Sat 14 Feb 2009
The Ethics of Theft
Posted by Ian under comics , culture , food , internet , music , politics , site , story , the liberal media , videogames[6] Comments
There’s a feeling, and to my knowledge it doesn’t have a name, that people seem to share. Sometimes, you’re told something, and you can just tell, without being able to fully explain why, that what’s being said is bullshit. I call this feeling cole*.
An example of something that gave me, and gives most people a sense of cole are those ads, usually at the beginning of a DVD you’ve already bought, telling you not to download movies. The argument (set to obnoxious jump cuts and pounding music) is that since you wouldn’t steal a purse, a TV or a DVD, you shouldn’t download movies because it is a form of theft, and therefore exactly the same thing. Except, as that feeling of cole in your gut tells you, no, it’s not.
But why isn’t it? What makes it different, and why does that influence so many people who would not steal a purse to feel that the theft of a film via downloading is not wrong? Here we get to our subject, the ethics of theft. Fortunately, the words we need to describe this already exist. First up is dispossession.
Dispossession is the denial of a person or persons’ access to or use of a thing, service or location. When you steal a purse, you have dispossessed the owner of that purse. They are no longer able to use that purse, or any of the objects inside of it. Stealing a DVD from a store dispossesses the owner or owners of the store of the DVD and the subsequent income from retail. They have now lost money since they purchased the DVD originally with the understanding that it would be sold.
For most of history nearly all theft has been dispossession in one way or another. It is only with the introduction of photographic, photostatic and digital copies that theft without dispossession has become common. In these cases the essential nature of theft is changed, and with it, our ethical understanding of the seriousness of the offense has been massively altered. Essentially, the primary reason theft offended people was that it deprived the rightful owner. In cases where that is no longer true, people now tend to see this dispossessionless theft as a victimless or nearly victimless crime. A lack of victim means the degree of offense is dramatically lessened.
It doesn’t vanish though, and that brings us to the other axis upon which ethical judgments of theft are considered: valuation. Where dispossession is an essentially binary consideration (either someone has been dispossessed or they have not), valuation introduces a great deal more granularity, and also serves to explain why the downloading of a film is, while certainly not on par with stealing a TV, still essentially unethical.
Valuation is a complex term, but for our purposes it means the assessing of value or worth, and the method of the assessment we are concerned with is implicative, meaning not a formal assessment, but an attempt to determine one’s assessment of value based on their actions.
Going back to our purse example, assuming a thief has snatched a purse, stolen the money or other valuable goods and then thrown the purse away, their valuation of the purse itself is roughly $0. It was worth taking for its contents, but beyond that is essentially trash, and since it might eventually serve as evidence of their crime, could even be said to take on a negative value.
Now we apply this to theft via download. Essentially, the person who downloads a movie without purchasing is saying “I value this at about a gig of hard drive space, and a little time tracking it down.” Unfortunately for the people planning to make money from sales, it’s very difficult to buy groceries with a gig or so of some other guy’s hard drive space.
Alternately, it is possible for a theft to increase the value of that which has been stolen. There is the classic example of stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family. Now we’ve taken a loaf of bread, value: $2, and turned it into food to keep your family alive, value: multiple human lives. In this case the ethics of theft, which we compute almost instantly and automatically, tell us that this has become an ethically sound act. We have increased the valuation of the stolen item so much that it is agreed to have been worthwhile. See also: E.T. Stealing a bunch of stuff to call for a ride home.
With that established, copy theft enters a grey area very quickly. What about a TV show that is off the air and not available by legitimate means? The value of the product, per the copyright holders is almost impossible to determine, which means the theft of the object can almost be construed as an increase in perceived value. Then there’s broadcast television, where if a viewer is not a Nielsen Family, the value of their viewership, whether watching the original broadcast or a downloaded copy is essentially 0, so is there actually a devaluation taking place during the latter?
Largely, this grey area exists because our ethical systems have not had time to catch up with the new scenarios of action offered to us by advancements in technology. Additionally, the questions of value (how much a thing is worth to each person, and who exactly is receiving what) continue to evolve in complexity**. It will be interesting to watch our culture adapt to answer these questions in the coming years.
