Umbran said:
The thing is, that folks who have illegal copies of pdfs (or mp3s, or whatever) are in violation of the law. Yes, they have stolen. But not every theft represents an economic loss.
I do not have a problem with the example that you used, but while every theft might not represent an easily quantifiable immediate economic loss, (1) I do not hold that an action is acceptable or unobjectionable (or, more strongly, unactionable - if that is a word) merely because it does not represent an immediate, easily quantifiable economic loss, and (2) the theft of material even by someone who'll steal it, but not buy it, changes the relationship between supply and demand for that item. Sigil wrote a much better bit on this than I would.
Not quite. We have to be careful when we make analogies between theft of physical products and theft of information.
I suppose the center of my starting point is that I would ask "Why?" to the above statement. You seem to be saying that the value of the work taht was put into the material is dependant on the material itself. If I steal a paper book that no one would ever buy (assuming that I can know that) It's still theft, even though someone might argue that, in this case, there is no "economic loss".
But, let's say someone sneaks into the bookstore with a battery-powered photocopier, their own toner, and a bunch of paper. They photocopy the book and put the original on the shelf in as close to mint condition as anyone could ever tell. He leaves with only the copy. The retailer can still sell that book! Which means that figuring out exactly how much was lost becomes a bit less straightforward. A game of "what if?"
But, at its base, it is easy to say what has been lost; the information contained within the book which was the source of the inherent value of the book. The person took a commercial product without paying for it, ergo, as I see it, the person stole it. If the thief makes many copies, then the thief is in the interesting position of 'stealing' many copies of the material by stealing it once. It's not really a game of "what if?", but "How much?"
A man walks up to a woman in the street, and asks her, "Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?"
The woman thinks for a moment and answers, "yes."
The man asks, "Okay, would you sleep with me for twenty dollars?"
At this point the woman becomes very upset and asks, "How dare you! What kind of a woman do you think I am!"
The man responds, "We've already established that, what we're doing doing now is just negotiating."
I would say that the argument that material can be taken if there is no immediate, easily quantifiable economic loss is 'just negotiating'.
For the record, I don't discuss the "loss of sale" issue to establish moral high ground for the theif. We have copyrights in order to protect the economic well-being of those who create new intellectual structures. If we want to have sane copyright laws, we must be accurate and honest about the economics of data theft. If we only have a naive estimate of the losses, we will also have naive rules, and they won't work well. Rather like what we have today.
If we don't have an accurate idea about the losses, then ... we don't have an accurate estimate of the losses. I'm not talking about whether a given copyright law is best or not, but about what is right to do. For those who claim that they don't like some aspect of copyright law, so it is a moral imperative to get as many free downloads as they can, I'd like to remind them that Henry David Thoreau's idea of civil disobedience did include breaking unjust laws - and then accepting the penalty for them. If there is someone who can say "I didn't like how a game supplement I wanted wasn't in print, so I copied it, and now I'm in jail for it" I'll buy the moral argument. For the record, I think that the U.S. Supreme Court's limitation of what constitutes "fair use", for example is unfortunate - I'm a MST3K fan - but even in the most parsimonius sense of the time that copyright should exist falls well short of this. Consider that even a copyright term of ten years would still include all d20/OGL material.
In the case of out of print material, the owner of the rights does not allow me the opportunity to give them anything for their work. It becomes a bit sticky to argue that an illegal copy causes a loss when the owner wasn't accepting money in the first place. Again, it is the owner's right to publisht he work or not. It would be illegal for me to copy it, even if they don't publish. But since they aren't making money off it, and in fact refuse to make money off it, how can a copy for personal use cause them an economic loss?
There are reasons to consider such copying a bit of a loss, actually, but evaluating how much of a loss there is becomes hairy.
A reason being that the demand for an OOP product has caused publishers such as TSR/WotC to make material available as PDF downloads. There aren't new 'old' products coming out as PDF's, and this decision was made at the same time (though I cannot show a *direct* connection) that PDF-selling web sites changed their sales download procedure due to massive pirating. Might not this wave of pirating have had the effect of killing the PDF project, representing a quite real loss?
Imagine that after the aforementioned tragic accident in which I lost my left hand, I then use the Styx CD to save the life of George RR Martin. And, in gratitude, he gives me the rights to the current "Song of Fire and Ice" books. Because I am either a jerk or an idiot, or both, I allow them to go out of print, and refuse to print new copies. Legally, such is my right. Nothing you can do to stop me, so there, nyah.
Well, for one thing, you have absolutely no enhanced right to distribute "Crystal Ball", even though you did lose your hand in connection with it, much less right to "Paradise Theater" or "Grand Illusion"
So, legally, I'm in the right. But morally? I'm dong a bit of a disservice to Mr. Martin, who isn't yet finished with the series. I'm doing a disservice to those who haven't yet read all of what has already been published. And so on. Whle my legal rights are not questionable, the morality of my position is not exactly grand. The moral position of those who thwart me is somewhat better then, no?
No. Just because the hypothetical 'you' is being a jerk and doing a disservice to Mr. Martin and the fans does not mean that the moral position of someone who steal the book is in any way improved, as I see it.
Which goes to show - legal rights and moral high ground are not necessarily linked. We prefer to have our laws coincide with solid morals and ethics, but this is not always possible.
Perhaps this answer is not helpful because we just split ways at my last sentence, but I am arguing that what is not legal - here - is also not moral. I can concieve of cases in which the moral (or, at a minimum, acceptable) act would be to break the law, but I am far from being convinced that I have seen anything in this thread that fits this description.