make their costs back on the volume of books sold. Now, you retain something like 70%-90% of gross, but you've got to do your own marketing. But those with platforms (like podcasts and such) already have ready markets, unless they intend to reach a wider general audience. So really, now more than ever, it's about what choices you as an author make.

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  22. In my opinion, metaphorically, some information wants to be free and then there's some that should have to pay you to read it.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Massimo, even if may expand on several of your comments about my previous comment, I will limit myself to one of your remarks:

    "You are talking as if ethics didn’t matter at all. We all do everything we can get away with? You must have a pretty glib view of humanity, my friend."

    1. Ethics matters; but as you said yourself, it deals with the logical implications of certain axioms or values. What I say in this context is that the axioms relevant in a society (i.e. those implied by the prevailing moral standards of that society) are in a general way conditioned by the economic reality of that society.
    2. You ask: "We all do everything we can get away with?" Most people don't. Most people do things that are permitted under the moral code, or moral values, prevailing in their society or group. Even those not complying with such moral code and values usually do know what is the "right" thing to do (under such code).
    3. My view of mankind may be seen as glib or otherwise. It is based (to my best understanding) on the findings of social science. One of the most widely agreed upon conclusions is that people (considered collectively at population level) respond to incentives, though the degree and measure of the total or average response may vary from one case to another. Examples of application of this conclusion are quite common, such as in advertising, marketing, political campaigning, or pedagogy. You establish an incentive, and populations respond (within certain limits).

    If one good has such characteristics, people will behave as if the good was indeed public (the classical example is communal pasture land, owned by a community, which should be used prudently by all community members, but easily abused by those with more grazing animals, in the so called tragedy of the commons). Enforcement (i.e. shooting or expelling surplus sheep seen grazing in the communal fields, as done in various pastoral communities) may stop the abusers; communal values usually won't (those owning more animals would strive to become communal chiefs in order to avoid any retaliation and enjoy impunity).
    These are the usual reasons why Economics has famously been called The Dismal Science. But these ideas are not a moral doctrine, but a description of human behavior actual and expected, and widely corroborated by fact.

    You also say about my definition of a public good as one that is effectively available to people, and its owner (if any) cannot enforce rights of ownership over that good. You say in this respect: " I care not at all for economics, in this context. I am interested in ethics, where a good is public if the authors agree to make it so." Well, as Humpty Dumpty had it, words must obey their master, and you may define them to your pleasure. It would be convenient to use some other word to avoid confusion, Alice would opine. However, let me ask: You have yourself stated that moral philosophy starts with adopting some (unspecified) values as axioms, and investigates the normative implications of such axioms; but what would the origin of those values be? The personal values of the philosopher? Perfectly legitimate, but not necessarily representative of actual morality prevailing in a society, and thus essentially arbitrary. To be representative, the axioms may be those actually reported by people, in case they are logically consistent (often they aren't). Thus one may adopt not one's own (arbitrary or personal) values, but a more science-based approach, working from the bottom up: study what moral norms people actually respect, or those in which they actually base their behavior, and try to infer some set of axioms under which those actual moral norms, actually held by people, make sense.

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  24. Chris,

    > you seem to be saying that the ethical follows from the legal <

    No, that’s definitely not what I mean.

    > my point is at home that I _don't_ keep it, which makes it ethically equivalent to listing in the store, legality aside <

    Not quite. You are violating an explicit prohibition by the owner, so you are doing something against the explicit will of the people that generated the product. That, in my book, is unethical (though it certainly doesn’t rank very high on the ladder of sins!).

    > I know that this is a utilitarian argument, but I do find it strange that virtue ethics would arrive at a conclusion that has a harmful effect, even if it is only harm in the form of opportunity cost. <

    That’s because virtue ethics has different priorities from utilitarianism. In this virtue ethicists are not alone, a lot of deontological commitments entail harm, often far worse than the one you can derive from applying virtue ethics!


    Hector,

    > the axioms relevant in a society ... are in a general way conditioned by the economic reality of that society. <

    Yes, of course, but they key word here is “conditioned,” as opposed to determined.

    > One of the most widely agreed upon conclusions is that people ... respond to incentives, though the degree and measure of the total or average response may vary from one case to another. <

    Of course they do, but “incentives” isn’t limited to economic ones (there are social incentives, such as reputation). And of course we are also shaped by education, especially early on in our lives.

    > these ideas are not a moral doctrine, but a description of human behavior actual and expected <

    Well, the “actual” part is much more debatable, in my opinion. And at any rate my post was about ethics, which is prescriptive, not descriptive.

    > what would the origin of those values be? <

    This is a discussion we’ve already had several times on this blog, too long to get into again here. In part they derive from our nature as a biological-social species, in part from our cultural evolution.

    > a more science-based approach, working from the bottom up: study what moral norms people actually respect <

    Nope, that would be going along with Shermer’s (or, god forbid, Harris’!) take on morality, which I have explained why I resist. Had you done that consistently through history you would have, for instance, discovered a “natural” tendency to enslave enemies and subjugate women, both of which we have overcome, at least in some parts of the world.

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    1. I think that while your point here might be on target with regard to what Hector said, Harris's and Shermer's morality would be based more on using science to see which policies would produce "better" (by some measure) societies rather than enshrining natural tendencies in law

      Delete
  25. Disagreeable,

    > that's beside the point. If I simply refrain from buying instead I'm still denying them their income, no matter how much they express their will! <

    It would be beside the point if we were talking economics, but we are talking ethics. Or I am, at any rate.

    > Theft is always wrong in principle because of the harm it does to take something that cannot be replaced for free <

    I’m not so sure that’s actually the case. The proverbial example of stealing an apple from a fabulously wealthy owner because you are starving to death seems to me hard to condemn on ethical grounds, utilitarian or virtue ethical (though it may be condemnable deontologically, but I like deontology even less than I like utilitarianism...).

