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gjm comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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So much the worse for you. (Though of course you should also factor in the utility gain to everyone who benefits from advancing technology, etc. And of course in practice one often ignores everything but the first-order effects.)
However, I was not talking about anything remotely resembling the loss to buggy whip manufacturers when you buy a car. I was referring to the elementary fact that when you pay for something, the money you lose by paying for it goes to other people; what you lose, they gain.
For sure, and of course I neither claimed nor implied otherwise. I claimed only that if writing and selling books becomes less profitable, that will tend to reduce the incentive to do it.
But what you quoted here was not the entirety of your reply, in an important respect: "doing something wrong" was a hyperlink to library.nu. The existence and destination of a hyperlink are an important part of the content of the sentence that contains the link, no?
The fact that an issue has been taken up by a single-issue political party doesn't mean that discussing it constitutes wandering into politics. In any case, let me elaborate something I already said: I am not arguing here (1) that existing laws about "intellectual property" are any good, or (2) that it is always (or even usually) a Bad Thing to copy things illegally. I am saying only that there are not-obviously-crazy reasons why someone might prefer to pay for a physical book rather than copying an illicit electronic copy. They aren't all legal reasons, either.
Broken window fallacy. If they don't gain, someone else does.
Touche, I hadn't thought of that. So the entirety of my reply is:
But I still don't see how you can interpret that to mean: "There's something wrong with buying books, you should exclusively pirate them," which is what you seem to be arguing against.
Semantical dispute. Whether you call it 'politics' or not, my mind recognises it as an exclusively political issue, and, as such, is already beginning to die. For instance, if I hadn't jumped directly (although without consciously intending to) to the 'put down this political opponent' mode, I might've said 'the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand; if you think otherwise, it's probably scope insensitivity.' Instead I said....
... I guess I need to work on that.
I don't know why you keep repeating that, since both of us agree perfectly about it.
Huh? What does the broken window fallacy have to do with the fact that if I pay you $10 for a book, then my loss of $10 (and gain of a book) is exactly balanced by your gain of $10 (and loss of a book)?
I didn't. I took it to mean "A person's default way of getting a book they want to read should be piracy rather than purchase". And it seems to me that if you're going to make that claim then either you should be offering some sort of comparison of the two options, or else it should be obvious that piracy is the better option. Which I don't think it is, for (at least) the two reasons I gave: some people might value keeping the law in this respect, and some people might value having a physical book rather than an electronic copy.
OK, fair enough. I don't want to keep you arguing about something that impairs your reasoning.
(I'm sure "the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand" is a good argument for something but it's far from clear to me how it can be a good argument for, e.g., "when you see a book you're interested in you should generally make an electronic copy rather than buying it, even if that happens to be illegal". The latter isn't a matter of millions versus thousands, and it can only be made so by turning it into some claim about what everyone should do, and if really-truly-everyone follows that advice then it seems likely that the impact on people who write books will be large, at which point you can't negate the ensuing higher-order effects.)
Because most of what you've said seems to presuppose that it's false. I suppose I must be misunderstanding somewhere since you say you agree and haven't retracted anything, but I'm not sure what I'm misunderstanding. So let me ask a more specific question. Suppose I am a person who likes physical books much much better than electronic ones, prefers to stay within the law when possible, and wants authors and publishers and booksellers to get paid. And suppose that when I see a book I'm interested in, what I contemplate doing is buying it rather than getting a copy from library.nu or wherever. Am I, in that case, necessarily doing something wrong? If so, what? If not, are you going to retract your original statement or have I grotesquely misunderstood what it was meant to mean?
Every time you see a book that looks interesting? If that were true, then, as you said,
If not, then it's not a default. I'm guessing the default is, 'meh, it's probably not worth the money,' and this default is overridden on rare occasions by the other alternatives of 'I'm gonna buy it' or 'I'm gonna pirate it, ARRR!'
