Piracy is Ethically Acceptable For Many Harvard Lawyers, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com) 101
Most people know all too well that it's against the law to share a pirated copy of a movie or TV-show. Law and ethics are not always in sync. Not even among those who are schooled as lawyers. From a report: This is the conclusion of an intriguing new study conducted among Harvard lawyers by Prof. Dariusz Jemielniak and Dr. Jerome Hergueux. The research, published in The Information Society journal, found that many lawyers believe that casual piracy is ethically acceptable. The researchers polled the perceptions of more than 100 international Masters of Law (LL.M.) students at Harvard, who all have a law degree. They were asked to evaluate how acceptable various piracy scenarios are, on a five-point scale going from very unacceptable to very acceptable.
The piracy scenarios ranged from downloading a TV-show or movie which isn't legally available, through pirating music to simply save money, to downloading content for educational or even commercial purposes. In total, 19 different alternatives were presented. While the researchers expected that lawyers would have conservative ethical positions when it comes to piracy, the opposite was true. The average of all answers was 3.23, which means that it leans toward the "acceptable" point of the scale. "We find that digital file sharing ranks relatively high in terms of ethical acceptability among our population of lawyers -- with the only notable exception being infringing copyright with a commercial purpose," the researchers conclude.
The piracy scenarios ranged from downloading a TV-show or movie which isn't legally available, through pirating music to simply save money, to downloading content for educational or even commercial purposes. In total, 19 different alternatives were presented. While the researchers expected that lawyers would have conservative ethical positions when it comes to piracy, the opposite was true. The average of all answers was 3.23, which means that it leans toward the "acceptable" point of the scale. "We find that digital file sharing ranks relatively high in terms of ethical acceptability among our population of lawyers -- with the only notable exception being infringing copyright with a commercial purpose," the researchers conclude.
Fauxes guard the henhouse, Phews at 11 (Score:2, Interesting)
I know, right? I'm in my 60's, and the very least ethical people I have ever known have been lawyers. Sadly, I've known a lot of lawyers.
There is a huge gap between the somewhat polar "I represent you to the very edge of the law for your and my benefit" and "I am after you to the very edge of the law to your maximum detriment unless you give me something" versus the nominal "I always try to do the ethical thing." Especially as the law is often not actually the "ethical thing" anyway.
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you seem to equate following U.S. copyright law with ethics
For most of human history, you could retell or rewrite a story and it was fine. Recently you have to wait until the author is dead plus x years...
hmmm.
ethical, yeah
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you seem to equate following U.S. copyright law with ethics
For most of human history, you could retell or rewrite a story and it was fine. Recently you have to wait until the author is dead plus x years...
hmmm.
ethical, yeah
Ehh, you seem to be equating campfire stories and sharing cassette recordings with full fledged, money making, internet piracy.
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He's not. He's explaining that copyright used to protect authors of those campfire stories, and now it protects their grandchildren for generations. That's an extension of law, not ethics.
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He doesn't care about the ethics or morals. He cares about the perceived notion that internet piracy is costing him vast amounts of money, and he wants that money. You're not going to persuade him to give up that money making capability with an argument based on an appeal to morality or ethics. Greed is the driving force behind him, and the only thing that will change his course is a bigger overriding force.
The copyright industry is so obsessed with the illusion of more money that it's leaving tons of real money lying on the table.
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Does it matter?
Current copyright law says that you can't make copies of arbitrary information and distribute to your friends.
To enforce it the government needs to monitor all communication you have with your friends, even inside your own home.
You can't have any form of copyright and absolute free speech at the same time.
You can't enforce current copyright while allowing people freedom within their own homes.
Copyright as it exists now is a removal of very fundamental rights in the name of profit.
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I spent years telling my kid I was a pirate (Score:3)
Abandonware mostly. I miss snesorama. They moved from Abandonware to Warez and got shut down. Some kind soul posted a full version of an obscure Korean PC schmup called X-Tom. Good luck finding a legitimate copy of that. I played the demo to death as a kid but I don't think it got a release. At least not state side.
