If piracy is unethical, what is the ethical status of loaning/reselling physical (or single access) forms of intellectual property?

Question

My understanding is that piracy is generally considered unethical because it allows the pirate to consume (or simply enjoy the pleasure of) the intellectual property, without making the creator (or rights holder) better off.

However, it does not seem that the following activities are generally frowned upon.

1. Libraries loaning physical books to patrons.
2. Reselling old books in an used book market place.
3. Individuals gifting books to their acquaintances after already having read them.
4. Reselling of video games, which the French court thinks is okay

(As far as I know,) the library does not have to pay for the number of times the book is loaned out, but only a flat price for the physical copy of the book. Reselling the old book or giving them away does not make the author any richer.

The main difference between the first three instances and piracy is that with pirated content, the content can spread in an unrestricted manner, but with these cases only one person has access to a copy at a time.

I believe that the fourth point is somewhat more nuanced, because I view some games as consumable and some as not. For example, a story game can be consumed, but a toy game like Townscaper cannot. This applies to books in some cases too: for example, a dictionary is non-consumable whereas a novel is consumable. In my understanding, this manner of single access transfer of intellectual property is better than piracy only if the transferred property is non-consumable, i.e, reselling a dictionary is okay but reselling a novel is not.

My question is:

• In what sense is the single access transfer of intellectual property more ethical than piracy?
• Is there a rigorous philosophical treatment of consumable vs non-consumable intellectual property? If so, do they discuss piracy?

Answer 1

"Piracy" would be considered unethical if one of these are true:

1. Creators are ethically entitled to payment for their works to be enjoyed
2. Breaking the law is unethical (assuming piracy is illegal)
3. You are ethically obligated to pay the amount a supplier requests, in order to procure something, and possibly adhere to the agreed-upon (written or unwritten) "sale contract" (weaker version of #1 and #2)

#1 would raise all sorts of questions about the things you mentioned, as well as being too vague and subjective when it comes to how much they are entitled to, so that's not really a compelling reason.

#2 is quite circular (something is illegal generally because it's unethical, which it is because it's illegal, which it is because it's unethical, etc.). This can make it ethical to unethical things, just because a laws tell you to. In the absence of a better reason to not do something illegal, this is not a compelling reason.

So that leaves us with #3. The reason we might consider this to be ethical is failure to pay a supplier undermines how society functions in terms of paying people for work they've done. This turns out to generally be quite reasonable:

• Libraries have acquired books from suppliers for the purposes of putting them in a library, so that's ethical.
• When you purchase something, you own it, and you can resell or gift things you own, so that's ethical.
• After you purchase something, if you make as many copies as you want and share that with anyone and everyone, that would undermine someone's ability to make money from that, so that would be unethical.

This isn't quite so straight-forward with piracy though. The person sharing it presumably acquired it legally. One might say you aren't paying for it by getting it from them, but this could also apply to gifts or libraries. One might say the person sharing it isn't using it for agreed-upon purposes. Let's consider that in more detail:

• If they share it with 1 person, and then immediately delete it, this would be functionally equivalent to a gift and therefore ethical (assuming gifting is ethical).
• If they share it with 1 person, and then use it one more time before deleting it, it seems absurd to say this is now strictly unethical.
• If they share it with 1 person and then immediately delete it, and that person uses it and shares it with 1 person before immediately deleting it, we'd presumably still consider this to be ethical.
• If they share it with 2 people, who only very briefly use it, and then they all delete it, this doesn't seem to be less ethical than the above.

You could extend this further. When exactly does it become unethical?

You necessarily have some rather blurry lines here if you want to call piracy unethical (and e.g. gifting ethical). This is not to say all piracy is ethical - ethics can have blurry lines (just look up ethical dilemmas), but that does cast doubt on whether all piracy is always unethical. It seems to be a question of scale, more than anything else: large-scale piracy (especially from the person sharing things) is more plausibly unethical than small-scale piracy or acquiring things through piracy.

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You could also separate the ethics of sharing something through piracy with the ethics of acquiring it through piracy. I'll focus on the latter.

In this regard, the following question comes up:

• Would you actually have spent money on it otherwise?

If you would've spent money on it, your piracy essentially deprived someone of money they otherwise would've (presumably-)ethically had, which may be considered unethical.

If you wouldn't have spent money on it, your piracy had essentially no effect on anyone else in the world. It is rather difficult to argue that something is unethical if it has no effect on others.

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Consumable vs non-consumable

One might say more "consumable" things would be less ethical to gift or resell, but we tend not to really differentiate those things.

I don't think there's really a clear line between those two. Some people tend to only read novels once, others might read them multiple times (and among those people, how many times and how often they're read can also vary, as can which books are read multiple times and which books are only read once). This would make them more or less "consumable".

If you were to consider a fully "consumable" book or game, after you've used it, you'd basically have 2 options:

1. Throw it in the trash (or let it gather dust in the back of a shelf)
2. Resell or gift it

The first option seems very wasteful, if nothing else. Wasteful of natural resources and wasteful of your own money.

One might also posit that (a) there are enough people who'd want to keep the copy they bought and (b) the price to buy it would account for any people reselling or gifting it, so that (in general) it isn't really outside the "sale contract" to resell or gift it, and it could therefore be considered generally ethical.

There may also be options (that are ideally cheaper) for people who don't want their own physical copy, like borrowing it from the library or getting a digital copy, which would make a better case that anyone who does end up with a physical copy they no longer want can resell or gift it.

#2 would be even more compelling if you were to sell or gift it to someone who wouldn't otherwise buy it (which would be similar to one of my arguments above, in that it wouldn't do harm to others).

Answer 2

First of all to call copyright infringement "piracy" should be considered unethical. Piracy is robbery and hijacking, those are felonies that involve coercion violence or the threat thereof. Copyright infringement is a misdemeanor were often enough huge companies that do not produce content themselves but only buy, hire or license content of other people make slightly less money than what they expected to make.

That's not even remotely in the same ball park. It's not even technically theft because you're not even taking away something from someone else by making a copy of it.

If you want to be really facetious you could even make the argument that it's the CREATION of content that is theft. Because why should the landscape belong to the painter or the melody to the musician? Why should anybody who later has the same idea be bared from accessing or publishing it just because someone else had it previously? Why should we consider copyright ethical in the first place? Why should culture and be hidden behind paywalls? And as said it's not even the artists themselves that enjoy that protection but usually the rights remain with publishers who themselves did nothing to create that content.

Of course artists need to have bread as anybody else or they die and can't make art, but just because something is a job that makes money does not by default mean that it's something ethical.

But in terms of your question. Well that is simply the terms of service. With the book you buy a physical copy and after you've bought it you're free to do with that object whatever you like (within the limits of the law). Usually reprinting it is explicitly forbidden within the TOS but apart from that it's now yours, there's a contract and that's part of it.

Just because producers get ever more daring to make people shitty offers and people are naive enough to buy them doesn't mean that using ones own property is piracy.

I mean if something is piracy than the prices that are taken for the distribution. The production and distribution gets ever more cheap, yet you're still expected to pay the same or even higher prices with the difference not ending up with the artist but still being pocketed by the distributors. That is taking someones money without providing an actual service. I mean it's still a contract, so it's technically legal, but if you want to be nitpicky that would be the thing that at least better fits the definition of theft (as said it still doesn't fit).