....After this, it's tempting to believe that this whole discussion was just a semantic dispute over the meaning of 'default', but that doesn't explain the last part of you first comment on this thread:
Which seems to indicate that you agree with my usage of 'default', so I'm still confused about where exactly the misunderstanding is.
Ugh, another irrelevant political argument from my side. Funny how I don't notice I'm replying to something other than the actual contents of the post until I have it pointed out to me. Hadn't realised quite how severe the mind-killing is.
I should probably just tap out of this discussion for a while now.
As I said: what I contemplate doing. Of course I often don't then buy the book. (But I do have an Amazon wishlist with over a thousand books in it.)
Looking over this conversation, we seem to have implicitly agreed that 'response' means thinking of something and DOING IT, instead of thinking of something and then rejecting it later. (I'm not sure I had that nuance in mind when I wrote it, but then the meaning kind of drifted in the ensuing conversation...)
And then I applied the exact same sense to 'contemplate'.
I'd still argue that your defaults are flawed. (If you don't buy most books you find interesting, why is that the first thing that your mind suggests when you encounter an interesting book?)
I expected the “DOING IT” link to go here instead.
Hadn't heard of it before. A very useful find.
I certainly haven't agreed (implicitly or otherwise) that "your default response to X is to think of Y" means that when X happens you actually do Y. As I said before, I took you to be talking about what happens in those cases in which you decide to actually get hold of the book (because if instead your meaning were "you often shouldn't bother getting the book at all" then (1) you were stating the obvious and (2) your link to library.nu was kinda irrelevant). Everything I've said has been based on that premise.
If you're now saying that your point was that actually literally thinking "I'm going to get that book" as soon as you find it interesting is silly -- well, yeah, it is, and it never occurred to me that anyone would think otherwise. My apologies if I've contributed to confusion here...
Ah.... we seem to have different models of what people do when they find an interesting-looking book. You're model is:
whereas my model is
So when I was talking about your response right after seeing the book, I was talking about the buy/pirate decision, which occurs later in the decision-making process for you.
Anyhow, I will restate my point as as 'If "buy it" is the first thing that your brain suggests to you once you've decided to get hold of a book, you're doing something wrong.'
But that one's just a nitpick. The more important takeaway is 'If you buy all or even a large fraction of the books you decide to get hold of, you're doing something wrong. (Unless the number of books you ever decide to get hold of is tiny.)'
Which is exactly what I always took you to be saying, and what I was arguing against by pointing out that some people might have (strong) preferences (1) against illegal copying or (2) for having physical copies of one's books, and that unless there's something plainly wrong with having such premises then your claim is implausible or at least needs more support.
Anyway. Yes, my model is nearer the first than the second of the ones you describe. Actually my process is something like this: (1) See interesting-looking book. (2) Add it to my monstrously long Amazon wishlist. (3) Consider whether I actually want a copy enough to bother paying for it; if so, buy it. (4) Consider whether I want to borrow it from a library; if so, do so at a convenient opportunity. As a matter of policy I don't pirate books it they are legally available at a not-completely-insane price; I am not claiming that this policy is optimal for me, never mind for other people whose values and/or resources may differ substantially from mine. I don't find myself with any shortage of useful reading matter and reference works this way; in fact, I have a backlog of something like 350 books sitting on my shelves waiting to be read. If you think it's clear that I'm doing something wrong by not pirating books in preference to buying them, please feel free to convince me. (Possibly relevant facts: I am reasonably well off and think it likely that the transfer of money from me to the bookseller and thence to various people associated with the production and sale of the book is utility-positive overall; so far as I can tell by introspection, having more money as a result of pirating books rather than buying them would not make me give more to charitable causes; I very much prefer having physical copies of the books I read; it pleases me that the people whose books I enjoy reading get some benefit from my reading them; I don't think it's feasible to reward them by sending them money directly instead.)
I realise that there were a lot of unnoticed background assumptions in my original post.
Here is where my assumptions trip up; my reaction to a 'not sure' at this stage would be 'whatever, let's just download it and see if it's interesting/useful'. While your reaction seems to be 'borrow it from library', or, failing that, 'meh, screw it'.
