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LoveGod102
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But would it be a sin if it wasn’t illegal?
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Rete
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That’s plagiarism. It’s not stealing, but lying. If you write a research paper and take credit for another person’s work, then you didn’t steal the work. You lied about where you obtained it.
That relates to the eighth commandment, not the seventh.
People deserve credit for their own ideas. That actually is another aspect of the intellectual property supporters that disturbs me. They see information as a commodity to be bought and sold, which carries with it no implicit right to attribution. Indeed, every major corporation does this all the time. A corporation will take credit for the ideas of employees. The person who invented something sometimes is never even mentioned in the patent application filed by others.
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edwest2
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edwest2
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LoveGod102
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I wasn’t referring to copying someone’s work and not giving them credit. That’s obviously wrong. I was referring to people making digital copies of music and books ET and posting them online for others to download and other things like that. I don’t do this myself, but I want to know if it would be moral if it were legal.
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edwest2
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You write a book and you see it available for free on a bunch of file sharing sites. You own the book. You have a copyright on it. Do you think it’s OK for others to take what you put your time and effort into for nothing?
Peace,
Ed
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thewanderer
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That is not the question that was asked. copyrights are the things which make it illegal to copy someones work. The question being asked is if we lived in a place where copying other people’s works was not illegal, ie, no such thing as copyrights etc existed, would it be immoral to copy anothers work.
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Rete
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It’s wrong… why? You just stated it is wrong and complained as if artists can’t possibly be compensated in any other way when I very clearly illustrated how they can, and pointed out that artists were compensated for thousands of years before somebody invented the insane notion of a copyright.This is wrong. It exists to allow artists to earn a living.
There are no sponsors for writing and music any more outside of the publishers. The artists earn their money through royalties.
A common misconception is that, if you hear something on the radio or see a new book in a bookstore, that artist must be wealthy. That is an extreme rarity. Most still have their “day jobs,” and of those who don’t, most are lucky to make it into the middle class. And musicians and writers all have to go on tour to promote their new works. It’s a hard life. We only hear about the excess, never about the grinding boredom and separation from family that comes with it.
I don’t grudge paying for the artists’ royalties.
And let’s not even talk about visual artists. If I sold a print for $25 in the '70s, and the owner sold it yesterday for a few thousand, I don’t get a penny of that. The visual artist gets no royalties. And if I made a print, and a “friend,” the daughter of a prominent artist, copied it, and said artist managed to get it hung in a sale gallery, and it sold, there is no law that forces her to give me any of the money. (Yes, that happened to me.)
So I am a stickler about respecting copyrights, and giving credit where credit is due. “…for the scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.’” (1 Tim 5:18) That means pirating, and making and giving away copies are both stealing.
It’s not stealing because information is not property. If material objects had the same properties as information, then we wouldn’t even have the concept of property rights in the first place. Think about that. If you could instantly make free copies of a tractor and farmland, then there wouldn’t be such a thing as property.
It doesn’t make any sense to apply property to information when the only thing that really matters is private versus public information and attribution of works. It really has nothing to do with property other than the physical artifact upon which information is encoded.
And as far as it being wrong that this market is government-facilitated and entirely dependent upon government… can you please justify that statement as well? Because that’s all we have here is a market entirely dependent upon government coercion to induce private behavior and create the impression of “property rights” where property rights have no applicability.
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Rete
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It’s only immoral to make copies of music today without paying for it because we have arbitrary laws that make it so. Because the law itself is neutral in this context, I don’t think you can make a moral case for violating that law. But in the context of drug patents, for example, I believe we have a moral obligation to violate those laws and treaties in order to produce ALL the drugs necessary to help people, regardless of what some capitalist demands in compensation. I have no trouble finding means to fairly compensate those companies, but I don’t find anything particularly moral about creating an artificial scarcity that results in millions of deaths for the sake of profit maximization. That’s the worst-case scenario of this mentality and it is happening all over the developing world.
If there were no law against copying music, then it would be perfectly acceptable. It’s no different than writing an equation on a notebook from your calculus textbook. It’s information, not a physical object. The only moral dimensions involved relate to private information (i.e. medical data and trade secrets) and attribution of works (plagiarism).
