Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich_D
Many people would, and many people wouldn't. More importantly the law differs between the two.
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Actually in this case no, the difference in the law is not important. We are discussing whether it is ethical. We all agree that whether it legally constitutes stealing or not, it is probably illegal to download from the darknet (and definitely illegal to upload). As people have pointed out, however, what is illegal is not necessarily unethical or immoral, or if something is unethical, it may not be unethical for the same reason that it is illegal.
Now, I think it is safe to say that ethics does not contain a special narrow definition of intellectual property, in the same way that the law does. Indeed, ethics tends to work from general principles (of course, different groups differ on what those specific general principles are!).
I am going to start with one principle though which is any position that does not at least consider the potential harm an action does to another person cannot be defended as an ethical consideration.
Now, one can argue that most who download books would never have bought the works in the first place and therefore no harm is done to the author or other rights holders and therefore it is ethical. I think one can argue to the contrary to some extent, but I am willing to accept that position for the moment.
In addition, one can argue that it especially true in the case of those who own physical copies of the work. They have already bought a copy that at some point was legally purchased (presumably) and therefore the author received their royalty and that downloading a dark-net copy is only providing additional access to a work the downloader has already paid for. I am definitely more sympathetic to this ethical position.
Where the ethics get decidedly more dicey is in the following situation. Someone downloads the books they already have, and then sell or give away the physical copies of the books they downloaded. It seems to me that this dramatically increases the chance of the rights holder being deprived of an original sale. Obviously the person who downloaded the books downloaded them because they wanted continued access to them; if they couldn't download them, they probably would not have given them away. On the flip side, now that the books have been given away (or sold), there are used copies available that will end up in the hands of someone who may well have paid money for a new copy had this used copy not been available.
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Bill