It's the arcade version (Score:2)
Hello. I'm left wing (Score:3, Insightful)
You are literally correct. This is grounded in left-wing thought.
However the default is that information can't be owned, and you need to justify that can be owned. That's not as easy as you think.
Information is naturally promiscuous and free spreading, so you need to justify the VAST amounts of state force needed to completely reverse information's innate nature, and turn it into a commodity workers have to buy.
Sure big budget movies are capital intensive to make, but just because the workers that you coerc
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"All property is theft. Except mine." does seem to be a core liberal value.
Did they ask the lawyers the right question? (Score:5, Interesting)
Under US law, the actual copyright law covers DISTRIBUTION, not RECEIPT. Receiving a pirated video is quite different under the law from distributing them. These people certainly understood the difference.
That may account for some of the difference, since commercial use would mean there will be future distribution of the files, but personal use will probably never be distributed once received.
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[C]ommercial use would mean there will be future distribution of the files, but personal use will probably never be distributed once received.
Neither is a given. "Personal use" sharing on an enthousiast site, or even ("fair use" until a copyright bot spots it) take a track and put it on a video as a backgrounder, upload to youtube.
Playing the music in a bar for the clientele is "commercial use" but involves no distribution, nor is it likely to. Over here such use even incurs fees to be paid to some royalty collecting organisation. That then reserves most of the take for litigating non-payers, not distribution to artists. Funny how that works.
Re: Did they ask the lawyers the right question? (Score:1)
"That then reserves most of the take for litigating non-payers, not distribution to artists."
Not true, all of the major rights agencies bring in more money throu litigation than they spend. (How on earth could there be "copyright trolls" if this weren't true?) Moreover, given that any particular composer would be entirely unable to widely enforce their rights, let alone manage the gazillions of licenses necessary, 12% of the take seems entirely reasonable.
You can certainly say that the statistical sampling
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Really? How many children and grandmothers were dragged into lawsuits by the MAFIAA because they were merely in RECEIPT of such content?
Can you cite any cases? I've heard of cases involving obvious distribution, and I've heard of cases where someone downloaded content using a file share system that made it available to other peers. I can't think of any widely reported cases of someone dragged into a lawsuit who only received it, without re-sharing.
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How many children and grandmothers were dragged into lawsuits by the MAFIAA because they were merely in RECEIPT of such content?
Merely downloading would NOT have a been a problem. Cases like you refer to, have for example involved people who downloaded into 'shared folders'. As in: download something yourself, then person B can download it from your 'shared folder'. Or they used a BitTorrent client, where (by default) everything downloaded is also available for uploading to others. Same for many other P2P apps.
Now whether they knew that or not, and whether that affects damages or not, is food for lawyers indeed. But it's the RE-d
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Under US law, the actual copyright law covers DISTRIBUTION, not RECEIPT.
Really? How many children and grandmothers were dragged into lawsuits by the MAFIAA because they were merely in RECEIPT of such content?
Probably none.
Remember bittorrent will seed by default and if you have seeding on you're distributing. As will most other platforms popular for file sharing as they are usually peer-to-peer systems as a cental server would get shut down and the developers put out of business if it wasn't the end users who distributed all the copyrighted content.
Also, there's a considerable difference between receiving something in the mail unsolicited, (what "receiving" actually means here) and going looking for something a
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The other thing I'd ask is why they bothered making the mean value the headline statistic. The whole point of asking the questions was to see what lawyers thought across a variety of scenarios ranging from black to gray to white. To me, the interesting thing to pull out of that would be any trends, such as a hard line against commercial use or a soft line against potential fair use.
The mean, however, doesn't really tell you about much of anything, and if the mean trended higher than they were expecting, tha
Re:Did they ask the lawyers the right question? (Score:5, Informative)
Under US law, the actual copyright law covers DISTRIBUTION, not RECEIPT. Receiving a pirated video is quite different under the law from distributing them. These people certainly understood the difference.