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LoveGod102
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But music is not only information, it’s entertainment, or at least is used for that purpose. As far as I know, you could perfectly legally print a sheet of lyrics off the internet of a copyrighted song, so long as you didn’t distribute it publicly, but you cannot legally download a copyrighted song without paying for it, unless the author gives you permission.
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edwest2
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thewanderer
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Others disagree with you here, and since there is no official Church teaching it is absolutely fine that they disagree. I tend to be inbetween, thinking that it is immoral in some circumstances but not in others, but not entirely sure where the line lies. It is a difficult topic worthy of discussion. Thanks OP for starting this thread
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LoveGod102
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You’re welcome!Others disagree with you here, and since there is no official Church teaching it is absolutely fine that they disagree. I tend to be inbetween, thinking that it is immoral in some circumstances but not in others, but not entirely sure where the line lies. It is a difficult topic worthy of discussion. Thanks OP for starting this thread
I tend to agree with you.
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edwest2
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Since the OP is asking about a situation that doesn’t exist, it’s only a hypothetical question. I work with some of the best Intellectual Property attorneys in the country. Bottom line: it’s stealing.
fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/ipr
Just because something can be turned into digital bits does not change that equation. And Thou shalt not steal applies.
Peace,
Ed
fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/ipr
Just because something can be turned into digital bits does not change that equation. And Thou shalt not steal applies.
Peace,
Ed
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jimperu
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The answer lies in the Ten commandments, “Thou shalt not steal”. Intellectual PROPERTY’
means it is a form of property BELONGING to someone. If it is not yours and you take or use it without permission of the owners, it is stealing.
means it is a form of property BELONGING to someone. If it is not yours and you take or use it without permission of the owners, it is stealing.
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LoveGod102
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But how is copying something stealing? It does not take that item away from the other person. The only way the argument that it is stealing is valid is if you are arguing that future profits are being stolen, since doing such may hinder that person’s ability to make profits from it.
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thewanderer
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Even more than that, if you follow the philosophical tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas there is a huge difference between private goods and common goods. Private goods are those which can only be shared by losing some of it oneself, this is referring to material goods, like pie. Common goods, however, are those which one can share without losing, such as knowledge. According to the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas there is a huge difference between material property and thoughts or intellectual property, if you will, and it is a mistake to treat them as though they are the same thing. Yes, it is important to ensure as much as we are able that every person is able to earn their keep, but thoughts simply are not property in the same way that physical matter is and that makes a difference.
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Fairwinds
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Aristotle and Thomas, wrong in so many other ways, would also be wrong here. of course I routinely steal Ari’s and Tom’s work, passing it off as my own, because, why not? its not real property. right?
all of the lame arguments justifying stealing other’s works have been looked at in detail by legislatures and courts, which have struck a balance in the law that protects authorship while allowing fair use. we can say that obeying the laws of the land is moral, so that fair use is moral, stealing is sinful.
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Rete
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This is entertainment as well:
Too bad nobody thought to claim ownership of it about twenty-eight hundred years ago.
And let’s not forget the monk who translated this poem from a now lost source (thus, having violated “copyrights” preserved for us one of the greatest poems in our culture):
This current perception of so-called intellectual property rights is completely artificial and constructed by special interest groups within the past century. That’s it.
Before the RIAA and MPAA came along, we had Beethoven, Michelangelo, Dante, Shakespeare, St. John of the Cross, so on and so on.
It’s just nonsense to consider information as property. The only reason we even think of physical objects as being potentially property (owned by somebody) is that there exists scarcity and exclusivity of use with physical object. Information lacks that quality. If physical objects had the attributes of information, then we would not even need property in the first place. So why try to make information into property when it lacks the fundamental attributes which make the concept of property necessary in the first place?
To justly call something property, you must at least show that it is a finite resource (subject to some level of scarcity) and can be used by only a limited number of people at any given time. Information lacks those attributes and therefore cannot rationally be considered property. People want you to think it is property because they are using a government-supported market to profit from it.
If the government stopped using coercion to enforce an otherwise impossible market, art and music would not suddenly disappear. There probably would not be as much money to be made, but that’s hardly a justification for using government force to maintain an otherwise unsustainable and irrational market. That’s no business model. It’s a racket.
And in any case, music and art that resulted from this new industry is rubbish compared to what it replaced. We lost a great deal of culture and art because of this bizarre concept. It’s not helping us at all.
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Fairwinds
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you’re not a working musician, are you?
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