The title of this brief blog post may overreach since I’m not going to provide some kind of ethical analysis going back to the Bible. (For a stab at that see John Frame’s essay and Vern Poythress’ thoughts.)
Rather, I just want to point out that, according to the U.S. Constitution law it is misleading to claim that using copyrighted material is “stealing.”
The period of history in North America that gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had a lot to say about “rights” and how they are not given by government and how no one should violate them.
So if it were widely believed that there is a natural right to gain exclusive profit from ideas or writing or songs or technological designs, one would not expect the following to be in the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
But it is.
Do you see the point? This isn’t the protection of a natural right; it is a government-granted monopoly believed necessary in order to promote a public good. And it is explicitly stated that this “exclusive Right” is to be temporary.
(I note in passing that the Constitution doesn’t empower congress to throw large wads of taxpayer cash at these authors and inventors. Granting them a temporary exclusi.ve right is thought to be as much subsidy as is necessary.)
So while it is important to obey the law, it is also important to not get beaten down by false accusations that downloading a movie is the same as stealing a car. This is one reason why such propaganda is wrong.
I’m surprised that they considered copyrights as promoting progress. Like you said, copyrights create monopolies which completely stunt progress. I don’t see how we can endorse intellectual monopolies and somehow think other monopolies are bad.
Hmm, I don’t agree. A writer’s labors result in a certain configuration of bits. A cabinetmaker’s labors result in a certain configuration of wood. The cabinetmaker can exclusively sell his cabinet. But the writer has no inherent right to exclusively sell his work product? By the very nature that bits can be copied instantly, unless we give that author a monopoly for some short period of time, then we have said that he may as well spend his time doing something else that he can be compensated for. A copyright is the best solution for making bits into cabinets for enough time to make up for the inherent difference between wood and words. An author can’t count on the unitary existence of his creation to ensure that he gets compensated for having created it. So we legally erect his product as a thing for a time. Who cares if the founders didn’t recognize this as an inherent right, they were wrong about that. Long live copyrights.
It is an inherent right but it is temporary?
It is a temporary, legal fiction created to protect an inherent right. But I don’t really know what rights are, anyway; that stuff hurts my head.
Basically, using my example, copyrights help bring parity to two acts of creation. A cabinetmaker cannot sell the same cabinet again once it is gone, so he prices into the cabinet his materials and labor. An author cannot price into his first sale all of his labor, so he has to be granted a way to convert time into something else.
If I broke into the cabinetmaker’s shop and stole his creation, you would call that theft. Copyrights help us treat the labors of information creators analogously. I view the two acts of creation as more than just analogous, but the products of that creation are admittedly very different. Surely our impulse about the justice of the copyright law reveals that we are seeing something inherent like a right in the situation.
But it is not obvious that if someone gave me an instant duplicate of a cabinet he bought from the cabinet maker that I would call that theft from the cabinet maker. Up until Edison made recording possible, musicians worked in an economy without copyrights (at least as far as their actual performances went). What makes that world wrong? Why can’t we have a working economy based on that same principle?
If I were to write today, I’d sure enjoy something like copyright. I’m just not sure I can justify enforcing it. Ethically it feels like it only works from the other side — as a courtesy you extend but do not demand.
I think things rise and fall together; we can’t picture change as happening in only one dimension or as having simple consequences. So, if you have copyright you probably have a lot of other artificial economic dampers. If you lack copyright you probably have a lot more economic freedom; possibly also a greater willingness to extend courtesies. On the whole I think free ground is a better soil for growing all kinds of creativity. On the economic side, where there is more production of wealth there is also more room for patronage. On the artistic side it’s a little harder for me to picture what might happen, but I think it would create a myriad of consequences and opportunities, some no doubt surprising, and I don’t think all of them would be negative.
I don’t want to hear “musicians” perform, I want to hear “The Beatles” thus copyright. “Music” is not a fungible service like “lawn mowing.”
Plus, your model says that recording musicians should not be able to make a living – they have to tour. When “the studio” is an instrument, the only way it can be played profitably is for there to be a copyright in place.