    > Downloading copyrighted material you would not have otherwise purchased is in my opinion not wrong in principle because you are harming no one. <

    That’s because you are equating wrong with harm, which is a limited view of wrong, in my opinion. For instance, to betray a promise is wrong even if it does not do any (economic, material) harm, because you have breached the trust someone had in you.

    > this makes downloading copyrighted material morally dubious rather than morally wrong. Do you see this distinction in the moral categories also or do you think it amounts to the same thing? <

    I certainly recognize a spectrum of morally problematic actions, going from dubious to definitely wrong, or from wrong but barely worth noting to seriously, dramatically wrong. But the in-principle point remains.

    > What if I'm an author that would prefer people to buy my books rather than read them for free in the library? <

    Then the author should have that added to the contract before signing it.

    > even if authors and publishers consent to allow their books to be used by libraries, then why should they do so? <

    Because it helps the public good. Because it helps promoting their work... Ultimately, who cares? My point is, that libraries lend works for free after the author/publisher has agreed. If the latter do not agree to your downloading, you are wrong in doing it.

    > That's begging the question that authors should have the right to prevent you from copying their creation. <

    There is no begging of the question that I can see. By going to their website you are making the promise to abide by their rules. If you break that promise you are in ethical violation, and I think uncontroversially so.

    > which was kind of my point. <

    I took your point to be that there is nothing wrong with *unauthorized* downloading. If we are talking only about the authorized ones then obviously we don’t disagree.

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    1. >It would be beside the point if we were talking economics, but we are talking ethics. Or I am, at any rate.<

      I'm not so sure it's so easy to separate the two. At any rate, you justify your ethics in terms of the harm done to the author by the lost sale. If the sale is not actually lost, then the justification of your ethics is not as clear.

      >I’m not so sure that’s actually the case. The proverbial example of stealing an apple from a fabulously wealthy owner because you are starving to death seems to me hard to condemn<

      Point taken. The same argument could be applied to downloading a work produced by a wealthy company or individual (if you somehow needed the work in order to survive)!

      However the fact remains that actual stealing is more harmful and in more ways than illegal freeloading, so I think it is wrong to apply the language and philosophy of theft. I do think it's in a different, lesser category of immoral act.

      >To betray a promise is wrong<

      That's not so clear to me. For me, this would depend on context. For me, the betrayal of a promise that cause no harm is not so much wrong as unwise. We want people to trust us, so we ought to be trustworthy.

      I probably just don't share your ethical system, so maybe there are some more fundamental issues to work out before we can expect to agree on filesharing.

      >Then the author should have that added to the contract before signing it.<

      I guess I'm just unaware of what limitations authors can legally put on usage of their books.

      Can you legally stop someone from reselling or lending your book? I don't think so, but I'm open to correction on that. In any case, what's legal is separate from what's moral. Do you think it is wrong to resell a book? Do you think the author has a right to prevent this?

      >There is no begging of the question that I can see. By going to their website you are making the promise to abide by their rules. If you break that promise you are in ethical violation, and I think uncontroversially so.<

      I don't think this is so clear. If I go to a torrent website to find a download of your book, I do so not having made any promise to you not to do so, whether I have visited your site or not.

      >I took your point to be that there is nothing wrong with *unauthorized* downloading. If we are talking only about the authorized ones then obviously we don’t disagree.<

      No, my position is not that there's nothing wrong with it. My position is that the morality of unauthorized downloading is unclear. The specific bit you quoted here was a paragraph where I expressed an argument against the morality of the sampling approach suggested by Chris.

      Delete
    2. Massimo:

      There's one issue that has come up several times, so I think it's worth discussing in a separate comment thread.

      Why is it unethical to violate the wishes of an author with respect to the usage of their work?

      As ethical assumptions go, it's not unreasonable on the face of it, and intuitively I might find myself agreeing with it. However I'm not sure that it bears up to analysis.

      Prohibitions an author might express might include the following:

      Thou shalt not download my book without paying me.
      Thou shalt not download my book without paying my estate after my death (in perpetuity).
      Thou shalt not borrow nor lend my book to others.
      Thou shalt not satirise my book.
      Thou shalt not give my book a bad review.
      Thou shalt not quote my book.
      Thou shalt not summarise nor describe my book.
      Thou shalt not reveal any information learned from my book.

      Why do you think some of this prohibitions are ethically binding while others are not?

      It seems to me that the only justification for holding the unauthorised distribution of a work to be unethical is economical in nature. It's not about transgressing against the wishes of the author, it's about making sure that authors are incentivised to produce successful works.

      As such, any argument about the rights and wrongs about illegal downloading should be concentrated on the effect these actions have on rewarding authors, not on whether they violate the authors' wishes.

      Delete
  26. You're working at this backwards.

    Information IS free, thanks to the internet. As long as one person on the planet wants you to have it (and for everything there seems to be at least one such person) then it will be available. Curtailing this involves extreme violations of rights, and much investment of resources.

    In light of that, what justification is there, in charging for material that is ALREADY created? Rather, content creators should charge for their work prior to it being created, as we're seeing happen with Kickstarter and similar methods.

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    1. That's wrong. Information takes a lot of energy to compile. That's the point of Massimo's post. That said, the dissemination of information on the internet has infinitesimal marginal cost, meaning every new copy is essentially free. But if the original creators are never compensated, we've got a "freeloader" problem that could collapse the information economy.

      Delete
    2. >Curtailing this involves extreme violations of rights, and much investment of resources... In light of that, what justification is there, in charging for material that is ALREADY created?

