[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by Andurian

First, this sounds like you are completely abandoning "loss of payment to the author" as your stated reason why piracy is wrong. Or perhaps I misunderstood your earlier posts and you never intended that position?

Actually I think if you read my posts again, in this thread and others, you will see that there are are several aspects to my arguments.

1. The first aspect is that ultimately, the proper destination of all published creative work is in the public domain. In other words, no one has a limitless right to profit from a creative work.

2. That being said, an author certainly has a right to profit from their work. Economic incentive for work (i.e. getting reasonable for your work) is a central concept both of capitalism and of many ethical systems.

3. Copyright law is essentially an attempt to encourage the publication of more work (point 1) by ensuring that authors have a right to profit from their work before anyone else (point 2).

Under the current system of trade that is present in the world today, if you eliminate copyright, you eliminate, or at least greatly curtail, the ability of any author to make a reasonable profit from their work.

Second, it is *not* agreed by all that fair use and the existence of a secondary market for artistic creations is acceptable. The publishing industry historically fought hard against fair use in anything outside of academia and the recording industry has tried to get laws passed against the sale of used CDs and MP3 players. I am confident that there exist publishers and authors who would throw a fit at the fact people read their books in bookstores rather than purchase them. (Just as there are authors who don't care if their books are downloaded).

Publishers might grouse about fair use, but until they can convince the government of the United States to change the law, they have to accept it. The fact that they continue to publish new media indicates an implicit (if grumbling) acceptance of the rules as they currently exist.

As for authors who throw a fit because some small percentage of people read books in their entirety in the book store, well that is up to the book stores to monitor. Book stores are the current legal owners of the copies of the books in their possession. The fact that they have the right to return some of those books does not change the fact that while they are on the shelf of the book store, those copies are owned by the book store. Therefore if the book store chooses to let someone read the whole book while they are in the store, it falls under fair use. Just like if the book was read in a library.

Third, "the reasonable bounds of fair use" is a painfully vague term. Many people on the internet consider it perfectly reasonable, for example, to download a complete game to find out if its worth buying. Others (as noted above) find those "reasonable bounds" to be far more restrictive than current law. The "implicit agreement that is made by society with authors when the authors publish a book" is under constant attack by both pirates on one side and Disney and its ilk on the other. Add to that the shifting ground created by new media and I'm not entirely sure there even *is* a real implicit agreement anymore. Just a set of laws that nobody likes.

Well the bounderies of fair use may be vague, but most fair use is certainly well defined. As it has been firmly established by case law. Disney can try to get laws passed to limit certain types of fair use, but generally, it is hard to restrict legitimate fair use because it is constitutionally protected. Pirates don't just attack fair use, they attack any sort of notion of fair compensation for work.

As

To your general principle that "the law defines a set of rules that authors, publishers and readers should ultimately abide by" I can only say that I hope that principle comes from some ethical motivation other than an obligation to obey the law. I am completely convinced that ethically (as contrasted with practically) we are under no special obligation to obey the law. In North Korea the law states that one will be shot for treason for criticizing the "Dear Leader." In many states in the American south in living memory the law stated that blacks and whites could not marry. Surely you wouldn't say that those laws carry ethical obligations!

Ethics is never a set of absolutes. Almost any behavior or guideline can be seen as ethical or unethical in a particular light. Any law that is by its very nature oppressive frees one from an ethical obligation to obey it. That being said, in a democratic system, where we have considerable say in how the people who make the laws are chosen, I think it needs to be demonstrated that the laws are oppressive before one can claim that one does not have an ethical requirement to follow the law. In other words, one has to show that the current laws surrounding the use of copyrighted materials are oppressive before one can justify breaking them. Likewise, even then, you are not given carte blanch to simply ignore the law, rather you must actively work to get the unjust law overturned.

There are, of course, practical reasons to obey the law. If you speed you can get ticketed and if you criticize the Dear Leader north of the DMZ you might find yourself dead. And often the two do match up - good laws make an effort to promote ethical behavior. But laws don't *define* ethical behavior - if breaking a law is immoral it is only immoral because that action would have been wrong even had there been no law.

I am not sure I would agree. I think we have an ethical obligation to obey laws unless the laws themselves are unethical. As someone who lives in a nation where we have a say in the laws that are passed, we have essentially signed a social contract by which we agree to abide by the laws that the nation passes.

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Bill