Jon, there is a major categorical difference between the writer and the cabinet maker. The cabinet maker is not telling you what you can do with your own property; the copyright-protected author is. Christianity is incarnational. Although support of copyright is the majority position among western Christians, I really haven’t seen a strong biblical argument for it. Even Rushdoony defended it on pragmatic grounds.
Certainly there was copying in the time when the Mosaic Law was given. It should be conspicuous for this argument that there is nothing prohibiting copying. There are laws forbidding coveting your neighbor’s house, but there are none forbidding that you copy the design with your own materials on your own property at your own expense. Imagine if they had to pay the Canaanites royalties for copying their chariot designs.
Also, since when can anybody guarantee that they will be compensated for anything unless they have a mutually agreed upon contract that trustworthy parties agree to? Labor only has a value if somebody agrees to pay you for it. “The laborer deserves his wages” only applies if there is some sort of mutually agreed upon (contractual in some sense) employment agreement.
Michael, I don’t see the outlines of your argument clearly; there is a categorical difference somewhere, I’ll grant, but not in any place that seems to make it possible to dismiss the utility of the analogy. The cabinetmaker has an inherently copy-safe product. It is built into the unitary existence of the cabinet that its purchase price is the fair market value. When there are atomic-level material duplicating machines, the cabinet maker will start to care about the same issues that the writer or studio musician does. (And, by the way, the design of furniture is protected too, so knock-off handbags, knock-off designer furniture can never be an atom-for-atom recopy either. Wal-Mart can sell plastic resin chairs, but they cannot be shaped just like the one that Philip Starck designed.)
The biblical argument is not based on the existence or non-existence of copyright law in the bible. The biblical argument would have to be based on the nature of property, the nature of desert, and the nature of labor. The purchase price of a book is not the market value of that book as in the case of the cabinet. Only the publishing company is paying to the author the book’s market value. Everyone else is benefitting from a license to own a copy of the book until the book has been completely “sold” and the copyright expires. It takes 80 years and many transactions to really sell a book for its fair market value. It takes a single transaction to sell a cabinet.
Patents and copyrights allow people to get a fair market value for items that cannot be sold all at once. I am sympathetic with all the critiques of copyright law abuse and the hindrances to fair use imposed by encryption. But at the same time, I think the need for copyright is just as embedded in morality and even “rights” as the need for anti-buglary laws. Copyright infringement may not be theft, simpliciter, but it is a deprival of desert which seems to make the Bible’s comments about workers and wages completely relevant.
By the way, I used to believe that perpetual copyrights should exist. I am still open to arguments on that, but I tend to think that a temporary copyright is the best way to handle what copyright law is intended to do – that is, enable someone to get a fair market value for work that no one would have the money to buy all at once (except a publishing company), but could copy instantly.
Mark,
If the government confiscates taxpayer money to buy your neighbor a car – that is government sponsored theft. But if you then take the car from your neighbor because you don’t like the reason he has it – that is still theft. So even if someone doesn’t like the reason the government created intellectual property laws (I’m actually totally fine with them) – it is still theft to take this intellectual property without paying for it.
David
David, you may be right, but I’m not sure about your analogy.
What if someone was busted for running an illegal private postal service? You would agree that the person broke the law and shouldn’t have done so. But would you agree with a claim that this person was guilty of stealing business from the Postal Service?
Mark,
You offer an interesting analogy – but I’m not sure that it fits the category of intellectual property (the U.S. Postal Service, after all, didn’t create the idea of delivering letters). Perhaps I am splitting hairs.
I differ with your argument because I don’t think that property rights have to be intrinsic in order to be real. If legitimate (NB: not perfect) government authority declares that something is your property – for me to take it away from you is theft.
As much as I love John Frame, the appropriate response to Christians who charge excessively (even if excessively is to charge at all) for use of the music they have written is to not use it. Is not a church both encouraging and giving in to covetousness when it says: “We want to use this music, but can’t afford it, so we’re just going to use it without permission?”
David