This is incorrect. What copyright law covers isn't distribution (well, actually there are some bits about mass distribution, but those are ancillary and limited in scope, not the central part of the law), nor receipt... copyright law restricts copying. You are not allowed to make copies of copyrighted works which you don't either own the copyright to, have permission from the copyright holder for, or have another legal justification (e.g. Fair Use).
Since the definition of "copying" requires that the information be "fixed in a tangible medium", the act of copying the bits onto the wire by the sharer, and the many additional acts of copying done by routers at every hop as the data transits the Internet to arrive at your computer, do not count as copyright infringement. If, upon receiving the data, you immediately forward it to a processor that decodes the data and sends it on to your video card and sound card, so you can watch it, I think there is still no copyright infringement, because none of those actions fix the information in a tangible medium.
If, however, you take a copy of those bits and write them to a spinning hard disk, SSD, SD card, etc., well, now you've fixed a copy in a tangible medium, and since you lack ownership, permission or another legal justification (probably Fair Use doesn't apply here), you've committed copyright infringement.
That may account for some of the difference, since commercial use would mean there will be future distribution of the files, but personal use will probably never be distributed once received.
No, it doesn't, because the lawyers likely understand correctly that downloading and saving a copy is copyright infringement. But they also understand that "ethical" and "legal" are two different things, and that it's perfectly possible for something to be illegal and yet ethically acceptable, or vice versa.
Re:Did they ask the lawyers the right question? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the lawyers seemed to understand is that there's a distinct difference between law and ethics. The US Constitution give Congress the power
Congress doesn't have to, and the power was for promoting the development of desirable works, not because copying is unethical. Copyright and patent law are relatively recent, and were created not to enforce ethics, but to provide economic incentive.
Now whether breaking the law is unethical is another matter, but that's a meta-argument.
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Under US law, the actual copyright law covers DISTRIBUTION, not RECEIPT.
Well yes, it's not against the law to watch an illegal broadcast/stream but to store it as a permanent copy is reproduction [cornell.edu]. Normally you could point to the Sony vs Betamax case and say recording it is fair use, but a copy of an illegal distribution is always illegal so you can not whitewash it. This is actually true whether or not you had any reason to think copyright was violated, it's a strict liability offense.
I'm entitled to free stuff! (Score:1)
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Re:I'm entitled to free stuff! (Score:4, Funny)
A man after midnight!
Re:I'm entitled to free stuff! (Score:5, Insightful)
I want $1 for that air you just breathed. Once bits get out there into the environment they are like the air molecules. Someone can of course claim that they own the air but not everyone will be guilted into falling for their scam.
Bits are copyable. That is in their nature. And there is nothing wrong with copying them. It is indeed free stuff. Just like the air is free. Rich capitalists would love to charge 1 cent for every molecule of air you breathe so that they can get even richer, but I for one say fuck them. They won't get richer from me.
It seems clear that most people don't think it is wrong. They don't think it is stealing. Most people seem to think it is more like taking a photo of a Ferrari and not like stealing a Ferrari at all. Accepting the free rider problem is the first step in deciding to sell digital goods. If you cannot accept the nature of digital 'property' then you have no business trying to sell it.
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This really rubs me the wrong way... strikes me as very similar to looting. So, as long as someone else goes in the store, grabs a bunch of stuff, and throws it in the street, you'll go grab that stuff from the street and walk home, with a free conscience. Sounds like a cowardly thief.
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You can still do that, the problem is that you usually have to crack DRM in order to do so.
And you aren't allowed to crack the DRM. Even owning tools to crack DRM is illegal.
Lawyers and Ethics Joke Somewhere (Score:2)
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Queue Lawyers and Ethics joke in 3... 2... 1...
Q: What do you call a lawyer with Ethics?
A: Unemployed.
Thanks. I'll be here all night.
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Q. Why don't sharks attack lawyers?