      As I have said in another comment, I am uncomfortable with the easy slide here from "it's hard to enforce copyright" to "enforcing copyright is unjustified." Have you heard of Plato's Ring of Gyges? If you had a ring that could make you invisible, no doubt you could easily get up to all sorts of mischief, up to and including rape and murder, and it would be damned hard to catch you. That doesn't remotely make those actions right.

      The above is not meant as a criticism of your Kickstarter idea, which might be the *practical* way to enforce this *moral* requirement. My point is, let us not mix "what is moral" up with "what is easy to enforce."

      Delete
  27. Randy,

    > Information IS free, thanks to the internet. <

    To begin with, not even the internet itself is free, so a fortiori information cannot be. Someone has to pay for power, servers, connections, upkeep, personnel, etc.

    > Curtailing this involves extreme violations of rights <

    What rights? On what basis do you have the right to freely copy my books? Just because you can?

    > what justification is there, in charging for material that is ALREADY created? <

    Do you not pay for a meal at the restaurant after the chef has cooked it?

    Disagreeable,

    > Harris's and Shermer's morality would be based more on using science to see which policies would produce "better" (by some measure) societies rather than enshrining natural tendencies in law <

    But if that’s the case I don’t see what the big deal is with either of them. It is entirely uncontroversial to have policy that is evidence-based, and of course policy is the concern of political science and economics more than of moral philosophy.

    > you justify your ethics in terms of the harm done to the author by the lost sale <

    Only in part. There is also the fact that you are violating another’s wish about how to treat her own work.

    > I think it is wrong to apply the language and philosophy of theft. I do think it's in a different, lesser category of immoral act <

    I’m not interested in the semantics, so I’m okay if you don’t want to call it theft. But it’s still unethical. And yes, to a lesser degree of plenty of other unethical behaviors.

    > the betrayal of a promise that cause no harm is not so much wrong as unwise. <

    Really? Is your wife going to be “harmed” if you sleep with someone else and she doesn’t know it? I’d still think it would be unethical.

    > Do you think it is wrong to resell a book? Do you think the author has a right to prevent this? <

    No, but surely you recognize that the cases are distinct. When you resell a book you can only resell one copy (which you had bought to begin with). When you copy a downloaded book (which you may not even have bought) you can make an infinite number of copies.

    > If I go to a torrent website to find a download of your book, I do so not having made any promise to you not to do so <

    Oh yes, my friend. The copyright of the work is inscribed in every e-version of it.

    > Why is it unethical to violate the wishes of an author with respect to the usage of their work? <

    Good question, as your examples clearly show. But I wouldn’t go quite that wide, certainly not to the point that the author can dictate things like no criticism allowed, no quotations, etc. I was referring to the sort of reasonable wishes that the author can express, for instance through copyright holding. (Yes, I know copyrights are a matter of law, not ethics, but I do think there is a link between the two.) Let me give you a different example that perhaps clarifies what I mean: if you check the upper right corner of this blog you’ll see that I grant permission to use part of what we publish here under a particular Creative Commons license. Now, you are perfectly free to violate that wish, and the violation would not cause me any economic harm, since the material is already available for free anyway. But I’d still count your violation as unethical.

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    Replies
    1. >But if that’s the case I don’t see what the big deal is with either of them. It is entirely uncontroversial to have policy that is evidence-based, and of course policy is the concern of political science and economics more than of moral philosophy.<

      I agree, neither of them is ultimately saying anything terribly controversial or even interesting. In fact Harris in particular seems mystified at why what he's saying is regarded as controversial at all. This is because he is guilty of overstating his case, and it is this overstatement (that all questions of morality are ultimately empirical) that everyone focuses on, when in fact 99% of what he says is about using science (by which he actually means science _and_ _reason_) to figure out how best to advance the well-being of conscious creatures.

      >There is also the fact that you are violating another’s wish about how to treat her own work.<
      Begging the question that it is wrong to violate another's wish about how to treat her work.

      >Really? Is your wife going to be “harmed” if you sleep with someone else and she doesn’t know it? I’d still think it would be unethical.<
      There's always the risk that she might find out, and in my case I would harm myself due to the feelings of (perhaps irrational) guilt I would experience. From the utilitarian point of view, it's better all around if I simply adhere to a rule whereby I will not sleep with someone else. Betraying this rule may not be so much utilitarian immoral, in the sense of causing harm, as it is deontologically unethical, in the sense of breaking a rule which is there to prevent harm. So there's different types of immoral/unethical acts. Stealing is generally immoral, whereas copyright infringement may be "merely" unethical.

      >No, but surely you recognize that the cases are distinct. When you resell a book you can only resell one copy (which you had bought to begin with). When you copy a downloaded book (which you may not even have bought) you can make an infinite number of copies.<
      Yes, but this a difference of scale, not a fundamental difference. In the console games industry, publishers lose a large fraction of sales due to second-hand sales. They lose a comparable (and perhaps lesser) fraction of sales due to piracy.

      Why then, if there is no fundamental difference, is one perfectly permissable but the other impermissable? If it's only a difference of scale, then I would expect one case to be very slightly immoral while the other is more immoral.

      >Oh yes, my friend. The copyright of the work is inscribed in every e-version of it.<

      So what? Reading the copyright does not constitute a promise on my part. Even if I am aware that I am transgressing against the wishes of the author, this is not the same thing as breaking a promise not to transgress. By the way, reading this sentence constitutes an acceptance that I am right and you are wrong, and you are hereby considered to have conceded the argument. ;)

      >But I wouldn’t go quite that wide, certainly not to the point that the author can dictate things like no criticism allowed, no quotations, etc.<

      Well, I wouldn't go quite so wide either! Some of these stipulations are more unreasonable than the others. But how can you justify where you draw the line? Why is it unethical for me to violate the creative commons license, but not to criticise your work should you attempt to prohibit this?

