[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by tompe

You have pointed out that the motivation for copyright is different from motivation of property right. So since there is a difference you can reason differently ethically. And using for example utilitarism I come to totally different conclusions also about how wrong it is and the reasoning differ.

Actually, the motivation is ultimately the same, to protect the public interest.
Having reasonable copyright laws and enforcing them actually is to public benefit just as allowing them to own private property is to the public benefit. In both cases though, the law ultimately defines how the holder of said property or copyright may use them.

That being said, please explain to me how the differences allow you to reason a different ethical conclusion for each. Saying they are different is not enough, you have to give us the whole chain of your reasoning.

Here you assume something "fair payment" that is a strange concept. You have to define that in the ethical system you use for the argument to be understandable.

Fair payment is simple, it is a price agreed upon by both the provider of the service or product and the consumer. The provider's ability to raise the price is essentially limited by the consumer's willingness to pay for it. The consumer's ability to drive down the price is limited by the level at which the provider is no longer willing to provide the service or product in the first place.

For the price to be fair, it has to be accepted by both parties. I.e. Paying $30 for a new book is just as fair as paying $5 for a remaindered one because in each case the seller and the consumer essentially agree on that price.

I am an utilitarist. So one possible motivation is that the utility on the worlds is increasing.

You might be a utilitarian, but being a utilitarian, you should understand that proper utilitarian ethics requires the concept of enlightened self interest. Illegal downloads of books is wrong from a utilitarian perspective because it decreases the motivation of the author and the publisher to produce more books. In the long run it will hurt the downloader as well as the person whose books were downloaded.

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Bill