"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

The Public Square
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I recently read this article by John Frame advocating substantial change in copyright law:

For it is possible, after all, in our democracy, to get lawschanged . We are not constrained forever to meekly acquiesce to a system which continually threatens us with grave consequences, even for innocent oversights, on dubious moral grounds.

He argues that copyright law is not morally required, because on its face, copying content is not actually theft.

Now what kind of law is copyright law? The literature sometimes describes copyright violation as “stealing,” and that would put copyright law in the moral category. But that is not at all obvious. When a carpenter makes a table and sells it to me, I then become the owner of the table. I can make another table like it, if I have the skill to do so; indeed, I can sell the table and its “copies” to someone else, even at a profit if that is possible.2 But copyright law insists that when I buy a piece of music I may not make additional copies (without permission), nor may I sell the originals or copies to anyone. If copyright were a moral issue, that same moral issue would arise in the case of the carpenter: morality is not a respecter of persons, for God is no respecter of persons. Why does the law give privileges to publishers (“ownership rights” of publications which continue even following their sale) which it does not give to carpenters and others?

I think the simple answer is that the law does give some similar protections to carpenters, both in terms of copyright and in terms of patents, if desired. Still, his main point is irrefutable. Benefitting from the work of somebody else without paying them is theft is some circumstances, but not in others. He further supports his claim that copying things that other people have done is not a moral problem with these additional arguments:

Further, if the issue were one of morality, copyrights should never expire. If it is morally wrong to copy a piece of music in June of 1989, it is also morally wrong to copy that same piece of music in June of 1990.

Finally, this cannot be a moral issue, because it is impossible to derive a doctrine of intellectual property from biblical principles. Indeed, the biblical writers regularly quote one another freely, with sometimes only the vaguest acknowledgements, if any at all.

Thus, “copyright is not a moral right, but a special privilege. Special privileges can be negotiated.”

He wrote this decades ago, although late enough that he briefly addresses computer programs protected by DRM. But a lot has changed since then. Twice recently I’ve seen the phrase I’ve titled this post: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.” The second time was in this post by Cory Doctorow.

Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (Language warning)

I’m definitely in agreement with the statement. I have no qualms in stripping DRM from digital content I’ve purchased.

But we’ve now gotten to the point where copyright is being used to destroy the utility of physical items. Read the Doctorow article for a wonderful list of examples.

It’s time for copyright to die. It has gotten to the point that it is not benefitting society, but harming it.

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Interesting thoughts. Thanks.

Similar to book printing, I’ve always found it interesting how copyright law creates the phenomenon of abandonware. With books, the whole publishing process is kind of its own cost of entry to reproduce something, but there is software out there which could be easily reproduced without much effort, but can’t be simply because it’s caught in copyright limbo for one reason or another. The original developer can no longer revive it because it no longer has this or that licensing to some other entity’s IP, and the entity who owns the IP is either uninterested in doing anything with it or are themselves beholden to some other entity. Whatever the specific case is, nobody’s interested in trying to make money on it.

Meanwhile, some dude could just rip a copy of it in with 5 minutes of effort. But he “can’t.”

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I am in general agreement. However, theft is about how we receive daily bread, not just our possessions. I think Luther’s explanation is Biblical:

You shall not steal.

What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not take our neighbor’s money or possessions, or get them in any dishonest way, but help him to improve and protect his possessions and income.

One of the jobs of the civil authority is to help us follow God’s law.

So, in a digital age, it can be just to have a legal licensing system that lets a ‘creator’ get paid as long as we would like to have that class of job, even if it means one day we can’t copy a book and the next day we can. We can also decide that we want the people who make money maintaining decades-long rights to do different work, and transition to a new system in a fair way.