Is file sharing a sin?

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Zatzat said:
Legal or illegal download is part of file sharing because a file or a copy of a file gets transferred from one location to another.
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Ok, time to rock the boat a little bit. Everyone brace themselves.

The very concept of the internet is based on file sharing. Right now, you are viewing a webpage. In order to do that, your computer web browser downloaded a html file from catholic.com which was generated using a PHP script which resides on Catholic Answers web server, which used information which is contained in a database on said server. Right now on your computer resides a copy of that file which originated from Catholic Answers. Catholic Answers shared the file with you. That is how the internet works.

Any questions?
 
Zatzat said:
This is the first thing you say. So I point out, quite correctly, that yes, lots of things are immoral if by their actions, they could result in harm to another person.

You should have conceded that your point was moot, but I do understand that this is the internet and the internet is very serious business and concession, is a very rare breed on the web.

Instead, in an illogical vindication of your original point, you compare reckless behavior that holds the potential for harm, with innocuous activities, such as driving safely, flying in an airplane, being a better candidate in a job interview? 🤷

Uhm, if your supposed to pay for software, but instead you get it for free, in effect stealing it and the manufacturer of the software doesn’t make their payroll and they have to lay off a bunch of people. Yes, the thievery is sinful as it negatively and directly impacted another person.

I’m not really much of a believer in the whole sin thing…Rather, I find Christians a little puzzling. The length that some will go to justify that stealing, isn’t actually stealing.

Your comparing people losing jobs because people are stealing intellectual property as being comparable to the loss of military jobs as a result of world peace?

I wish there was an emoticon that could show a little cartoon with his chin dropping to the floor.
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I’m amazed myself. People can go on and on about forms of worship and/or authority of leadership but then to miss so basic a point. Besides a jaw drop we need a face palm with a shaking head and a Jesus crying because His followers so missed His message.
 
4Squarebaby said:
I’m amazed myself. People can go on and on about forms of worship and/or authority of leadership but then to miss so basic a point. Besides a jaw drop we need a face palm with a shaking head and a Jesus crying because His followers so missed His message.
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4square…really, your think our Lord is crying because some of his followers find the arguments in support of prohibition of filesharing to be dubious and self-contradicting?

Like I said, I download no copy righted material. and I buy all of my music and programming from iTunes or Netflix, unless it comes from an artist with publicly known trade-tape friendly tendencies (e.g. WILCO, Phish, Tte Grateful Dead etc).

My interest in this matter is about the arguments for and against the practice. I’m no biblical scholar but I am fairly sure that Jesus would not weep at the sight of one of his attempting to use/refine their God given ability to reason.
 
BuphiloCatholic said:
. I’m no biblical scholar but I am fairly sure that Jesus would not weep at the sight of one of his attempting to use/refine their God given ability to reason.
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But would your Jesus download for free intellectual property that he has no colour of right to download?

Or would Jesus pay?

Was it not Jesus who said ’ Give unto Caesar, what Caesar is due?’
 
Zatzat said:
theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/net-piracy-taking-toll-on-jobs-european-study-says/article1503357/

'A study into Internet piracy by a Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading.

…Those industries generated €860-billion ($1.194-trillion) and employed 14.4 million people in 2008. But in the same year, €10-billion and 186,000 jobs were lost to piracy, the study found.

If that trend continues – and the rapid increase in illegal downloads and advancing piracy techniques suggest it will – then up to 1.2 million jobs and €240-billion worth of European commerce could be wiped out by 2015.’

Now, could the few holdouts please explain again how piracy and file sharing isn’t a sin?
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There has been study after study after study. One thing that has been clearly learned, the media companies are good at buying and influencing the result they want. Usually their real purpose is to further corrupt the political process and gain draconian intellectual property laws. Time and again the numbers in studies such as this have been shown to be simply made up. It is usually a purchased result, not a statistically valid one.

Any such article as this should be fully ignored unless someone trustworthy verifies its funding, independence and detailed methodology. It should also provide a detailed breakdown of the 1.2 million jobs and a detailed breakdown of €240-billion supposedly to be lost. With that you could do your own basic sanity check. I am very, very doubtful of these numbers.

On the other hand, there have been a number of academic studies that have shown piracy has actually increased revenue for the media companies.

