The law says its illegal to pirate, or illegal distribution of content, of movies and music. But why do all of us still do it?
We know its illegal, and we know its morally wrong to promote it to friends and others, but we still do it.
Could it be, that laws restrict the free will, in a way that it was never ment to be restricted?
Some people posit that information itself is a self-replicating entity that, like a virus, enters a host and causes copies of itself to be made. Unlike a virus, a human being would say that it is his own choice to replicate the information, but whatever the case, some would indeed say that it is impossible and maybe even wrong to try to restrict the free spread of any information. I would disagree to the extent that the information is originated or first encoded by individuals who make a living from it and rely on it to survive; but there’s something to be said for the wonderful inscription “These words may be copied free forever…”
Certainly nobody who knows what he is about obeys the law simply because it is the law; there are moral considerations and practical ones.
hey, good metaphor as a virus.
going on your idea, bear with me, the virus spreads based on the idea of survival, the basic of life, a fact we can not deny.
then, is there something similar in analogy to file sharing? think about it for a second, is there some inheret quality in the action of file sharing, something so basic that we feel its inevitable to act and keep sharing?
What is that basic?
I do not think it wise to say “… and we know its morally wrong to promote it to friends and others…” because not everybody subscribes to the ideal that it is immoral, although my personal philosophy works like this: If you have permission to distribute it, do so, if not don’t, and if it is something that is known to be in the public domain legally (like the song “Happy Birthday,” or some stories, etc) and a group tries to enforce control over this particular Public Domain work, then we have to rebel to preserve this public domain work’s status.
A minor misconception is that if it is copyrighted, it can not be distributed freely. Although true most of the time, there are people who copyright stuff, but allow it to be freely share it.
I think the rebellion has to do with the taking advantage of a business group or groups that will do anything to preserve a business model that is used in a way that screws copyright holders, and doesn’t keep up with the technology changes.
i think the main reason why people steal from internet is because if the internet wasnt there with the goods, pirates would just give up on it and not worry about spending their money on it.
i- uh my friend dls music and video games, and this friends defientely would not have spent a large sum of money on that software if he was forced to in order to enjoy it. he would just rather not enjoy it.
hey music industry how much does it cost you to make one cd? and how much do you think im gonna pay? fuck you.
what the whole country needs to do is stop spending money on retail real estate!!! virtual real estate (a website) is virtually free!! when you independently distribute something on your website it costs a tiny fraction of what it would when you deal it out to wholesalers and retailers; they all take a little cut just like drug dealers.
so cut the middle man and everyone is happier, except those parasite middle men. these are our real pirates. they take our money and they dont even offer a real service except for a roof over our unbought products.
Some things are difficult to own. Specifically, ideas are difficult to own.
It is not like a concrete object, which has a definitive place. Ideas have no single place.
If I steal your house, or your car, or your shoe, then I have it and you don’t any longer.
If I were able to able to just make a copy of your house, your car and you shoe, then I would only have a copy of your object and not the thing itself. You would suffer no loss of property. Nothing you own would be gone when I copied it.
Now we have no method to copy a house, but we do have a quick and effective method to copy a song. I can make a copy of a song in mere moments that sounds every bit at good as the original. I have not taken any object away from you. I only made a copy of what you had. It is not stealing. No thing has been taken away.
Ownership is only an idea. It has an effect through belief that get backed up with force, when necessary.
This is MY car. If somebody steals MY car then I get the police to enforce my ownership of MY car. With a car, or any other concrete object ownership is strongly related to possession. Everything I own I usually also possess.
Now with an abstract object like a song possession is divorced from ownership. Just because I have a copy of the song in my possession, that is unrelated to if I own it or not. The company that distributes the product retains the ownership. They own the song no matter who possesses it. This is ownership unlike other forms of ownership.
Their ownership of the song only works if we believe that the company owns it. There is no way for them to completely enforce their ownership when copying is so easy and effective.
So the owners of songs tap into guilt. They try to stigmatize unauthorized copying. They invoke the curse of the lawsuit! They summon forth their lawyers from the pits of Hades and send them forth to smite the wicked! The curse of the Cooperate Lawsuit being the most devastating and vile curse ever wrought. (Yet, all the kinds horses and all the kinds men cannot put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.)
Plus the celebrity and wealth of musical artists diminishes our sympathy for them. We feel as if we don’t take much away from them by copying rather then buying their albums.
You never know when two people on opposite places of the world could be thinking of the same creation at the same time. I do not believe can be “stolen” as some say it can, because then how would people be able to create different things based on other thoughs and ideas then? I mean, if you could “steal” an idea and others can’t use it, don’t you think “new” ideas and creations would be limited because they would be “snatched” away by too many people?