      Delete
  28. Some people have books on sale to advertise their existence, and consider that every free copy that goes out gives weight to the proposition that this writer has contributed knowledge of value to the word's culture. But of course I'm considering that different people write books for different purposes, which if course is not a matter to be considered here.

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  29. I agree with Massimo's view on copyrights, but for different reasons, and hence would be open to shortening the copyright period even more than he would like. There's no reason that the copyright should lasts long as the author lives.

    The original purpose of copyrights was not to give authors a way to get rich. The purpose was to create an environment that is conducive to generating more and more idea. If someone's writing a blog, it stands to reason that his productivity and the quality of his work would increase if he could do it full time. Copyrights therefore is about professionalism and specialization.

    Now not all professionals get a pension. So why should authors. They should be treated the same way other professionals are treated.There's no point in keeping the copyright alive until some writer dies at the age of 120.

    ***

    About wanting information for free, I think those who say information should be free say that with corporations in mind, not individual authors. I suppose that evolution didn't build us in a way to care about non-human giant entities like corporations. You'd wonder, well, what does it cost Microsoft if I steal just this one copy of Windows 8. It's not as if I'm ever going to buy it.

    Actually, come to think about it, if I'm not going to buy something like song-X no matter what, how am I hurting the record company or the artist if I steal it?

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  30. (1) All good right-thinking anti-realists ought to be comfortable with the notion that to Object A, all other Objects exist simply as information, even you Massimo Creature, what with your conscious wishes and desires, and sigh, in the year 2013 you can still get away with what will surely be considered a politically incorrect statement in 2023 concerning those with mental illness.

    (2) Gentle reader, you are most likely a realist. So ignore (1) and ask yourself if water wants to find its level? Similar thought for information.

    (3) If info wants to be free, it does not give an airborne copulation whether this is moral, just, or even cool.

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  31. First of all, I think "Information wants to be free." is a slogan which is usually understood as either the statement the copying can not be prevented (this side of outlawing computers) or in the context of RMS's famous quote "free as in freedom, not as in free beer."

    That being said, would you argue that a poor person should not be allowed to read your book, because of their failure to acquire the requested resources to pay you? Or would you prefer that this hypothetical persons pirates your book? ( Don't worry, I just ordered the dead tree edition of your book, so the question is completely theoretical.)







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  32. While I don't really disagree with your conclusions, I'd like to suggest that the phrase "information wants to be free" is actually more philosophically interesting and useful than you make it out to be.

    As someone already pointed out, the original meaning of the phrase had to do with access rather than money. It's true that some people use it the wrong way (just as the term "free software" is often used incorrectly) but the misuse is not a cogent or interesting form of the idea.

    The first interesting thing is the use of teleological language, which closely mirrors the way we speak in shorthand about evolutionary processes. For example, in a recent review, H. Allen Orr says, "The world changes and a species can’t find a mutation fast enough to let it live". And this is a review that argues *against* Thomas Nagel's teleological view of nature. Obviously, species as a whole aren't purposefully looking for good mutations. But the language of teleology fits so well and makes the description so much more concise that we don't tend to feel bashful about using it -- with the tacit understanding, of course, that we're not *really* implying purposeful behavior.

    One question this raises is whether perhaps *all* of our teleological language actually refers to complex interactions of local efficient causes in a system -- that is, whether *human* purposeful behavior might really be a sort of emergent causality made up of a vast number of local causes. Terrence Deacon seems to follow this route.

    Also, there's a parallel with biology in terms of both structure and change over time. "Information wants to be free" means that the structure of information is such that changes made to it in order to make it less free inhibit its ability to *be* information. The obvious example of this is encryption processes, which "entropize" information (entropic data is noise -- the opposite of information). A more easily understood example is the phrase, "networks want to be insecure". Networks connect nodes together, and any security features added to them inhibit the connectiveness, which is really their "network-ness". In teleological language, security acts against the purpose for which a network was designed, which is to connect things together.

    That's the structure part. The "change over time" part is the way the structure of information has changed historically. Over time, information has become ever easier to transmit, easier to copy, easier to copy *with precision*, and easier to interpret (standardized file formats, encodings, etc.). If information were a species, we'd say that it is evolving toward greater freedom of movement.

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  33. Massimo, you have stated several times in the comments that you care only about the ethical aspect of this problem and not the economic aspect. Do you care about solving the problem, or do you just want to complain about it?

    It is all well and good to say that people do not have a *right* to get information for free. However, that does absolutely nothing to change the fact that they *can* get it for free, and most of the time they feel no particular ethical compunctions about doing so. Looking at the issue from an economic perspective is helpful in elucidating why that is.

    Anti-piracy efforts in the present day maintain, incredibly stubbornly, a strictly analog mindset. Digital rights management software is solely an attempt to make digital goods, which have no scarcity, behave like physical goods, which do have scarcity. These attempts to shackle the Internet and prevent it from doing the thing at which it naturally excels - spreading information - are doomed to failure. That, to me, is what is meant by the phrase "information wants to be free."

    You make a very good point that it costs a lot to *produce* an ebook, and this is where the publishing industry must focus. The actual product of the ebook is virtually free to copy, so the industry can no longer survive by selling the ebook itself as though it were a physical product. People don't want just one ebook, though; they want good authors to write more books. Human creativity is still a scarce resource which has value.

    As long as the entertainment industries continue to insist on selling products instead of producers, they will have to treat their customers like criminals. Eventually, people will realize that an economy in which creators are never paid for creating will cease to have creators. This will happen with the industries or without them. Creators should push for this realization rather than resisting it.

    Here are some articles on this topic which are worth reading:
    http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic
    http://www.fortressofdoors.com/search/label/4%20currencies

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  34. Thank you.
    It seems like, as with everything else, there seems to be this divisive trend regarding this type of thing.