Just to be clear - I am saying the media companies have been well known to lie and promote false propaganda. I am not condoning piracy / theft.
 
lutherlic said:
Any such article as this should be fully ignored unless someone trustworthy verifies its funding, independence and detailed methodology. It should also provide a detailed breakdown of the 1.2 million jobs and a detailed breakdown of €240-billion supposedly to be lost. With that you could do your own basic sanity check. I am very, very doubtful of these numbers.
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I’m confident such facts would be found in the actual study.
 
Zatzat said:
But would your Jesus download for free intellectual property that he has no colour of right to download?

Or would Jesus pay?

Was it not Jesus who said ’ Give unto Caesar, what Caesar is due?’
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This is an unfortunate non-sequitur! Yes, Our Lord said, “render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar.” But in the present case, that of filesharing, this is not an applicable moral principle. Our Lord was addressing his followers resentment of Roman taxation, and at the same time he was rejecting and driving from their minds any hope that he would be the “anti-Roman” messiah that many Jews of his day had been praying for and expecting. The coin he used as an object lesson had a picture of Caesar etched on it. He was saying in essence, “Look, I know you want me to destroy Rome, but Rome belongs to the Romans, and my Kingdom is not of this world, Let them have what’s their’s and give me what is mine.”.

To use this incident in the life of Our Lord to, as you suggest, argue that we have to obey any law of the secular authority whether it is moral or not simply because it is the law and we have to obey Caesar (the temporal secular power), is spiritually naive and practically dangerous. Many laws are immoral (for instance denying woman’s suffrage, or equal civil rights, or the legitimate medical use of marijuana). And they should be opposed. And we as Christians have an an obligation to oppose them.

So to say as you just have done that a law is a law is a law and we must obey the laws, is patently absurd.

The underlying issue is whether or not filesharing is morally impermissible, not whether it is legally impermissible.

As for your question about whether Jesus would fileshare,*** I believe the Scripture shows us that He not only would but that He actually did fileshare.*** He used the “intellectual property” of the Jewish prophets which He downloaded from source texts into His own brain matter for the express purpose of public distribution. It’s a good thing their were no intellectual property back then keep Him from doing so!
 
Zatzat said:
But would your Jesus download for free intellectual property that he has no colour of right to download?

Or would Jesus pay?

Was it not Jesus who said ’ Give unto Caesar, what Caesar is due?’
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The proponents of theft who have you think the rest of the verse was missing, “unless the legion is too busy to catch you” verse 22: His reply amazed them and they went away.
 
Sharing of copyrighted materials gained popularity in the late 1990s. The first major lawsuit happened in 2000. Ever since then, file sharing has become very popular!:eek:

We are now in 2010 (20 years later). Is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church sleeping?🤷 The Catholic Church is never hesitant to call a sin a sin (we see this everyday – abortion, homosexuality…).
I have never read the CCC (I hope to do so one day) but I had the opportunity to read the CCC on masturbation on another thread. Please permit me to quote part of it:
2352 By masturbation…
To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability.
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It is very important to note how the church makes equitable judgement based on social factors. St Paul even clearly differentiates between sin committed outside of the body with sin committed against the body (grave matter).
So from the CCC, a confessor can only pass judgment on such an issue (masturbation) on a case by case base (I guess).

Now back to file sharing. Imagine a situation where the Magisterium decides to weigh in on illegal file sharing. There are two major things I guess they would have to consider.
  1. The rationale behind copyright today.
  2. Social factors (file sharing per se is just inevitable)
Those two factors would produce a fruitful result.

For those who claim that they are amazed by the fact that some of us Catholics are against existing copyright laws or whatever, well know that not all Catholics take man-made laws as gospel. Trying to take bible passages out of context doesn’t help:p.
 
You speak as if 20 years is a long time. What is the average age of Magistrrium members? Are they computer literate or do they depend on younger people to manage computers for them and have no understanding necesary to take a stand. Or perhaps they just see theft and it is not a moral issue on the specific ways a theif takes what he wants without paying for it. Masturbation on the other hand has been with mankind since the first generation of man.
 
