So you must believe that Steve can't condition the sale of his secret with Bob upon Bob's behavior, according to you? Steve can't say, "Bob, this is yours as long as you don't tell fluoridation. If you break this, you forfeit ownership of this secret, and it is now mine again."
What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
Besides, if one could enter into such an agreement, what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement, resulting in you knowingly possessing what then becomes Steve's secret again upon sale to you? To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements, I do think you'll have a pretty large problem with capitalism, even separate from intellectual property, as it questions the very nature of both freedom and ownership. Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
> What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
I don't know of any country in the world that allows anything and everything to be put in a contract and for good reason. Why do you think that it is so?
> Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
When you sell it? Absolutely not. Why do you think that you should have control over something when you sell it?
By reading the rest of this comment, you agree to give me all your money forever. (edited to emphasize "rest of" which OP apparently missed)
Assuming you're still here, what's the ethical difference between this and "by purchasing this DVD you agree to blah blah"? In neither case did anyone agree to anything.
See my edit: of course, as a benevolent Rightsholder(tm)(c)(R) I am only demanding your money if you continue reading after the "contract" you "agreed" to.
The point, of course, is that there is no agreement in either case. You agree to do something when you agree to it, not when I claim that you agreed to it. You can argue the opposite legally, and you might even win, but you can't argue it ethically; absent a crisis of conscience halfway through, someone who intended to pirate a movie and then went on to actually pirate a movie did not agree not to pirate a movie a priori.
Except there is a very clear agreement in the case where you purchase a DVD. You own the physical DVD, but you license the contents of that DVD. It's right there on the DVD box itself.
A valid contract requires a meeting of the minds, but the average customer has no idea that a legal fiction separates the movie he wanted from the plastic disc he just bought.
It was a mistake to entertain dense contracts of adhesion with parties who were never really expected to understand them (who hires a lawyer before spending $15 on a movie?). UCC should add anything reasonable that copyright law doesn’t already cover. Infringement is a tort with statutory penalties even without any contract.
...yes, much like the very clear agreement in my comment where you agreed to give me all of your money. Why can you ignore the one, and I can't ignore the other? What, ethically speaking, is the difference between them?
Yes, you enter into an agreement with Disney that you will abide by copyright law. You would not have been sold the item if Disney were aware you did not agree to copyright law.
We're going in circles; why are they different? I understand that the movie studio would like them to be different, they put a sticker on the side of the DVD saying so, but I don't care about their opinion on the matter and even after four responses it's not clear why you think I ought to.
I get why you're taking this position - If I agree to not do X and then do X, you can call me unethical even if X is harmless. So, if you can show that pirates somehow agreed not to pirate, you can declare that those pirates are unethical without having to show that piracy itself is unethical. The problem with this position is that it uses semantics to contradict reality. You're asking us to imagine someone who picks up a DVD in a store and reads the sticker on the side and loudly declares, "What nonsense, I'm going to go pirate this movie right now!", and claiming that ethically he is somehow agreeing to the license, and that when he goes home and uploads it, that he is somehow breaking a promise not to pirate it despite having explicitly promised do exactly that. That's an obviously contorted position.
If piracy is bad, it's because of the ramifications of the actual act of piracy, not because a corporation fooled me into pinky-swearing not to do it. Companies try to tell us what to do all the time, you can just ignore them; boilerplate legalese has no moral or ethical valence. However, I will also say that I appreciate the time and patience you've put into this thread, you've been nothing but civil and in good faith, so thanks for that.
Piracy is immoral as it necessitates misrepresenting intention to abide by the implicit agreement that you enter into when you purchase a copy of a work. Piracy is immoral because it requires deception.
Additionally, it undermines capitalistic incentives to create intellectual works, but that's what drives creators of work to stipulate conditions when they sell copies of their work. But it's the deception, not the undermined capitalistic incentives, that make piracy immoral.
And thank you for your compliment! I'm fascinated by the idea that so many people fight so hard to find ways for piracy to be a moral act when, to me, it's infinitely easier to accept it as an immoral act and do it anyway. Do people really operate in life expecting to always do the morally correct thing? That's wild, to me.