    Such as if you believe a publicly funded study should be free, then you should expect everyone else to WORK for free. Which makes no logical sense whatsoever! It would only make sense if we had a public funding for all writers, artists, etc. and a public fund to publish/disseminate.

    But it seems it's common for people to fail to consider these aspects, and therefore fail to advocate for what they really want - which is clearly publicly funded writers, artists, etc.

    It's the old, "I'm against this system, but I have nothing to offer instead!" Seems to be a very common problem among extremists in any issue category.

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  35. Yoshi,

    > would you argue that a poor person should not be allowed to read your book, because of their failure to acquire the requested resources to pay you? <

    I would argue that person should avail himself of a public library. At any rate, books are hardly in the same categories of foodstuff one needs not to starve.

    Asher,

    > The first interesting thing is the use of teleological language, which closely mirrors the way we speak in shorthand about evolutionary processes. <

    Yes, but of course my post wasn’t a quibble about the teleological-sounding phrase itself, it was about the ethics of expecting not to pay for someone else’s work.

    TBYITBSITBH,

    > If I can afford to buy one new music album, but there're two I'd love to get, it seems to me that it's totally harmless to buy one and get the other illegally, as per the utilitarian argument <

    I’m not sure Peter Singer would go along with that reasoning, but at best it illustrates what’s wrong with utilitarianism. As I said many times on this thread, monetary harm is not the only thing that makes an action unethical.

    > For people who would otherwise simply not be able to pay for such things, free (illegal) access to them can massively improve their life, and maybe even well-being <

    That strikes me as a bizarre argument. So any time you think you need something and can’t pay for it you just take it? What, exactly, is the difference between this attitude and standard theft, and why should it be acceptable?

    Kevin,

    > you care only about the ethical aspect of this problem and not the economic aspect. Do you care about solving the problem, or do you just want to complain about it? <

    The solution of the problem is, obviously, important. But it is conceptually distinct from analyzing the problem, which is what I did in the post. Besides, as you should have seen from the discussion, a number of people don’t even *see* the problem...

    > As long as the entertainment industries continue to insist on selling products instead of producers, they will have to treat their customers like criminals. <

    I’m beginning to think I’m in the minority, but damn it, I pay for every single one of my e-books, music downloads from iTunes, and videos that I watch. Because it’s the right thing to do. What a sucker.

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    1. "What, exactly, is the difference between this attitude and standard theft, and why should it be acceptable?"

      The difference is that you are not harming anyone. If you genuinely cannot afford to legally copy something, then illegally copying it genuinely harms nobody. If you cannot afford to buy a physical good, then stealing it harms the merchant.

      Delete
  36. Massimo,

    > I’m beginning to think I’m in the minority, but damn it, I pay for every single one of my e-books, music downloads from iTunes, and videos that I watch. Because it’s the right thing to do. What a sucker.

    Let me elaborate on my statement "they will have to treat their customers like criminals."

    DRM software only affects paying customers who buy the "official" products. Someone who pays for an ebook (or movie, or song, etc.) will often be restricted in their use of that product: they may only be allowed to use it on some of their devices or they may be unable to share it with friends. In contrast, someone who illegally downloads the product has complete freedom in how they use it. This amounts to a penalty on paying customers.

    Some industries have started to realize this, such as the music industry which now offers DRM-free downloads through Amazon and often iTunes. This move only came after over a decade of resistance, and they continue to push for legislation to preserve their pre-existing business models at the expense of Internet freedom and consumer rights and privacy.

    Treating one's customers like criminals does not seem like an economically viable or ethically sound business practice to me.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Massimo -

    Yeah, I wasn't saying that you were or should have been writing about what I found interesting about the phrase. But I do think it helps in a moral/ethical analysis to think about how the structural constraints of information affect the consequences of a moral stance. The tension between "wants to be free" and "wants to be expensive" is a structural and intrinsic one that we know can't be avoided or ignored in a moral analysis. Sorry for the tangent -- perhaps a reader or two will find value in it.

    "What, exactly, is the difference between this attitude and standard theft, and why should it be acceptable?"

    Standard theft is when the owner no longer has the object that is taken. The argument is that in the case mentioned, the cost to the owner is very small (someone else spent the energy to make a copy, program a crack, distribute the copy, etc., and the lost revenue is hypothetical because the thief wouldn't have purchased anyway), and the benefit to the thief is very large (a copy of Photoshop, say, allowing a starving artist to develop needed skills that she/he can't presently afford to pay for). It doesn't seem like a bizarre argument -- just a utilitarian one. I'd be tempted to argue that it's justifiable if the thief pays for the information if/when able to do so. The thief certainly can't argue that she/he is not in debt to the owner.

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  38. If we're talking about information that has acquired meaning, then the reason that this information now exists is to have that meaning used by those to whom it will mean something. Metaphorically wanting to be free for them to use, in other words.

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  39. Massimo:

    You wrote (in response to D. Me): >I wouldn’t go quite that wide, certainly not to the point that the author can dictate things like no criticism allowed, no quotations, etc. I was referring to the sort of reasonable wishes that the author can express, for instance through copyright holding.<

    Who decides what is "reasonable"? It seems that the authors should not decide, but rather society at large should determine what is fair compensation. We could take the viewpoint of Plato (The Republic):

    "Friend, we do you no wrong; for in other States philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you have been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and therefore we must insist on your descending into the den."

    In this sense, people are "voting with their mouse" to demand that intellectual/artistic materials be freely available. Morality/Ethics are not "out there" in the external world, waiting to be discovered like a law of physics, but are human creations. If governments were more responsive to the public, the monopoly rents would be overturned. Instead, government caters to the rich and powerful. That's why a recent law that EXTENDS copyright monopoly rents has the sobriquet "Mickey Mouse Protection Act".

