The Moral Arrr-gument for Digital Piracy

The current laws favour private profit over collective good; it’s corporations that are unethical.

Avast ye scurvy dogs, the House of Commons is soon to be boarded by pirates. The Pirate Party of Canada received official party status on April 12, 2010. One assumes that they plan to steal the next election.

The Pirate Party’s platform includes promoting the downloading of music and movies for non-commercial uses, and it hopes to rein in government surveillance of the internet. Before we dismiss this new party as pirates who don’t do anything, we should keep in mind that Swedish pirates won two seats in the 2009 European Parliamentary election

Media scholars and intellectual property lawyers have long argued for substantial changes in copyright laws, but not the kind the entertainment industry is seeking. American lawyer and media theorist Lawrence Lessig argues that we need to resist corporate property claims because they actually threaten to corrupt the rule of law. As the laws stand right now, they effectively criminalize the mass behaviour of internet users and engender hostility between media consumers and corporations. If the law criminalizes what almost everyone does, it calls into question whether the law is acting in the interests of the common good or the greedy few.

One of the most controversial moral claims for digital piracy comes from the postmodernist media theorist, Mark Poster, who writes that “all citizens have an obligation to violate copyright law.” Corporations are grossly violating our rights to use private property such as music, images, and words to create new art, commentary, and other forms of expression. By overextending their rights far beyond the original intention of copyright laws, corporations stifle creativity and undermine the collective good in the name of private profit. Thus, their legal claims should and must be resisted.

As I tell my students, copyright law does not establish what is ethical. It merely reinforces property claims on behalf of very powerful interests that seek to define their interests as ours. At this point, some readers are scrolling down to the “Comment” section and preparing to fire back at digital pirates with the argument, “But what about the struggling artists who won’t get paid because of digital piracy?” But entertainment corporations are not bastions of moral behaviour and fair dealing. As Poster notes and many others have confirmed, “The vast majority of [music] artists never see a penny for the sale of their music.”

The economic arguments against piracy do not hold much water. The industry grossly overstates losses due to digital piracy, which actually has a negligible effect (and sometimes a positive effect) on sales. There is a very weak correlation between digital piracy and revenue loss.

The current state of intellectual property laws serves to reinforce unequal social relations, unequal distribution of wealth, and unequal cultural power. Civil disobedience is justified, says Poster, because the legal system “no longer provides any semblance of justice.” Corporations are the ones acting in the most unethical manner, in their attempt to reduce the rights of consumers and increase their control over the production and distribution of culture.

If Mark Poster were running for office under the flag of the Pirate Party, he would have my vote.