|
In the U.S., it might be legally fair use (and morally acceptable) to convert a copyrighted book that one owns a copy of toThe har electronic format for one's personal use. Then again it might not be--it depends on what a court would say (I hate the idea of laws whose applicability depends on future court decisions). However, it is my feeling--and I am not a lawyer--that courts would be make a distinction between one's own converting a book one owns for personal use and one's downloading someone else's conversion of the said book. I suspect that the latter is illegal.
Is it moral? Well, in the case where a licensed electronic version of the book is readily available, one is not giving the author/publisher fair compensation for the item. So in that case it is not moral. It's a matter of not giving the worker his wages.
The harder case is where an electronic copy is not available. Then one is not depriving the author/publisher of anything by copying the item. Nonetheless, one is making use of the labor of another without compensating the worker. Moreover, it seems to be illegal, and we are generally morally bound to follow the law, whether because we have sworn to do so (e.g., when I became a Canadian citizen I swore to follow Her Majesty's laws) or simply because we live under their authority.
The "generally" is a difficult issue and people disagree on it. We are not bound to follow laws that require us to do something immoral (e.g., Nazi laws requiring one to turn Jews in to the Gestapo).
There may also be room for genuine civil disobedience in the case of immoral laws, even when these laws do not require us to do anything immoral (e.g., if a law commands me to sit in a particular part of a bus because of my race, it is not immoral for me to obey this law, but nonetheless the law is immoral and civil disobedience may be appropriate). However, copyright laws are not immoral (in some aspects they seem clearly misguided--for instance the copyright extensions were indeed misguided--but misguided and immoral are not the same), and anyway someone who downloads a copyrighted work is generally not engaging in civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a peaceful, public act coupled with an acceptance of legal consequences, rather than a furtive, private act of downloading.
This leaves one last question. Is it morally required to obey laws that are not immoral but are merely unreasonable. The standard for "unreasonableness" had better be pretty strict. Otherwise, given the wide disagreement between citizens in a democratic society, chaos would result if people felt free to disobey laws they didn't see as reasonable. One way to make for such a standard is to talk of laws that no reasonable and moderately well-informed person could defend.
Reasonable and moderately well-informed people do defend copyright laws as they stand. So that standard wouldn't allow disobedience.
Another approach, however, would be to look at the purpose behind the law. Thus one might think that it is OK to disobey a law if in doing so one is not harming the purpose behind the law. The purpose behind a copyright law is the furthering of innovation and the fair compensation of producers of intellectual property. Downloading the materials does not harm the furthering of innovation, but does go against the fair compensation purpose, it seems. (Question: Suppose that I downloaded the materials, but then sent a check to the publisher and to the author with a fair price?)
All that said, it seems to me that if one disobeys a law, one's reason for doing so should be pretty serious (e.g., fighting racism)--mere convenience should not be enough.
|