    I think you are conflating "ethical" with "obeys outdated laws that are hated by the overwhelming majority, but loved by the rich and powerful".

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  40. Asher,

    > It doesn't seem like a bizarre argument -- just a utilitarian one. <

    I’m sorry, I remain unconvinced that utilitarianism can be bent to ethically justify thievery. and if it can, then there goes another strike against utilitarianism.

    Tom,

    > Who decides what is "reasonable"? It seems that the authors should not decide, but rather society at large should determine what is fair compensation. <

    Well, first one can provide arguments for why some things are reasonable and others less so. But society has indeed decided in this case. We have laws against copyright infringement.

    > people are "voting with their mouse" to demand that intellectual/artistic materials be freely available. <

    No, in our society we vote by proxy, it’s called a representative democracy for a reason. Direct voting is a really terrible idea. If we did it the way you suggest I’m pretty sure that interracial marriage would still be illegal in certain areas of the country.

    > I think you are conflating "ethical" with "obeys outdated laws that are hated by the overwhelming majority, but loved by the rich and powerful". <

    I assure you that I am not that naive.

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    Replies
    1. >But society has indeed decided in this case. We have laws against copyright infringement.<

      Society could be wrong. That's why I think it's important that we debate the morality of breaking these laws, otherwise we are merely extrapolating morality from legality, which seems fallacious to me.

      Furthermore, the existence of even a good law does not necessarily imply that breaking this law is morally impermissable in general.

      I feel that it would probably be a good thing if we had effective measures that could prevent piracy without limiting legitimate uses of content. If we could prevent illegal copying, this would mean an increased incentive for people to pay for digital works and therefore greater rewards for authors.

      I think that it's important that we recognise that copyright law is nothing more than a failed attempt to implement such a measure.

      In the real world, infringement is trivial. While it might be a good thing if we could make infringement impossible or costly in general, it does not follow that each specific case of infringment is morally impermissable.

      Delete
  41. Have not yet read through the comment stream but I find the original post very convincing. Two remarks:

    The desire for open access to publications is understandable and I sympathize. However, as a career scientist one is evaluated at every step for the ranking of the journals one gets into, and it would be career suicide to take the principled stance on that question unless open access journals are available for your area that are as prestigious as the standard ones or you are close to retirement. Family to feed etc. I also see certain problems with the incentives under an open access system.

    As an aside, I simply do not believe that the restricted access model is such a problem anyway except (and that is a biggie, of course) for libraries. If somebody wants to read my papers and cannot get behind the paywall they can simply send me an e-mail and ask for a PDF. That's how we do it.

    Second, I think the way illegal copying is treated in many jurisdictions is ludicrous and has too little regard for the actual damage done. There are big differences between the following situations:

    1. Somebody copies something for personal use that they would not have been able to buy anyway. In this case, nobody loses anything.
    2. Somebody copies something for personal use that they would have been able to afford. In this case, the author, publisher etc lose money.
    3. Somebody copies and widely distributes something for free. In this case, the author, publisher etc lose a whole lot of money.
    4. Somebody copies and widely distributes something for a lower price than the legitimate publisher. In this case, the author, publisher etc lose a whole lot of money, and the copier runs a criminal enterprise.

    I would throw the book at #4 and can understand people wanting to throw the book at #3, but it is genuinely unclear to me what the big problem with #1 is, for example. The fear mongering campaigns the publishing industries direct against #1 and #2 are completely over the top.

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  42. Massimo,

    > I’m beginning to think I’m in the minority, but damn it, I pay for every single one of my e-books, music downloads from iTunes, and videos that I watch. Because it’s the right thing to do. What a sucker.

    we aren't that far apart, as I agree we should pay for what we consume, I am merely disagreeing about the special case of pre-sampling before you pay (which practically only applies to music). You say going against an artists wishes in unethical, fine. But I still think that even without written consent it is implicit that an artist is ok with "you can listen to my music, whether it's at a record store, a friends house or tempararily downloaded, as long as you legally purchase it afterwards".

    Cheers
    Chris

    P.S. Could help but notice you mention iTunes again. It does seem curious why the fruit company does not seem to belong to the group of "panic-stricken large corporations" - they are certainly far from saints...

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  43. I'm not really sure if piracy can ever be justified in a direct sense (perhaps there's some case to be made when there's a different stream of compensation), but what I'd be curious to see explored is how those arguments against would similarly apply to other practices like lending a friend a book or film, or even institutions like libraries or rental stores. And for that matter, how it differs from radio or television. To that effect, I don't think the piracy is anything much different to what we've come to get used to as social creatures with shareable media - we've been getting information for (effectively) free, as well as sharing it with others, long before there was Napster. The internet just makes the practice more pronounced.

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  44. Chris,

    > Could help but notice you mention iTunes again. It does seem curious why the fruit company does not seem to belong to the group of "panic-stricken large corporations" - they are certainly far from saints... <

    No large corporation is saintly, though some are worse than others. But the target of this particular post was the sense of entitlement to piracy, not the behavior of corporations. I’ve written on the latter before, and will do so again...

    Kel,

    > I'd be curious to see explored is how those arguments against would similarly apply to other practices like lending a friend a book or film, or even institutions like libraries or rental stores. And for that matter, how it differs from radio or television. <

    There are definitely differences there. Rights for use of copyrighted material on radio, television and in libraries are clear and agreed to by all parties involved (and usually do involve compensation of authors and publishers). Lending books and records - as I pointed out before - is also different because there is only one copy (the one you legally own) that you can lend. With internet piracy you can make an indefinite number of copies of the work. Besides, even e-books now can be lent (again, by way of agreement with authors and publishers), so lending clearly isn’t the problem.

