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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

> and not so ethical

Sharing content hardly involves ethics. It's more about economy.

EDIT:

What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run.

I wanted to make a point. Defending that point would take essays, which I'm not in the mood to write right now.

Refer to RMS's essays:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html

The only 'questionable' act involved in sharing is violating copyright. I don't think of that as a crime or even as an ethically questionable act.

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> What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run.

Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat, it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the economy.

You read my post and replied to it without my permission. I want you to send me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign saying "I'm really sorry".

/sarcasm

I don't see your point, sarcasm or otherwise.

The creators / owners of copyright have only artificial, legal ways of making you pay for the content. There is no moral or ethical reason to pay for the content. It's equivalent to saying You read my post and replied to it without my permission. I want you to send me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign saying "I'm really sorry". They have no real claim to that.

If you'd said in advance that I had to do that before replying, then sure you'd have a point. You can't apply the condition after, I can't give you a DVD for free and then demand payment after you've watched it if there wasn't a prior agreement.

I did, but you didn't read my 30-page legalese fine print.

/sarcasm

This depends on how much you believe in moral-relativity. There is a concept of ownership and rights (sometimes legally defined) associated with IP. Disregarding those rights can be seen as unethical. There is no precedence in our culture saying that you have the right to disallow comments on your IP, which is why your example is not considered unethical.

To take your example to an extreme, is it unethical to trespass on someone's property? Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street? Our concept of ownership would suggest that the former is unethical, the latter is not, but is that just because we have artificial ideas of ownership?

My ethical system includes IP ownership. I think it is unethical to use GPL code without releasing the source, for example.

I have heard that it's different in other countries, but the system in the USA is pretty clear that IP is a legal construct, and is only used as an incentive, not an inherent right. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...

James Madison, who wrote most of the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote most of the Declaration of Independence (and who were both later elected to the office of President), thought that IP had no basis in reality. http://classicliberal.tripod.com/madison/detached4.html and http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

Just because US law defines IP as an incentive not an inherent right doesn't mean that culturally it's only a incentive.

You have poorly defined what "ethical" means. So far the only clarification you have made is that legal and ethical are too different things. Some people disagree and define "ethical" as "law-abiding" which means that copyright infringement is unethical.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that there is a degree of relativism to your statement. Just because you don't think that copyright infringement is unethical doesn't mean that people who do are wrong.

I'm not really a proponent of moral-relativism but ultimately I have to accepted that ethics are a human construct and as such disagreement will arise over its precise definition. For example, I think eating meat is unethical but most people don't. Does that make me wrong?

I'm just using "ethical" to contrast things that would be wrong no matter what the law says. Breaking the law is unethical - that's why we don't need a "Rule 1: Don't break the rules." Stealing would be unethical even if there were no law. But copying something without the author's permission isn't unethical except when the law says so.

Ah, I see what you mean but I disagree with your premise - I think that IP is an ethical gray area and that copyright infringement can be unethical absent the law/economics. I think it would be unethical for a programmer in a country that doesn't recognize the GPL to use GPL'd code in a proprietary product, for example, because they would be going against the expressed [reasonable] wishes of the content creator.

Culturally, filesharing is everywhere (as was sharing of videos, CDs and books before it), so approaching the question from that angle is not going to be useful to a stance favoring very strong copyrights.

I am not trying to take a stance for strong copyright. My stance is that there are (or can be) non-artificial ethical reasons to not commit copyright infringement.

> Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street?

Not per se, but:

It's unethical to invade other people's privacy.

If you had a telescope with a special vision ray that could see behind walls, it would be unethical to use it to see inside people's homes and bedrooms.

Thanks for the edit, I was not looking forward to a huge debate over this topic since it's been discussed to death. We all have our own opinions on what's ethical in this area, it's all very gray.

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