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No. Copyright is always fundamentally a legal discussion. Everyday copying doesn't have deep ethical ramifications, because the most everyday copying we do is called 'memory' and remembering something is almost never unethical. And ethics is the only branch of philosophy which really has a voice in the matter -- copyright is not epistemic or ontological, etc. I would go so far as to say that the utter absence of a moral intuition against copying is why the vast majority of people do it and don't have a problem with it.

The people who do seem to be responding to some sort of intuition of this form: "a free lunch is unfair." It's not, as we'd say, unfair to you, and not even to the copyright holders necessarily, but something about a free lunch just looks suspicious. So the first comment in this thread says that whether Joe Blow's actions are unfair "comes down to how much Joe Blow WOULD have paid for avatar.mp4." You saw that he would have paid for X but instead he got it for free, and you said "man, there's something unfair here."

It may sometimes be useful to regulate things which our ethical intuitions don't speak very strongly about. Our ethical intuitions don't speak very strongly about living in a messy room; a boarding school might nonetheless demand that its students keep their rooms clean. (I have heard a cute theory that we lack this intuition because our primate ancestors lived in trees and therefore literally did not have to handle their own crap.) Seatbelt laws, licensing drivers, and regulating CO2 emissions would also fit into the same category. So "who has the right to copy this book?" can still be a valid question, even when that book is a .pdf and our relevant moral intuitions instead say, "hey, I'm just giving the book I bought to a friend -- that's within my rights as a person who bought the book." That moral intuition, even if you have it, doesn't necessarily obviate the potential social value of that law.



Part of why I love the law is that every legal discussion is also a philosophical discussion. Should killing someone be legal sometimes? Should pornography be illegal sometimes? Where does my right to privacy win out over society's right to protect itself from crime? When is it OK to back out of a contract? Should my quality of life suffer after the divorce, if you were making the money while I took care of the kids? Is there a right for a child-rape defendant to sit across from the child while she testifies and stare her in the face? Can we outlaw gay marriage just because some people don't like the idea, or do those people have to prove some kind of actual harm?

In all kinds of stupid little cases, every day, lawyers hammer out what kind of people we want to be -- how our society wants to instantiate our morality. It's glorious.

Anyway, the copyright question is partly the legal question of what people should be allowed to do, and partly the moral question of what laws it's OK to break when there's no real prospect of enforcement. But it's all about laws.


Copyright is but the idea of copyright isn't.


There is no idea of copyright distinct from copyright. o_O.


There is a definition of copyright and the question is whether that definition can be said to apply to digital.


I'm not sure you understand the context -- for that matter, your terse replies make it hard to know what you think you're saying. But to respond anyways: there is a legal definition of the idea of copyright and the question is pretty well-settled whether that definition applies to digital works. There is no philosophical definition of copyright, for the reasons that I said above -- it's hard to regard it as an issue in philosophy.


I understand the context perfectly.

To claim that the idea of copyright is pretty well-settled when it comes to digital works just illustrate the problem here.

It's not well-settled cause there isn't anything to settle as such. This is not a discussion about right or wrong but about whether it should apply to digital work.

Even a discussion of property on physical things aren't a settled discussion. There are no conclusion only a decision.

There are a number of indicators hinting that it's far from settled when it comes to digital. Among other things the very fact that we are debating it and the very fact that many people don't seem to have a problem downloading things and don't consider it wrong.

And not just because they are cheap. But because the very fundamental idea of demand and supply, the idea of owning ideas that are themselves byproducts of others ideas is way way way too complex to just say. Done deal. There is something more fundamental in play here.

Perhaps for you, but not for me and many others.




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