One of the tired arguments offered by intellectual property (IP) thieves is that stealing software or music causes no significant harm to the owners of the IP.
One of the tired arguments offered by intellectual property (IP) thieves is that stealing software or music causes no significant harm to the owners of the IP.
For example, typing “downloading not theft” (without the quotation marks) into the Google search field brings up discussions that include a mass of comment on The New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen’s opinion that the illegal download of the electronic version of a book that a reader bought in hardcover is not unethical. “Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.”
For more along those lines, see the sneering, hostile, contemptuous and disrespectful dismissals of IP law in the comments at the bottom of the techdirt page (hey, I didn’t name the Web site).
So the medium is irrelevant, eh? Buying it once should mean you get all forms free? Thus if someone were to buy a book printed in the hardback edition, I guess it would be OK to steal the paperback version as well as the electronic version. And if you have an old edition that’s been damaged by the flood in your basement, it must be morally acceptable to walk over to the nearest bookstore and liberate another copy without paying for it – after all, you paid for it once.
And if someone fails to back up their iTunes library, they should be able to download everything you ever paid for – free – from somewhere; if not iTunes (they make you pay) then at least using BitTorrent, right?
Nah. For more sneering, hostile, contemptuous and disrespectful dismissals of IP thieves’ cant, see “The Napster Cantata” and other articles in the Ethics section of my Web site.
As for the harmlessness of IP theft, consider that in 2010, the Business Software Alliance and IDC published “The Economic Benefits of Reducing Software Piracy.” The analysts argue that reducing widespread software piracy would boost the global economy significantly; for example, they write (quoting):
• Reducing the piracy rate for PC software by 10 percentage points — 2.5 points per year for four years — would create $142 billion in new economic activity while adding nearly 500,000 new high-tech jobs and generating roughly $32 billion in new tax revenues by 2013.
• On average, more than 80% of the benefits of reducing PC software piracy accrue to local economies — and in some cases it is more than 90%.
• Front-loading the gain by lowering piracy 10 points in the first two years of a four-year period would compound the economic benefits by 36%, producing $193 billion in new economic activity by 2013 and generating $43 billion in new tax revenues.
• Software has a ripple effect on the broader IT industry because selling, servicing and supporting software creates downstream economic activity. In the 42 countries covered in the study, the commercial value of unlicensed PC software put into the market amounted to $45 billion in 2009, resulting in total losses of revenue, employment and taxes from related sectors in excess of $110 billion.
The most recent BSA report on the scope of international software piracy dates from October 2009 and is freely available for download as a PDF.
More about that report in the next column.