You're welcome, and for the record, I'm equally fascinated by your position - that a corporation can change the ethics of my actions merely by wishing it so. Like, is this limited to corporations, or can regular people wield this magic? You seem to think that money changing hands is a critical factor - why so? If a moral commandment can be attached to a purchase, why not to a gift, a meal, a story, a forum comment? That's why I keep going back to the hypothetical about "By reading this you promise to give me money" sort of license. Yes, it's absurd, but that's the point - your position leads to absurdities.
And lots of them! Could a restaurant declare, "By purchasing this sandwich, you promise not to give us a bad review on yelp"? If not, how is that different? Would that license apply if the sandwich was free? What if someone else bought it for me? If I make you a sandwich and stipulate that you must declare it to be delicious, and it isn't, is it more ethical for you to break my "license" or to lie?
I got more! What about DVD region restrictions? If I buy a movie in America and the license requires me to buy a second copy to watch in Asia, am I ethically obligated to do that too, even though that doesn't have even a fig leaf of moral justification beyond the manufacturer's profit motive? Is it unethical to skip the unskippable ads? For that matter, how does this license magically transfer itself from the rightsholder to the manufacturer, warehouse, retailer, and thence consumer? If I sell it used to my friend John, has he "agreed" to a contract with whoever originaly published the media through the magic of transitive association? What if I give it away for free, or throw it away and someone picks it out of my trash?
We're not done! Does this magic travel backwards in time? What license did I agree to when I inherited my Dad's old Beatles albums on vinyl? Bandcamp offers seven different licenses for music, is it one of those or a different one? Am I allowed to watch in in Asia, or is it region-restricted too? If not, how do you know?
We haven't even discussed immoral licenses. What if the license says, "By purchasing this you agree not to show it to any filthy stinking [ethnicity] people", can I ethically ignore that? What about those Taylor Swift albums that she doesn't own the rights to, can we pirate those? What about a trans person who wants to read Harry Potter, is it more ethical for them to purchase the books or to bootleg them? Can I download Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book"? OJ Simpson's autobiography? Henry Kissinger's?
Etc, etc. You get my point, I hope, which is that the seemingly simple "piracy is bad because it's unethical to ignore a shrinkwrap license" position is actually fraught with contradictions and argumentum ad absurdums. Whereas, the inversion - breaking the license is unethical because piracy is bad - is blissfully free of these problems. It allows exceptions, as in "OK, Henry Kissinger is fair game but you still have to pay for books not written by mass murderers" without compromising its central premise. The only downside is, it requires you to demonstrate that piracy is bad in itself, which requires a discussion of the different ways it can help and hurt different artists in different circumstances, rather than a tidy one-line proof that all pirates everywhere are bad, QED.
This is a long thread and post and sometimes with all the hypotheticals it's easy to be misunderstood, so to be sure that I am actually taking a stand (as opposed to just throwing rocks at yours) 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. That the license claims it constitutes an "agreement" is simply false by any reasonable definition, as proven by the fact that people regularly purchase media who demonstrate their failure to agree with it by word and action. The only purpose such licenses serve is that some corporate lawyer somewhere decided it might help them win some hypothetical lawsuit; it is the ethical and legal equivalent of wearing a t-shit reading, "By reading this shirt, you agree not to rob me."
I can clear this up simply; do you believe in the concept of contracts? If so, why might your examples not be valid contracts? I think if you can figure out how to apply the concept of contracts to this situation, you will understand my position.
I think you egregiously misunderstood that comment. Of course those silly examples are silly; that's the point, they are silly in the same way and for the same reason that DVD licenses are silly. Do you believe in things that look like contracts and sound like contracts and are full of impressive-sounding legalese and were written by a team of lawyers, but are despite that a load of old tosh?
So if contracts exist, can a contract exist where Steve offers a copy of his work to Bob, but only on the condition that Bob agree to not share that copy with anyone else?
Would it be immoral for Bob to agree to such a contract, but then change his mind after obtaining the copy of the work and begin sharing it with others?
