Hacker News Reader

Comment by WendyTheWillow | Hacker News Reader

Piracy is immoral because you agreed to the laws, not because they are moral. The expectation of compliance is part of the social contract (you would understand this if you read what I wrote about me describing how disagreement with laws is acceptable). This is compatible with the idea that laws are not inherently moral, though it's a common mistake to make to confuse morality with legality. That's not what is happening here.

The reason this conversation won't progress is that you're more or less ignoring all of ethics and philosophical thought as it's been laid out in the past 500 years, instead substituting your own opinion, as if that were even approaching equality. Of course we won't get anywhere if you can't address the obvious relationship piracy has with the concept of "Free riders", for example.

View on HN

(you've heavily edited the comment I was replying to, I shall now edit the response)

> The expectation of compliance is part of the social contract.

Ethics requires that we act ethically regardless of what the law says, period. You can't something something Hobbes your way out of that.

> The reason this conversation won't progress is that you're more or less ignoring all of ethics and philosophical thought as it's been laid out in the past 500 years, instead substituting your own opinion, as if that were even approaching equality.

Huh? I'd be perfectly happy if CDs and DVDs were sold according to 500-year-old philosophical ethics. The "you might own the disc but you're only allowed to do what I say with it" stuff is comparatively very recent.

> Of course we won't get anywhere if you can't address the obvious relationship piracy has with the concept of "Free riders", for example.

Why am I supposed to address this? Was I asked to at some point? You've spent a solid week arguing that piracy is unethical specifically because the people who do it have somehow agreed not to. Are you now pivoting to the position that it's unethical for reasons pertaining to the consequences of piracy? If so (and far be it from me to accuse you of not reading my comments, which would be very rude) can I remind you that I clearly and explicitly agreed with that?

> ...I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker.

You're misunderstanding. I have never claimed that you must act unethically, I claimed that your lack of stipulation in the sale amounts to agreement to the terms. The time to object was at the point of the transaction, not afterward, and certainly not without new information. I am not saying the law itself is or isn't moral, I'm saying your agreement to the law, knowing you have zero intention of following it as you disagree with it is immoral.

The correct course of action, the moral course, would be to decline the transaction on moral grounds. If you don't like copyright law, you shouldn't buy products that require its adherence, and you shouldn't pirate products that require someone else to deceive in order to obtain.

And if you can't figure out how to deal with the basic logical issues with your position, logical issues that people 500 years ago were able to navigate, that's more of a positional issue for you than it is any problem of mine. And why should you care? Because you seem to want to be correct here, and that's the only path forward. You cannot maintain your position justifiably without addressing the issues I've brought up with said position.

Your position re: "the sticker" is a substantial retraction of your initial argument, that piracy is not immoral. It's also incorrect. The "sticker" presents a reminder of the social contract's obligations, which only makes it further immoral that, despite the reminder, a person still willfully deceives their way into possession of a copy of a work.

> Your position re: "the sticker" is a substantial retraction of your initial argument, that piracy is not immoral.

That was my original argument, from a week ago. You can go look at it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38453647

Don't know how I could've made it any clearer. Genuinely curious whether/how you will update as a result.

Does it upset you that I update my comments during the window HN allows? I can stop if you like. I think when you say "genuinely curious" I'm not sure I believe you actually are.

And sure, we can call that your original argument. It's still wrong.

You spent a week arguing with me under the impression I believed X, and I pointed out that I had told you at the beginning I didn't believe X. I was curious whether you'd re-read the thread with this new information in mind and re-evaluate the things you'd said. I think we both know the answer to that, so here we are.

You are right though, that I thought I was a lot more curious than I was - I forgot about this until I saw you peddling the same line of goods in a new thread this morning. Best of luck :) I will close by saying thanks for being civil, I hope you experienced this conversation in the "Let's have a friendly tussle over this relatively obscure point for fun and to understand the world better" spirit in which it was intended. For future reference, you can enhance that good-natured spirit greatly by not accusing people of being upset. Also wouldn't hurt to pay a little extra attention when someone says, "Just to avoid misunderstanding I'll try to clearly summarize my position...", missing that caused a lot of unnecessary repetition.

I didn't spend a week misunderstanding you (I hope you realize you wrote a lot more than the one sentence you referred back to), I miswrote one line in one comment out of dozens that you've now latched onto. That's fine, but it doesn't hold as a meaningful disagreement to what I've said here, a fact I bet you hoped I'd miss.

My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.

> a fact I bet you hoped I'd miss.

Don't do stuff like this. Communication via text between strangers over philosophical topics is hard enough without it. Assume good faith.

This argument has only ever been about one thing: you made a claim that there's an easy way to show that all piracy is unethical regardless of the details, and I said that was wrong. That's it. However, when somewhere along the way you get the idea that I'm also arguing that piracy is always ethical, it's not sneaky or underhanded of me to point out that I'm not. It's not impossible to imagine a world in which that would cast some of the things I've said in a new light; "your reason for believing X is wrong" is materially and non-trivially different from "X is wrong."

> My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.

Wrong on both counts, but it looks like you found a new thread full of people who agree with me and still want to discuss it, so no great loss I'd imagine.

Ah but you gave away the game just now; either they agree with you and I was right to argue as I have, or you had one specific point, one nobody else has made in the second thread. Looks like the argument really was about what I said it was, after all!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com