The Ethics of Piracy

I had considered an Ethics post about DRM following yesterday’s ravings about digital coffee, but there doesn’t appear to be much to talk about; the sellers certainly have the right to offer or restrict functionality on the products they are offering, and the buyers have the option of voting with their feet (and their wallets) and not purchasing products with DRM or any other measure/feature to which they take exception. Either of these positions could be seen as wrong, greedy/stingy, or actively evil, depending on which side of the debate one happens to be on, but there does not appear to be an ethical issue to discuss. By the same token, there doesn’t appear to be much question that somebody who downloads a program, a movie, a song or whatever from a copyrighted work and does not pay for it is committing an actual crime, and can’t really justify that under any ethical grounds, either. It’s only when one or more of those conditions does not apply that things begin to get murky…

Consider, for example, the case of people who are downloading and using any work that is unavailable to them, specifically because it is out of print and neither the original author or the publisher ever intend to make new copies available. Technically, this is still a copyright violation, and can still be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or pursued in civil court for uncompensated use. But if there was no chance whatsoever of the author or publisher ever selling another copy, or earning any other revenue from this product, is it still unethical for people to obtain unauthorized copies for their private use? Does our answer change if these unauthorized users will not make any profits of their own from the product? What if there is no alternative product they could have used for this purpose – as in the case of orphaned or obsolete software?

On the one hand, it could be argued that something does not stop being your property just because you aren’t currently using it, and the owners of the copyright could elect to do something with them at some future point. It could also be argued that if the unauthorized users could not pirate this property they would have to purchase something else, which might actually involve giving revenue to the owners or some other deserving person. On the other hand, it could be argued that some users would not have been able to afford to make any purchase; that if they had not been able to access the pirated work their only other choice would have been nothing – in which case there is no way in which their actions could be of harm to anyone. There is also the possibility of future benefit if you do allow them to access the work…

For some years now a number of companies – notably including Baen Books – have been releasing electronic copies of various works in electronic format, generally DRM free, on the principle that people who read free electronic copies of books will then want to acquire hard-copy versions. It’s also common for some publishers to make the first volume of a series – or a very basic version of a software package, to take another common example – available for free, with the understanding that the rest of the material is available for sale at reasonable prices. This appears to have been moderately successful for the publishers, and is believed to drive a lot of the sales for smart phone apps and the like – which really makes you wonder…

Are there conditions under which the unauthorized access of copyrighted material can be of sufficient value to the holder of the copyright in order to ethically (if not legally) justify doing so? Does our answer change if there is no way the legal owner could possibly make any money on the copyright through any legal or authorized channel? What if the unauthorized use later leads to income for the legal owner from some other enterprise; do the ends then justify the means? Or should we just assume that anyone who wants to see their work freely distributed will use some form of Creative Commons license, and respect the ownership rights of anyone using a conventional copyright or patent, even if doing so is ultimately NOT in the owner’s best interest?

It’s worth thinking about…