I feel like I'm talking to an LLM with a very limited token history. Yes, it would, if Bob actually agreed to a real contract. Have I not made it clear why I don't think purchasing a DVD constitutes agreeing to the license attached to it? That was literally the point of my very first reply to you: the difference between agreeing to something and being told "I declare that you agree to this".
So, if we agree on these concepts for an explicit contract, do you believe in implicit agreement to contracts? This might take the form of, e.g. an expectation of refund if this DVD ends up being blank, or the belief that the DVD won't contain a virus or cut you when you grab the edge. They're not written on the side of the DVD, and they're not declared, "Because you read this, you must agree," but they still exist as a set of expectations and assumptions that come with social interactions (including product sales).
In other words, are there implicit rules that govern any given exchange beyond those that are explicitly stated before the exchange occurs? Really, rules that govern social interaction generally. Do those rules exist?
> do you believe in implicit agreement to contracts? This might take the form of, e.g. an expectation of refund if this DVD ends up being blank, or the belief that the DVD won't contain a virus or cut you when you grab the edge.
In a word, no. I expect the DVD to work and not have a virus because consumer products are usually subject to an implied warranty of merchantability (which is very much not an ethical agreement but a legal obligation imposed by courts). The idea of a corporation replacing a faulty product because it's the right thing to do sounds like something from a children's book with talking badgers who wear waistcoats and serve tea. The real-world DVD manufacturer would dump toxic waste in my back yard if they thought the savings would exceed the fine.
> they still exist as a set of expectations and assumptions that come with social interactions (including product sales).
Purchasing a product from a corporation is not a social interaction. Not sure what else to say beyond referring you to the definition of "social."
> In other words, are there implicit rules that govern any given exchange beyond those that are explicitly stated before the exchange occurs? Really, rules that govern social interaction generally. Do those rules exist?
There are implict rules for all sorts of situations, sure. People tend to disagree on what they are, which is why we have so many explicit rules, e.g. copyright law and the CFAA and so forth. But sure, implicit rules can exist. "Don't fart in a crowded elevator" might be one. Another might be, "If you have a point to make, explain it clearly as opposed to dragging it out with leading rhetorical questions." What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?
> People tend to disagree on what they are, which is why we have so many explicit rules, e.g. copyright law and the CFAA and so forth.
If this is an explicit rule attached to every sale, then by purchasing a copyrighted work, you're consenting to that part of the agreement, yes? And if not, then how is this an explicit rule?
Keep in mind that regardless of whether or not law is an accurate reflection of morality, once it's part of the agreement, you consenting to it via purchase means you accept it, presuming as you said that it is indeed part of every sale agreement.
> If this is an explicit rule attached to every sale, then by purchasing a copyrighted work, you're consenting to that part of the agreement, yes? And if not, then how is this an explicit rule?
First, breaking a law isn't by itself unethical. You can argue otherwise if you like, but a) it opens up a whole slew of absurdities (e.g. exploiting a software bug on a slot machine for profit is unethical IFF it's on a network that crosses a state line - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Kane), and b) you'd be abandoning everything you've said up til this point.
Second, copyright law is not a rule that is "attached to every sale," whatever that means. (If it were, you could get around it by shoplifting!) You need to stop blurring the lines between legal rules and ethical rules, because it's led you to confuse the difference between agreeing to a rule and being subject to it. So, let's make that explicit. I'm subject to copyright law. Doesn't matter if I agree to it or consent to it (it's not even clear what consenting to a law means), I'm subject to it regardless.
Now, you can certainly argue that there are ethical laws that we are all subject to as well. But, you are not arguing that! (correct me if I'm wrong, of course) You are arguing that there is an ethical law against piracy that pirates have agreed to, without wanting to, and I'm telling you, that's not a thing that can happen. You can't agree to something against your will.
So, you gotta make a choice to make this whole line of reasoning coherent. This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse? If so, I think they very clearly are refusing it, and if not, you cannot meaningfully claim that they agreed to it.
So, you believe that there is not a set of expectations that anchor human interaction, including the exchange of goods, that we implicitly opt into as a mechanism to preserve self-interest?