Come on, that's just equivalent to throwing in the towel. Why not look for ways to optimise it if it's not optimal?
How many of those do you think you'll ever actually read? I see that as a phenomenal waste of money.
I maintain that this is sub-optimal, and that which is sub-optimal should be optimised. I find it inconceivable that you can't find any good use for the money you save by not buying books... So why wouldn't you put it to those uses?
This is one of the things that I really can't argue against without arguing that people shouldn't have exclusive rights to decide where they spend their money. I'm not willing to bite that bullet just yet.
I can point out that this preference might just be status quo bias. Of course, that's not necessarily the case.
I do have one (1) Fully General Counterargument though, read on....
Ah, but does that really rank higher on your preference rankings than existential risk reduction?
But this does show me that my view was overly simplistic and that I've veered too far into other-optimisation. I should probably end this discussion now.
4. Decide whether to tell people about my criminal tendencies on the internet.
As a legal term, "criminal" does not apply here.
So it's fine to discuss the morality of infanticide and baby-eating, but IP infringement is taboo? :P
it seems I've spoken carelessly and I'd like to restate my initial point. I appreciate the clarifications as to the legal details.
I'm suggesting that piracy is immoral, and in very large part because it is illegal. I don't think moral concerns always trump instrumental value or that breaking the law is always immoral. But these will be exceptional cases. Copying a book illegaly because one doesn't want to pay for it seems like an unexceptional case of wrongdoing, and one plausably comparable (morally if not legally) to theft. It seems comparable, I mean, to any given case of breaking the law because it makes life a little easier or more pleasent.
ETA: And I don't mean to suggest I have any knock out argument myself. I really would just like to hear the argument to the contrary if anyone would be willing to take the time.
So you think that the value of the rule of law is more important than immediate personal gains? Fair enough.
You seem to think it's wrong for other reasons, tho I can't quite decipher it.
Why specifically compare to theft? Why not trespassing or something? The only similarity I can see is that infringement and theft are both crimes of an economic nature, but so is vandalism.
To clarify the situation and the relationships between the terms, would you agree that theft is approximately the intersection of vandalism and infringement? (it removes the original, and the perp gains without paying)
And what of it? You're pointing to a general category with the implicit assumption that everything it contains is wrong. Which, as you know, isn't true. Perhaps most of the members of this set can be classified as wrong, but as long as wrongness isn't a general feature of this set, membership of this set isn't a sufficient condition to classify anything as wrong. Ergo, the members of this set that are wrong, aren't wrong because they belong to this set, but are wrong because they meet some other criteria of wrongness. You should think about what those criteria are, and then we can debate whether this particular issue meets those criteria.
As I and other people have pointed out, it's not even morally comparable to theft. You haven't addressed any of those comments as far as I can tell. I'll go with the charitable interpretation and assume what you mean by 'comparable' is what you're saying in the next sentence (the part I responded to in the first part of this comment).
But isn't stealing wrong?
Stealing: I break into your house and take a book without your consent. You no longer have the book.
Copying: I use ctrl-c ctrl-v on your book. Now both of us have the book.
Pretty fundamental distinction, isn't it?
Who said anything about stealing? This is about buying or copying a book, not theft.
Maybe to a deontologist. As far as I'm concerned, all that matters is whether it makes the world a better or worse place. It doesn't even matter whether copyright infringement is 'stealing' or not (though, as others have pointed out, it basically is not). And it seems to me that in certain situations infringing copyright has lots of benefits with almost no downsides, so I could not accept calling it wrong.
Intrinsically or instrumentally?
I don't find stealing intrinsically wrong. Property is just made up anyways.
Property is used for a reason, though. It makes our economy function. As such, I'd find stealing instrumentally wrong. When dealing with something like information, it's only instrumentally wrong if you would have bought it if piracy wasn't an option, and you aren't planning on doing something better with the money, such as donating it to a good charity.
