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Originally Posted by evollove

I think it's ownership which makes piracy unethical.

i'm glad to see you believe in private property. so do i. i'm not a communist.

what appears nebulous here is "what ownership". but it's not, really.

because with intellectual property and copyrights, what one owns is THE RIGHTS to something.

and when you violate those rights, yes, you violate that ownership and it's therefore unethical-- at least if you believe in private property, and that rights can be owned and therefore bought and sold.

if you believe it's all a free-for-all then this doesn't apply. but as i actually do, it applies to me.

Originally Posted by evollove

A free "experience" is not, otherwise libraries would be unethical, and as far as I know they are not. Lending a CD to friend to listen to doesn't quite pass the threshold for unethical behavior.

libraries could be unethical depending on who defines the ethics. as it is, libraries i believe enjoy certain exemptions but they also have limits in what they can do.

the library does not give away infinite copies in perpetuity to anyone that requests them. the doctrine of first sale applies to the lending of books. but lending is not the same as making copies.

with digital though, similar principles as physical books apply.

for example, i can download an e-book from my public library, which is technically a copy, but i get it for a limited time and i must get in a queue if someone else has access to that book (to those *rights*).

there's more stuff here and i can't read it but it shows how libraries are a special case: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright

Originally Posted by evollove

You may borrow a book and have it's experience, but if you want to be able to experience the book whenever you want, you have to cough up some money for ownership.

sure

Originally Posted by evollove

(Stuff on youtube is almost on the line, but is probably ultimately unethical because if certain simple steps are taken, you can watch whatever you want whenever, which is more or less ownership.)

i really don't know how youtube works but they're always taking down shit due to copyright violations. can't say more than that though. i don't know how they work behind the scenes.

Originally Posted by evollove

So: I could check out a DVD at my library. But sometimes I like watching movies on my phone. I need the movie as a file. So I pirate the movie. After I watch it, I delete it. It was just some dumb comedy I'll never watch again.

Is this action unethical?

if you believe in private property and if you believe that the content creator or distributor or rights owner has a right to administer access to that content, then yes, it's unethical.

it's not an atrocity against humanity but it's a little theft nevertheless. and it has an impact in the aggregate.

now if you're a communist who believes that all knowledge belongs to humanity, and you're willing to give away your labor and its fruits for free the same way you take them, then it's not unethical in that case and in that context.

so ethics depends on the society. and in a society as big as ours the only common ground we have is the law. so what's legal and what's ethical get conflated. but they're not always the same. so, war is legal but unethical to a conscientious objector. taxes are legal but libertarians call it theft. abortion is legal but christians think it's mass murder. so we're always negotiating those differences in legislatures and courts.

the issue for me though is where does the communist society get the economic incentives to produce content and innovation. they just kept playing the same 200 year old symphonies over & over while the west was cranking out all sorts of new things.