Assuming you are referring to the social contract, I refer you again to the definition of "social"; corporations are not part of it, any more than a scorpion is, or a calculator. Could you answer some of these questions so I can understand your position better?
> What implicit rule is it that you think applies to purchasing stuff?
> This ethical agreement not to pirate stuff, is this something that pirates can refuse?
But you don't need to actually agree to the contract in order to purchase the DVD.
It's a contract that the rights holder is trying to say you've agreed to implicitly by buying the DVD, but you've never actually agreed to anything.
If I tell the checkout clerk at Walmart verbally "I refuse to abide by the terms of use for this DVD and I will make copies and distribute them as I please", that clerk has absolutely zero obligation to refuse to sell me the DVD and would probably just be like "sure man whatever"
So it's not actually a condition of sale.
It's supposedly a condition of viewing/usage of the content on the DVD, but I never agreed to it and the content is in my possession so...
The Walmart store associate absolutely has a duty not to sell you that DVD; while we can argue over the nature of the implicit contract you consent to when you buy something, it's almost certainly an explicit clause in Walmart's contract with, say, Paramount that they take all effort to limit piracy of content they sell to customers.
> it's almost certainly an explicit clause in Walmart's contract with, say, Paramount that they take all effort to limit piracy of content they sell to customers
I've actually worked at retail stores that sold CDs, DVDs and Videogames. At no point during any kind of training was I told to take any action to limit piracy of content that we sold to customers.
If this was part of Retailers contract, then it would certainly be part of sales associate training.
Since it's not, I'm going to have to firmly assert that it is Definitely Not "almost certainly an explicit clause" like you claim.
Why would a store associate be aware of the language of the contract between your corporation and the supplier?
Besides, even if it weren't in the contract, the product is covered by copyright law. No person who owns content that can trivially be made worthless absent copyright law would ever allow a copy of their work to be made. That's the agreement you enter into when you purchase a copy of the work.
If such a contract exists then the retailer has to uphold the contract
The associates at the point of sale are the people who are in the best position to uphold the contract
To uphold the contract they would need to receive training. They wouldn't have to know the exact language of the contract, but there would be a procedure in place that the retailer could use to demonstrate that they are upholding the contract to the best of their ability.
Since such training doesn't exist, then it's likely no such contract exists either.
>What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
Nothing prevents anyone from entering into such an agreement, but it can't be called a "sale". Like I said, perhaps it's a lease of some kind, but selling something and putting special conditions on the transfer are mutually exclusive. If you sell me something then I own it, can I do whatever I want with it (destroy it, gift it, sell it, etc.); if can't do whatever I want with it then I don't own it, and you haven't sold it to me.
>what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement
At this point we're probably talking about contract law, not ownership rights, so "violation" seems perfectly adequate.
>To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
Just as example, when someone misses a payment on a purchase and it's repossessed, they're not said to have "stolen" the item, they're said to have "defaulted" on the debt. Your usage of the word "theft" is one I've never seen before.
>If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements
You can enter into all sorts of agreements that entitle you to limited prerogatives over something. Those agreements go by different names, and so does the relationship between you and the thing that the agreement is about while the agreement is current. "Contingent ownership" is a term that refers to nothing that exists, as ownership involves total decision power over something, and a sale is a particular agreement that involves the transfer of that power in its entirety.
>Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?
Yes, again, you can enter into agreements with other people over something you own and impose whatever terms you like without transferring ownership of the thing. It's not a sale until you relinquish all rights over the thing. Hell, you can even do a sort of timed sale where you reserve the right to claw back the thing for a limited time; in such a case one could not say the sale is complete before that time elapses, and before then the person doesn't have complete ownership.
If I defined "contingent ownership" as a "perpetual license for use that only expires if either party violates the terms of the contract," would all of this make much more sense? Then, Bob never owns Steve's secret and is only permitted to use it in certain circumstances, none of which include Bob making Steve's secret available to you. In fact, Steve explicitly disallows Bob from doing that in the contract, and Bob agrees to this.