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  45. Disagreeable,

    > If you genuinely cannot afford to legally copy something, then illegally copying it genuinely harms nobody. If you cannot afford to buy a physical good, then stealing it harms the merchant. <

    Besides the point I have already made, that financial harm is not the only measure of unethical behavior, I just don’t buy this “I can’t afford it therefore I’m entitled to steal it” attitude. To begin with, it is hard to imagine someone who can afford a computer and an mp3 player but somehow cannot spare $0.99 for a song. Second, unlike the case of the starving person who steals foodstuff, it is plainly obvious that one can live without listening to downloaded music. Which to me means that all of this amounts to a gigantic case of rationalization for one’s unethical behavior.

    > Begging the question that it is wrong to violate another's wish about how to treat her work. <

    I think you need to be clearer on what constitutes begging the question, this isn’t a case of it, regardless of the fact that we may disagree on whether it is or it isn’t unethical.

    > Betraying this rule may not be so much utilitarian immoral, in the sense of causing harm, as it is deontologically unethical, in the sense of breaking a rule which is there to prevent harm. <

    There is no salient philosophical difference between morality and ethics, despite the fact - to which I have already agreed - that there is a range of unethical behaviors.

    > Why then, if there is no fundamental difference, is one perfectly permissable but the other impermissable? <

    Not sure why people seem to have such a hard time with this point: reselling a book or record is permissible because you purchased the physical object, it is yours. With electronic material, there is no object, you are dealing only with the content. The difference, therefore, is qualitative, not quantitative.

    > Reading the copyright does not constitute a promise on my part. <

    But opening that book after the copyright is, both legally and ethically.

    > But how can you justify where you draw the line? <

    In lots of interesting cases in life differences are of degree; it doesn’t follow that there are no salient differences.

    > Society could be wrong. That's why I think it's important that we debate the morality of breaking these laws, otherwise we are merely extrapolating morality from legality, which seems fallacious to me. <

    That’s precisely what we have been doing. But you seem to deny that society is right when it comes to copyright, and yet a subset of it turns out to be right when they decide to download material they haven’t paid for.

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    1. >Besides the point I have already made, that financial harm is not the only measure of unethical behavior,<

      Fair enough, but the relevant point in the context is that it's not the same as stealing because it is less harmful.

      >To begin with, it is hard to imagine someone who can afford a computer and an mp3 player but somehow cannot spare $0.99 for a song.<

      Plenty of digital goods cost a lot more than $0.99, and plenty of people have more time available to consume goods than they do money to buy them.

      >It is plainly obvious that one can live without listening to downloaded music<

      Agreed, which is why it is morally dubious.

      >I think you need to be clearer on what constitutes begging the question, this isn’t a case of it, regardless of the fact that we may disagree on whether it is or it isn’t unethical.<

      Begging the question is assuming that which is at stake in order to prove your point. Your argument against illegal copying is that (a)authors need to be compensated for producing their work and (b)authors have a right to have their wishes respected with regard to the use of the work.

      (b) is an assertion which is equivalent to that which is at stake (unauthorised copying is wrong), and so to assume it is begging the question in my book.

      I accept (a) and dispute (b) as unfounded or not yet established (if not necessarily incorrect).

      >There is no salient philosophical difference between morality and ethics, despite the fact - to which I have already agreed - that there is a range of unethical behaviors.<

      In context I thought the distinction I was making was clear: I was using immoral to refer to an action which is inherently wrong in itself (e.g. because it does harm), and unethical to refer to an action which breaches a code of conduct (as in legal ethics).

      >reselling a book or record is permissible because you purchased the physical object, it is yours. With electronic material, there is no object, you are dealing only with the content. The difference, therefore, is qualitative, not quantitative.<

      In either case the effect is the same: you are gaining the benefit of the work of the author without compensating the author. Why should the fact that you have a physical object make any difference? Whether you own something or licence something is a legal issue not a moral one.

      (Parenthetically, my position is that second-hand purchases of certain goods is perhaps morally dubious in the same way as unauthorised distribution.)

      In any case, the argument in your original post stressed the similarities between physical goods and digital goods, especially in terms of costs of production. If you now get to say there is a qualitative difference because there is no physical object, couldn't a pirate say the same thing? "With electronic material, there is no object, you are dealing only with the content, therefore different rules apply. I'm not stealing an object -- I'm disseminating information".

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    2. >But opening that book after the copyright is, both legally and ethically.<
      Well, legally the case is cut and dried, but I don't think you have given a justification for the ethics of it.

      For what moral reason should reading a copyright notice or other stipulation bind you to agree by it? You obviously did not feel bound to concede the argument just because you read my earlier tongue-in-cheek stipulation that you should.

      "In lots of interesting cases in life differences are of degree; it doesn’t follow that there are no salient differences."

      Agreed, of course. However, you are basing your argument on the premise that "authors have the right to control the usage of their work" though this is clearly limited to certain types of control. I'm just pointing out that you have not justified why control of distribution should be protected but not other kinds of control.

      >That’s precisely what we have been doing.<

      The general discussion has been on whether it is permissable to illegally copy content, but I'm not sure you have really engaged with the sub-issue of whether an author has a right to have his or her wishes be respected. The only justification you have provided for your position on this matter is that there is a law to that effect. I'm just pointing out that that's not really a justification at all.

      What I'm trying to get you to concede is that the author's right to control distribution stems from the author's right to be compensated for his or her work. If we can dispense with the author's rights issue, it boils down the economic need to compensate authors.

      If you want to show that there's more to the argument than economics, then it would be helpful to provide an alternative argument establishing the right of authors to control distribution of their content (as opposed to other rights of control they do not have).