*Named for James Cole, my sixth grade teacher and the person responsible for giving me this feeling more often than anyone I’ve ever met. Honestly, I’d like to thank him for instilling such a complete distrust of authority at such a young age.
**A popular bit of rationalization, one which I myself am not above using, is that while my actual valuation of a product is quite high, my willingness to support the structures that have been built to profit from that product is rather low. Do I want to support a musical artist whose work I enjoy? Absolutely. Do I want to do so when more than 97% of that support is siphoned off before reaching the artist? Not always. Should distribution channels receive recompense for the work and cost required for disseminating art? Yes. Should they be allowed to bloat up like the record and film industries have? Of course not. The line is then, wavering, and often poorly marked.
February 14th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
This is surprisingly unslanted!
February 14th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Well, originally I was going to just make fun of how stupid those ads where, but the more I wrote on it (in my head), the more I got caught up in the ways we walk around making ethical judgments on things like this without ever considering the criteria we use. That wound up being a lot more interesting to me than berating ad executives AGAIN.
Also cut from the original was a discussion of how sometimes the copy theft of something actually leads to a long term increase in value, because people wind up buying stuff they steal. It’s hard to get hard facts on this, but every study done with music has shown that the heavy downloaders were overwhelmingly heavy buyers as well. The personal example in my case is comics, where before I downloaded stuff, I wasn’t reading anything, and now you’re getting mad about how I buy too many. Valuation of an individual downloaded comic is decreased, valuation of comics as a whole is increased.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Dear killallthewhiteman,
Valuation and possession of intellectual property are not new problems caused by modern technology – downloading is merely our modern version of the problem.
For as long as there has been art or culture, it has been copied. This was previously called “folklore” or “oral traditions” or some such thing and is studied by grad students. Dispossession of a song was never a problem until corporations became involved and demanded that they be paid for every single copy of every Britney Spears single that played on some kid’s ipod.
“Possession” and “valuation” are both social constructs. Thus, before someone can be dispossessed of something valuable, we must all agree that “possession” and “valuation” are possible. Having only recently begun considering to what I’m sure is some sort of quasi-communism, I’m still working through this theory. But, despite the American belief in property “rights” above all, some things don’t (or maybe shouldn’t) belong to individual people (or corporations) no matter how much their lawyers and accountants say they do.
I think I could go on for pages, so I’ll stop there.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Al,
I want to thank you for pointing out several things I took totally for granted in my post. The notions of possession and value are indeed constructs, and it is only in reaction to these constructs that the ethics are formed.
It also got me thinking about some very tricky business related to supporting the arts. Essentially, if we don’t apply some kind of value to them, and remunerate the creators in some way, it becomes very difficult for anyone to produce new art. This actually goes back to the folklore and oral tradition. The storyteller role was a (here comes that word) valued role. Even if a storyteller could not provide entirely for themselves, they would be supported by the community in which they lived because their stories and songs had some kind of value (though personal, spiritual, historical and not economic). Unfortunately, we’ve yet to find a situation where these small community functions scale at high population levels.
This also calls to mind my current worries about journalism. I’m absolutely of the opinion that the internet making news free is wonderful, and that the ability for a news story to be picked up and re-reported is essential for a free and well educated people. The big flaw I see in this model is how are the journalists getting paid? A certain amount of news will just be collected in the wild, but investigative journalism, and international reporting need a budget. If all of our news is free and endlessly reproducible, who exactly is footing the bill?
March 28th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Indeed.
That’s the trick about remunerating content creators as opposed to merely the purveyors of the content.
The created item itself has some intrinsic value, but that value is essentially unknowable. We generally are required to rely on the publisher of content to set the value. (Which is crazy, if you think about it – for a million reasons, a Flaming Lips album and a Britney Spears album should not both cost $14.99.)
But whatever that value, the majority of it should belong to the creator, right? Surely, not the newspaper or record company who did nothing more than provide the medium for the content to be distributed.
Maybe this is why it’s difficult for people to believe that they’re “stealing” when they read a newspaper online for free? They assume that any money they would have paid would never make it back to the creator, anyway. And what’s the harm in stealing from the publisher, who probably screwed the journalist with some pittance salary to begin with?
Either that, or they’re just cheap bastards.
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:28 pm
I was forced by the Irony Gods to steal this content, for my own website Crackercoast.com