If Bob violates his agreement, breaks his word, and you know he did that but accept Steve's secret anyway, is that immoral, to you?
As I said previously, bits are not exactly the same as physical goods. You own a string of bits as long as you keep it secret (i.e. within your control). Regardless of what any law says, once Steve told Bob his secret, he lost ownership of it. If someone steals your car, there are, conceivably, things the law can do to get it back to you, because a physical item can only exist in one place at any given time. If Bob finds out Steve's secret, there's nothing any law can do to make Bob forget Steve's secret.
Any law or contract that attempts to treat strings of bits as equivalent to physical items is fundamentally flawed.
> Regardless of what any law says, once Steve told Bob his secret, he lost ownership of it.
This, therefore, means you don't believe in the enforceability of contracts, or that someone is free to make agreements as they see fit. That's kind of a problem in a capitalistic society, as contracts run, well, everything more complex than a simple transfer of ownership, which IP rights are not.
Besides, we're not really talking about the legality of any of this, we're focusing on the morality. In this case, the morality of asserting you won't do something, and then doing that anyway.
To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
>This, therefore, means you don't believe in the enforceability of contracts
It means don't believe in the absolute enforceability of contracts. If a contract contains clauses that require the physically impossible to happen, such a contract cannot possibly be enforced in its totality.
>To apply our hypo, if Bob told Steve he wouldn't do something in order to satisfy Steve's conditions of transfer of ownership to Bob, but then Bob does what he claimed he would not, is that immoral?
Your question is too abstract to answer. If Bob promised Steve he wouldn't release the slaves, I'd say it's outright immoral to keep that promise. If Bob promise Steve he would make another payment in 30 days, it's probably at least unethical to not keep that promise, absent any additional circumstances. If Bob promise Steve he wouldn't do something with Bob's own property, I'd say Bob is within his right to do whatever he wishes, regardless of anything else.
Even so, the moral act would be to refuse to agree to the contract, not duplicitously agree to the contract with zero intent on doing what you claimed.
And no, watching Avengers: Endgame is not on the same moral level as freeing slaves. I will not cede that ground.
>Even so, the moral act would be to refuse to agree to the contract, not duplicitously agree to the contract with zero intent on doing what you claimed.
The moral (if you insist) act would be to not offer a nonsensical contract. If I want to do something and I have to agree to a nonsensical contract to do it then I'll agree to it and then do whatever I want. If the other party doesn't like then next time they can offer a reasonable contract, and if they don't I'll just do it again. Sorry, but you don't get my firstborn just because you put it in an EULA that I had to agree to when I installed your software.
>And no, watching Avengers: Endgame is not on the same moral level as freeing slaves. I will not cede that ground.
Interesting. However, the one who made a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable clauses in a contract was me. The way you posed your question in your last comment implied that you think that, if you've already entered into an agreement not to do it, pirating a movie and freeing slaves are ethically equivalent. It would seem that respecting your word to you trumps everything else, no matter what. If that's really what you think, then fine, I can respect that. However, if it's possible that you could enter into an agreement that would require you to act in a way that you find unacceptable and you would rather breach the agreement than act in that way, you will need to concede that what you find unethical is not breaching the agreement per se, but the specific manner in which the agreement is breached.
In other words, in such a case we have a simple difference of opinion. You think slavery is bad and pirating is bad (perhaps to different degrees, but still, they're bad), and I think slavery is bad and pirating is not bad. That there's an agreement or whatever else is just a distraction.
What mechanism prevents Bob and Steve from entering into such an agreement? To me, that would be a violation of freedom, to limit the kinds of agreements people can enter into.
Besides, if one could enter into such an agreement, what would you call the deliberate violation of the agreement, resulting in you knowingly possessing what then becomes Steve's secret again upon sale to you? To me, knowingly possessing something that does not belong to you seems like a fair definition of theft.
If you don't believe people are free to enter into contingent ownership agreements, I do think you'll have a pretty large problem with capitalism, even separate from intellectual property, as it questions the very nature of both freedom and ownership. Even by your own definition of "control", wouldn't I not have control over something if I can't concoct whatever rules for that thing that I like?