Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Actually, that isn't quite what the discussion is about.
While it is true that some might do it just to spite society (like Augustine with his pears; although I doubt you should become christian over it), most don't, because they just live by a different moral rule set.
The question at hand here is
1. whether that set of personal rules to live by can be justified to any degree,
2. whether it counts for anything that a large part of society seems to more or less share our rule set, thus partly negating the "it's immoral" claim,
3. whether that rule set isn't too biased towards the interest of a single group (the consumer),
3a. if we that is the case, should we follow a different, [according to some] more legal rule set (such as the one "supplied" to us so kindly by the recording/publishing industries) or,
3b. is there another option that centers less on the personal gain of the majority [and sod the consequences for the producers, both the author and the publisher] but also not as centered on the corporate gain of a handful (as the actual authors get little to nothing of the total sum anyway), with individual citizen's rights biting the dust entirely in favor of the latter's.
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A lot of people are just not that concerned with the ethicality, because they attach so little moral weight to the issue. They're as likely to wrestle with themselves over the moral ambiguities of jaywalking.
The deprivation of artists and the death of industries is not a concern because it's not a remotely likely outcome. The only industry that ever suffered significant harm from filesharing was the RIAA, and they are still alive and well, not because they killed P2P, but because they're adapting their business model to the new reality. That reality is not defined by fiesharing itself, but by the new distribution channels and consumer expectations that P2P forced them to address.
The more practical debate is not whether filesharing is good or bad, but what are its actual effects, what does it mean for the future, and what action if any is warranted on the part of media companies, creators, and/or the law.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
I'm sure you'd agree that no amount of saying "well hey I don't think it is wrong" would make some acts ok wouldn't you? So why should doing so make piracy ok? Because that's all it is really.
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Well no, no it's not. Referring to for-profit bootlegging as piracy is a bit of a stretch, and filesharing bears only an associative connection to bootlegging. "It's just bad" is no argument at all. Filesharing media against the authors' wishes is obviously not a perfectly wholesome activity, but in terms of moral outrages it falls somewhere south of littering. Most network peers are not "pirates," as if it were a lifestyle, but media consumers who take advantage of both licit and illicit means.