A. Professional courtesy.
Ba-dum-tsh!
Of course it is (Score:1)
If a machine existed that could duplicate any configuration of matter at zero cost, all markets, and the whole way we organize our society would be immediately fucked. We'd have to rethink literally everything from the ground up.
The problem is that such a machine already exists for information.
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Sorting is still expensive though
Not Surprised (Score:1)
Academic publishing has a *huge* problem. (Score:1)
It's hard to take criticism of pseudo scientific stuff like anti-vax, etc. seriously when the counter-argument is a PDF that sits behind a $600.00 paywall.
The scientific perspective looks like they're trying to selling you something while the other party has no problem going right to Youtube to publish without any constraints what-so-ever.
Hold the phone (Score:1, Flamebait)
Given our recent experience with the Trump legal team, lawyers in his orbit like Rudy Giuliani, his current attorney general William Barr, his former personal lawyer (in prison), his former campaign manager (in prison), his former White House lawyer, and guys like Michael Avenatti (going to prison), why would it be news that there is some crime that is "ethically acceptable" to a lawyer? Trump has gotten his lawyers to sign off on pardoning convicted war criminals for chrissake. After that, I mean, what's
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Not paying them? (Be it 40% of any awarded settlements, or their fees starting at about $200 and only going up from there.)
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Not paying them?
They consider that ethical, just not legal. If they can get away with not paying the people they hire, they will. An unfortunate reality of doing business, but they get their paycheck.
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My post was non-partisan. I was simply listing some well-known crooked lawyers who have been in the news recently. Don't blame me that all but one were members of the Trump regime.
It's a simple rule of fairness for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to work x hours for my money.
So when I pay somebody that money, I expect x house of work in return. Provided the difficulty and prerequisites of the job are comparable. Otherwise somebody is ripped off.
And I don't like to be ripped off. Nor do I like to rip others off.
And there's the problem:
All I get for my money, is a mere copy.
Sure, somebody worked to create the "work". And that actual work should be paid.
But usually, that somebody is not the one "selling" me the copy.
No, that somebody got likely paid a fixed amount (like a programmer) or gets such a negligible amount that it's insulting and he has to live off of live performances and merchandizing (like a musician), aka by working.
No, the one "selling" copies, is just there to rake in the money. It's not like iTunes does hard work by having you upload your song, and having you download a copy. It's basically a decorated FTP server. The operational costs could be paid with ads. Very few ads.
And there is the joke: Copyright is a *distributor*'s privilege!
Not an author's. (Germany had something like that, called Urheberrecht.)
It is a law, to give somebody the privilege, not right, but privilege, to a literal monopoly. A crime in any legitimate industry. To create artificial scarcity. Usually another crime. To rake in money.
Even when the original work was paid off a loong time ago. (Helloo Disney! Yes, we are talking about you!)
Now to me, that is ripping me off. To me, that is equivalent to stealing amd fraud. You may be OK with that. But I'm not. I got kids to feed. Money is not free.
And imagine if I acted like that too!
Ok, I worked eight hours today. (Yay, lucky me!) This got me a nice sum of money. Now imagine if I started treating that money as my "labor property" or however it would be called. And whenever somebody wanted to sell me something, I would put the money on the copy machine, and "pay" with the fake money. And demand they accept that.
I could use all the same arguments. Like "I worked hard for that money, you thieves!" Forbid them form copying it too, with a license. "Don't copy that money"! And lobby congress, to make me a law that gives me a monopoly on those bills of money that I earned. "To protect creative people and foster innovation."
I could even make insulting cheesy cinema ads, saying "Copying AC's labor property is stealing! Piracy is a crime!" and sue everyone for a literal googolplex dollars!
Yes, I actually worked hard for that money.
And I would still be a fraudster and a thief!
. . .
I used to work in the music, TV and software industry.
I have seen the insides.
I remember the boss of [redacted] demanding we order hookers, snort finger-thick lines of cocaine, and only *then* the contract for B[redacted] S[redacted] would be made.