4Squarebaby said:
You speak as if 20 years is a long time. What is the average age of Magistrrium members? Are they computer literate or do they depend on younger people to manage computers for them and have no understanding necesary to take a stand. Or perhaps they just see theft and it is not a moral issue on the specific ways a theif takes what he wants without paying for it. Masturbation on the other hand has been with mankind since the first generation of man.
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Lo! There are catholics here who are interested in knowing whether this issue is a sin or not. For non-catholics, this debate wouldn’t really make sense to you.
 
Setlew said:
A couple of other things to keep in mind - first, although we are supposed to obey civil laws when they are set up for just and moral reasons, we do not necessarily have to obey them when they are not set up in this fashion. I heard recently where a major recording-industry organization was lobbying the UK government to extend the period in which they “own” the rights to music/movies (before they go into the public domain) from 50 to 90 years, because the Beatles’ first album comes into the public domain in 2012 and they don’t want to lose that fat cash cow. I would argue that laws set up for no other reason then to perpetually benefit an organization not directly responsible for the activites producing the profits are ethically and morally wrong in themselves.

Secondly, organizations like the RIAA typically take $13-14 off of every album sold, leaving only $1-2 to the artist; and the manner in which they determine the portion of profits that is allocated to the artist has been deemed grossly unfair by many people within and without the industry, including several major recording artists (see Steve Vai’s letter of protest here: vai.com/AllAboutSteve/postcard_040220.html.) A better system would be a direct (through the Internet) system where the artist sells his recordings directly to the public in digital format at whatever price he or she chose. Several small/independent organizations, companies and artists are already doing this; but more major artists will have to break away from the media conglomerate before these activities will have any great effect on the status quo. 😦
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I’ve never understood copyright. You Setlew, do not strike me as much of a capitalist. I have no problem with that as I am a Distributist. As a Distributist, I consider myself a very old fashioned kind of guy. From what I am aware, in the past, they didn’t have copyright. For example, most of Shakespeare’s plays are stolen from various historical texts and what not. Graphic novelist/philosopher Dave Sim believes that an artists work should be as regularly available as Shakespeare’s works are. Given the tradition and the evolution of media technology, what is needed is to undo modern notions of copyright. One way to do that is to take a revolutionary approach and to illegally download music. However, that is just my potentially unstable Chesterbellocian opinion.

There appears to be alot of disagreement on this issue. One person here let us know their priest’s opinion. I think the only way to truly settle this if we want to be true Catholics is to find out what the Church’s opinion is.
 
BuphiloCatholic said:
As for your question about whether Jesus would fileshare,*** I believe the Scripture shows us that He not only would but that He actually did fileshare.*** He used the “intellectual property” of the Jewish prophets which He downloaded from source texts into His own brain matter for the express purpose of public distribution. It’s a good thing their were no intellectual property back then keep Him from doing so!
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That is a really good point!
 
I’ve downloaded songs on Limewire and oftimes the songs don’t come out right. They are sometimes interspersed with a strange screeching noise. Sometimes it’s the wrong version of the song that you’re looking for. Sometimes they’re recorded from the radio. Some songs refuse to download at all (especially Christian songs oddly enough). It might be because I’m slightly OCD, I would like the song to be perfect. It might just be more worth it to pay Apple the 99 cents for the sake of quality and to be certain of its legitimacy. But that’s just my opinion.
 
As of current copyright laws, it depends on the file. Most files are created by the sharer, so they are legal. Of course, “pirating” games, movies, and music, that’s wrong.

Speaking of file-sharing, have any of you heard of this Project Gutenberg? It’s a website that contains tons of classic works of literature and non-fiction, all free-to-download. This is because these works are no longer copyrighted.

Here’s the link to the site.

promo.net/pg/

They got tons of works by Catholics as well (pretty sure they have good old St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine).
 
presidentjlh said:
As of current copyright laws, it depends on the file. Most files are created by the sharer, so they are legal. Of course, “pirating” games, movies, and music, that’s wrong.

Speaking of file-sharing, have any of you heard of this Project Gutenberg? It’s a website that contains tons of classic works of literature and non-fiction, all free-to-download. This is because these works are no longer copyrighted.

Here’s the link to the site.

promo.net/pg/

They got tons of works by Catholics as well (pretty sure they have good old St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine).
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Wikisource is something similar except it’s a wiki. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

However, the difference between Project Gutenberg and file-sharing is that most music is still copyrighted.
 
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