      >But you seem to deny that society is right when it comes to copyright, and yet a subset of it turns out to be right when they decide to download material they haven’t paid for.<

      I don't think I'm making any such strong assertions. I'm making the case for uncertainty. I having particularly strong convictions either way is unsupportable.

      In any case, society is probably right to have a law protecting copyright (as I stated). I just don't think it's clear-cut enough to be able to say that illegal copying is always immoral.

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  46. Massimo:

    I think maybe the conversation needs to be rebooted. As far as I can see, this whole issue boils down to one simple question:

    Why should an author have the right to control distribution of their work (financial compensation excepted)?

    In particular, keep in mind that we do not usually grant the author the right to control fair use, second-hand selling, lending etc., so why is distribution different?

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  47. Massimo,
    just out of curiosity: did you make mixtapes back in the day? Is there a qualitative difference between that kind of copying and the "modern" digital kind and if yes, why? (By your reasoning above I would assume no.)

    Cheers
    Chris

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  48. Massimo,

    You wrote, “…you [D. Me] seem to deny that society is right when it comes to copyright, and yet a subset of it turns out to be right when they decide to download material they haven’t paid for.”

    Massimo, you yourself pointed out that the legal decisions by “Society” are by proxy and not direct vote. If a representative votes for a law that is contrary to popular opinion (which they often do), is it a contradiction that a subset of “Society” (a portion of the populace) should have a different opinion? I think we need to distinguish between the wishes of “Society” as reflected by representatives and the wishes of “Society” as reflected by popular opinion. I think that will explain how society can be wrong in one case and a subset of it right in another case.

    Disagreeable Me wrote in his Feb. 22 post: “Massimo seems to be assuming that it is necessarily unethical to transgress against the wishes of the author, but he has not yet explained why.”

    You wrote previously that, “… it seems to me to be a minimum ethical standard that unless an author/publisher agrees to make the work available for free there is a moral obligation not to steal it.”

    This doesn’t work for me as it wouldn’t be “stealing” if it were not for a law that says it IS stealing. But you say your ethical basis is not legal (“an unethical thing to do, whether permitted by the law or not.”). What then is your basis? It’s not legal. It’s not economics. It’s not popular opinion. So, what is it?

    I get a vague sense that it is based upon the principle that it is unethical to make use of another person’s work without their permission. But certainly such precepts must have limits. Could I charge you to look at the wall of my house after I painted it? You are enjoying my work without paying me! You wrote, “In lots of interesting cases in life differences are of degree; it doesn’t follow that there are no salient differences.”
    But how do we ultimately decide a particular case (like copyright) if not by popular opinion -- which you say we must discard on the grounds that it will lead to bans on interracial marriage?

    Can you clarify your basis for saying that authors should have monopoly rents and that denying them this wish is unethical?


    I

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    1. >But certainly such precepts must have limits. Could I charge you to look at the wall of my house after I painted it?

      Actually, you could; you'd just have to disclose the fact beforehand. Interestingly, the economic transaction thus created would be almost identical to paying to see an Yves Klein exhibition.

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    2. Ian: Although Massimo has pronounced this thread dead, your remarks made me think and want to reply.

      Suppose that we amend my wall example as follows: Assume that I am unable to prevent people from looking at my wall without paying (e.g. there are zoning laws that do not permit me to put up a screen). Also, I put up a sign: "you must pay if you look").

      I'd like to ask the follwing:

      1) Is it reasonable for me to expect the police to enforce something that is essentially unenforceable -- for example, put an army of police around my house 24/7 to apprehend anybody who looks without paying?

      2) If the vast majority of people passing by look without paying, are they unethical? Or, has society (as expressed by popular opinion) decided that the particular work I am offering in the particular format in which they view it doesn't merit payment?

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    3. @Tom: You are certainly correct that IP is not an easy notion and that there is a lot of complicated legal & moral hairsplitting that would need to be done in order to get a workable theory & set of laws.

      I'm not really interested in putting in all that work, but it seems like the patch for this particular example would involve some principle to the effect that charging someone to look at your wall must involve a contract freely entered into, and that if you cannot *help* but look at the wall then you have in effect been forced into the contract.

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  49. Tom, Chris, Disagreeable,

    I think the discussion is reaching somewhat diminishing returns, as well as expanding into much broader (even meta-ethical) directions that go well beyond my original post. I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful contributions (which is a large part of why I write the blog to begin with!). I'll keep mulling things over and eventually, as it often happens, publish a new post with updated views. Cheers.

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    1. Thanks for the courteous and stimulating debate, Massimo. I enjoyed it very much. It's given me plenty to think about. It may be that we are both right in the context of our own particular moral frameworks.

      I'm not going to say I'm not disappointed that you're bowing out, but I know you're a busy man.

      I look forward to hear more on the topic from you in the future.

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  50. What I take people to mean by that strange phrase is something more along the lines that in the era of the internet people have a right to completely free information

    I think you're misunderstanding it. I take it to mean that the ease and inexpensiveness with which bits can be copied today, makes it difficult to constrain that copying. We are no longer in the era of scribes and carbon paper, and laws fashioned for those days result in many actions which are reasonably perceived as injustice.

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  51. Interesting: the latest episode of The Pod Delusion podcast deals with an author, Terry Deary, who is clearly not happy that his books are being borrowed from libraries.

    It seems that in some countries at least (the UK in this case), libraries are not justifiable on the grounds of the author's consent, as the author has no legal right to deny consent.

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  52. Many people forget the key differences between free information and information piracy. Popular international authors like Paulo Coelho have released pirated version of his books online. The effort has contributed towards increasing the sale of his books in several countries, instead of reducing his overall revenue. So the concept of free information must be evaluated by keeping in mind certain criterions and circumstances.

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