I know the psychological effects of cocaine abuse.
And I swear to fucking god, if the entire "intellectual property" thing isn't the direct result of the extreme paranoia and overconfidence that cocaine induces, plus the desperate need for more drug money.
-- Not trolling, not making this up, but obviously posting anonymously.
Philosophy of law (Score:2, Insightful)
Most lawyers in my experience tend towards legal positivism [wikipedia.org], which entails that there is no inherent link between law and morality. Morality still applies to law - it is meaningful to say that a law is moral or immoral - but it is possible to have a law that is legally valid despite being immoral or to identify an action as moral despite being illegal.
The main alternative is to believe that to be valid as law a rule must be morally supportable. This is very much the minority position though.
I don't believe
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Lawyers have to separate the law from ethics to do their job. It's jurors who we need to believe that a law is invalid when it's immoral.
Garrr! (Score:1)
Let's Just Make Sure We Use the Right Terms (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethical, legal, counter-policy, and of negligible harm are all very different. Being Harvard lawyers, they probably paid close attention to the questions and answered the question being asked.
"Ethical" is relative to the ethical philosophy to which one subscribes. It's unlikely that a Kantian would say pirating is OK, but a many of the flavors of consequentialists might be OK streaming an episode of a show they missed via an illegitimate distributor.
Legal is relative to one's jurisdiction. In the US, it's illegal to distribute, but not necessarily to receive pirated content.
Still, some/most ISPs will forbid the downloading or streaming of content not legally obtained. (A policy issue.)
Lastly, regardless of all the above, if those downloading/streaming weren't likely to watch/listen to the content if they didn't have access to the downloading/streaming option for free, then it's easily arguable that there is no revenue going unrealized and thus no harm. Then, of course, there are those who may pirate an IP and then go on to purchase the content legitimately. I know plenty of people who pirated in college but then bought the full version of their movies and albums they loved once they could actually afford to do after college.
And then you get into mitigating circumstances. How ethically bad is it for someone pirate IP where it is banned by an authoritarian regime. Ya, I wouldn't mind North Korean civilians getting their hands on Braveheart or other revolutionary flicks. Or maybe simply documentaries.
Lesson: Words mean things. Right, good, should, must, ethical, legal, harmless, acceptable, allowed are all different and one would do well to understand the nuance that separates each one so that one could best understand the way others (and one's self) make decisions.
They really needed a study to find this? (Score:2)
Corrected Headline (Score:4, Funny)
Foreigners Ignoring Copyright Law Nothing Unusual (Score:2)
Doesn't LL. M. mean foreign lawyers studying briefly in U.S. so that they can practice in U.S. (or in contexts where U.S. law matters)?
Why should it be so surprising that foreign lawyers (possibly from China) have no respect for copyright?
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I am a foreigner and I have to ignore all Copyright Laws.
Why?
I live in a country where the Kung Fu Panda cartoons are not permitted to air --- because of the drummers at background which happen to be piglets.
It's a country where the children movie Babe is not permitted.
In fact, everything that is not halal is not permitted for sale.
And if I buy the thing abroad, and try to carry the legal copies of DVD home in my luggage, if they found out those contraband , I will be punished.
No, I does not belong to th
I'm curious (Score:2)
Do they also agree to steal or sink the ships and send the crew afloat in rescue boats or do they only a-ok it if the pirates take the cargo and leave the ship to the original owner?
They don't know lawyers very well. (Score:2)
IAAL
Two Harvard lawyers go to a bar.... (Score:2)
No wait:
Two lawyers go to a bar....
One suddenly exclaims "Oh no, we have to go back to the office, I left the safe open!"
The other calmly says "What are you worried about? We're both here."
most (Score:2)
well, maybe most lawyers had no problems with it, but it only takes a few lawyers to cause a lot of problems for 'pirates'.
there are enough of them that don't have an issue with sending notices or suing grandmothers, kids, schools, etc.