I do think that the current copyright laws, which deviate too far from their origional purpose, can stifle innovation instead of promote it like it was intended to, mainly because if an idea is even like another, under the law they can be sued for infringement. This stifles because if too many people are sued for having creations that are too close to in similarity to another, no matter how slight this is, I think people would grow to be too afraid to create something “new” at the risk of getting sued. Just my hypothesis.
First,
I guess my original quesiton was: If we assume breaking the law is morally wrong, assuming we all agree that the law exists and should be placed for the file sharing situation, then what is it the makes us want to keeping sharing it?
The thrill of not being caught? the idea of rebellion against law’s? or is it, what i think, actually performing the idea of a free will, because the law has bounded our free will too much, and this is why we are breaking this law. from a society point of view, in order for economy to work, we need laws; from a philisophical point of view, we have given up too much of free will, and, although understanding the consequences, we still act according to free will?
Second,
The idea of file sharing, and you not losing anything because i am just making a identical copy. These are ideas that of virtual property. to enjoy music, in the good old days, you would have to go to a concert hall. then time passed we invented long magnetic strips that can replay the music or video again and again. but to see the live band perform, you would still have to wait in line for 2 days and 2 nights, paying a good 100 dollars for a front row seat. because you are buying a live show content, that is not virtual and has no copies before it.
like someone previous replied, file sharing is just making a copy, you did not steal the actual thing. then i think the question becomes, whether or not we should give virtual content any value? and the even more troubling part would be how to decide on what value to give it?
I do think the only kind of “virtual content” that can have value is money, like that in a virtual bank/paypal account, because unlike music or software, this is the [i]only[/i] kind of intangible data that can truely be stolen in my opinion (because when you “take” from the account, there is less left, unlike illegally copying music or software, where the item in question still remains on the computer you copied from). Everything else that they claim to be “stolen” (music, software) is just a group of 1s and 0s being copied.
what would happen if government did not enforce the laws of protecting one’s money? the balance sheet tells us whether or not something went wrong in the account. but would you not suspect the operator to write in some extra cash to his own accout? again he did not steal anyone else’s money from their account, he just added some extra to the money system, which is closely monitored and regulated by the government.
so money, in a sense, could be “copied”, it’s just has a direct affect on the economy and thus closely watched by the governemnt, as well as everyone else, and pushishments could be harsh.
It might be your theory, but I tend to think that we do ilegal things because we think that doing so will bring us more pleasure (at one given moment) than following the laws will give us. Of course, this is also the reason why we doing everything else, too. 
However, man is allways seeking new ways to get pleasure faster, and doing something that he normally would attempt to do (running a stoplight to get to a party quicker) sometimes gets extremely tempting. Man, which is clearly an imperfect creature, often disregards the real purpose of the laws, and goes ahead and takes the risky action anyways.
All too often; however, it brings us way more than just pleasure.
Just my humble thoughts, anyway.
GoneFishing, you got me there 
re-thinks theory
That’s a hell of an assumption to make. 
I have nothing else to say right now from my own perspective; wonderful summary, Xander.
crap, you got me there. let me use my philisophical power to reason my way out. 
The law could be wrong in the first place, but does that give us the right to break it? i dont think so, instead we could challenge it and modify it, but in a sens, it is just wrong to break the law.
[Off Topic a bit]
putting it in a better quesiton,
can we justify our action in breaking the law, even though we beleive it to be wrong?
I’m personally a big fan of civil disobedience, so yes: some laws are morally okay to break.
[contented edited by ILP]
The law is there only to protect and empower the few who enforce it at the expense of the many who are subject to it.
Property is theft. How can you consider something is “yours” it was here before you came along and it will be here long after you’ve died. Intellectual Property is only yours while it’s in your head. You can’t stop some one from quoting or mis-quoting something you’ve said, just like you can’t stop someone from playing/copying your music.
And I’m pretty sure some one still owns the copyright to “Happy Birthday”.
Abgrund,
Yes, I agree. That distinction you pointed out–obedience of the law is not necessarily a moral act, though a moral act might coincide with the law—seems to be an issue that often gets neglected or taken for granted. That is, taken for granted that obedience of the law equals morality, which is not. (Banality of Evil is a good example–Eichmann).
I also agree…if I’m understanding all of this correctily.
An example of immorallity by obeying a law:
1) the law is: Obey the dicatator no matter what.
2) The dictator tells me to murdur someone for no good reason
To me, this proves that it is possible to have (perhaps) inherently-good laws (such as, “Obey the rular”), but it is still possible to commit immoral deeds by simply obeying them.
Correct? 