Also, I seem to be in a minority with intellectual property, at least when it comes to books. Governments have gone to great lengths to set up libraries to allow the citizens to pirate books.
Not if I have already read the book and you haven't, and not if I have less money (more specifically, I get more marginal utility per dollar) than you.
Yes, of course "exactly balanced" is true only when we reckon in dollars and books rather than utility. (The way I put it earlier in the thread was: "first-order effects that cancel out exactly when expressed in terms of money, and therefore probably cancel out approximately when expressed in terms of utility".)
Perhaps a good argument can be made that for most book-buyers a transfer of money from them to the publisher (and thence to the author, publisher's employees, etc.) produces a net utility loss. But (1) I still don't see that this has anything to do with the broken window fallacy -- I suspect that Anubhav thinks I'm making a more complicated point than I actually am -- and (2) it certainly won't do to look only at my loss of money and act as if the money has just disappeared into the void.
(#2 might be wrong for people who are close to being purely selfish. I agree that someone motivated only by self-interest can, to a good first approximation, pretend that money they spend simply disappears, and that some reasons for preferring legal purchase over illegal copying will have no force for such a person. I'm fairly sure that Anubhav isn't assuming pure selfishness; certainly many of his/her arguments seem to assume the reverse.)
But they're not exact even then.
Physical scenario: I pay you $10 and you give me a book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain the book, you lose it.
Your assumption holds so far. But now, consider...
Digital scenario (legal): I pay you $10 and you lease me a digital copy of the book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain a book, but you don't lose it, since my copy of the book was created (copied) as and when I ordered it, and you still have your copy.
Digital scenario (illegal/ legally free): I don't pay you anything and get a copy of your book. I lose no money, you gain no money. I gain a book, you don't lose a book.
On the whole (at least if you prefer digital copies and only consider first-order effects) it's a transfer of money that can be avoided and still have a net positive outcome. And as for the $10 you didn't pay to the author (publisher?) you can use it to pay for....
Wait, the author can use it to pay for something else too. You're right, this isn't the broken window fallacy; there is no destruction of value involved. It's still a pointless exchange of money though. (Assuming you're only interested in the contents of the book. If not, the exchange may or may not be pointless, but such cases are a minority.)
'his'. 'Anubhav' is an exclusively male name. </nitpick>
Digital scenario (legal, with DRM): I pay you $10 and you issue me a digital copy of the book, on terms that you can change at will. If you go out of business, I lose the book. If it turns out that you messed up your upstream licensing, I lose the book. If the book is banned by your government, I lose the book. If you decide to discontinue the service for business reasons, I lose the book. In some cases, if my computer breaks or if I upgrade it, I lose the book — at least until I spend an hour on the phone with your tech support convincing them to give it back to me.
Irrelevant, unless I'm confused. (Perhaps I am.) The claim I thought I was responding to is that one way in which buying a physical book is worse than taking a digital copy is that you have to pay for it and therefore lose utility; so I said why that utility is (roughly) transferred to others rather than merely lost.
I do, of course, agree that digital copying is fundamentally different from (legal or illegal) physical taking because it doesn't deprive anyone of the original. (This is one of the reasons why "intellectual property" is such a bad name for what it denotes.)
Thanks. (I did have a quick google and establish that it is a male name, but I didn't have enough evidence to rule out the possibility that it might be a female name too.)
But it's an excellent name in the sense that, for Lockeans, it is an obvious consequence of the right to property.
How so? (And what do you mean by "it"? "Intellectual property" includes, at least, copyrights, patents and trademarks, no two of which are at all the same as one another.)
For copyright, see this paper by Richard Volkman. Excerpt:
It's unpacked rather rigorously through the paper.
Certainly patents are dubious legal constructs, and trademarks are pretty much just a legal convenience, but they have much the same character in terms of ownership as copyright, so it makes sense to keep them under the same umbrella term (if they are to exist at all).
I disagree that they are not at all the same as one another; they are pretty much the only cases where one can own a pattern rather than a particular object. (Heraclitean objections notwithstanding)