Does Internet Piracy Necessarily Amount to Theft?
Many web users probably share the view that there is some difference between shoplifting and the illegal downloading of a piece of music. We may want to answer the question from a legal perspective. However, I would like to adopt a different perspective here, approaching the matter on grounds of broader principles, starting from a pre-juridical notion of theft, understood as an action through which one person deprives another of something. It is on such grounds that I will answer in three steps to whether piracy is theft.
One may be tempted at first sight to answer this question negatively, insisting on the fact that the goods at stake are non-rival. What does this mean? If you steal a loaf of bread from a shop and you eat it, you prevent someone else from buying and eating it. In contrast, the fact of downloading a file from the Internet does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. Your consumption of a non-rival good does not prevent others from consuming it as well. This is probably one of the reasons why we often perceive file downloading differently from shoplifting.
If we were to stop here, we could conclude that a music file pirate is no thief. The non-rival nature of intellectual goods is definitely something relevant. However, it would be a mistake to stop here. Why? Because we would miss the production side. In a specialized economy in which most of our production is intended to be consumed by others, what matters to a producer is not primarily the consumption value for him of the produced good. Rather, it is the good’s exchange value that matters. If a baker works day and night, it is not merely to eat his own bread. It is also to sell it in order to be able to buy vegetables, drugs or books. Similarly, a professional musician could not survive merely by listening to his own music and drinking fresh water. He also needs to be able to buy bread. As a result, even if Internet piracy is about non-rival goods, it remains no less true that the pirate is a thief as defined above. As in the shoplifting case, he deprives producers and sellers of their income. Interestingly, however, the extent to which he deprives them of the exchange value of these goods is less radical than for rival goods as his downloading does not prevent producers and sellers from selling it to other consumers. Be that as it may, it remains true that the pirate deprives producers and sellers of something.
This reasoning would be incomplete without a third step. What about a consumer who does not have any purchasing power? Should we conclude that when he violates intellectual property, he also acts in an unjust manner, depriving the producer from his income? I don’t think so. The exchange value of a good depends on what each consumer is able to give. If the latter is unable to pay anything because he barely has enough to survive till the next day, the exchange value of a good to him amounts to zero. This does not merely entail that a poor Internet pirate would be a thief with mitigating circumstances. Following our definition above, he would be no thief at all since he deprives neither other consumers, nor the producer of anything.
What follows from this? In developed countries, most pirates can afford to pay what they download illegally. They are thus thieves in the pre-legal sense above, unless one defends the view that authors are not entitled to the exchange value that pirates deprive them of. In contrast, what about a person earning less than 2 dollars a day and whose life could be saved through an expensive patented drug? For this person, buying pirate drugs to save his life would not amount to theft at all. And if that very same person, after a long day at work, wishes to illegally download a musical file, this would not amount to theft in the sense above either. Intellectual property thus raises different ethical issues, depending on whether we are considering poor consumers or not.
[Translation of Feb. 5, 2011. “Le piratage, pas toujours du vol”, La Libre Belgique, Suppl. La Libre Entreprise, p. 9]
A Romanian language version of this article can be found on www.argumentesifapte.ro, at the address : http://www.argumentesifapte.ro/2013/06/14/pirateria-nu-intotdeauna-un-furt/
About the Author
Axel Gosseries Axel Gosseries este permanent research fellow (cercetător principal, membru al societăţii belgiene pentru cercetare știinţifică FRS-FNRS), și profesor la Universitatea Catolică din Louvain-la-Neuve (unde și-a obţinut și titlul de doctor în anul 2000). Axel Gosseries este unul dintre cei mai importanţi specialiști, pe plan mondial, în problematica filosofică a dreptăţii intergeneraţionale, autor al unor lucrări fundamentale în domeniu între care Penser la justice entre les générations, De l'affaire Perruche à la réforme des retraites, Paris: Aubier (Flammarion), 2004 – traducerea românească: Despre dreptate între generaţii, București: Paideia, 2011. Recunoaşterea sa drept unul dintre experţii magistrali în domeniu este atestată, între altele, de faptul că a fost invitat să semneze capitolele dedicate subiectului în lucrări prestigioase ca The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, sau The Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. El este, de asemenea, editorul unor lucrări colective esenţiale, ca Arguing about justice. Essays for Philippe Van Parijs (ed. with Y. Vanderborght), 2011, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain; Intergenerational Justice (ed. with Lukas Meyer) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice (ed. with A. Marciano & A. Strowel), Basingstoke & N.Y.: Palgrave McMillan, 2008. Axel Gosseries a scris numeroase articole de specialitate importante, mult citite şi frecvent citate, pe temele dreptăţii intergeneraţionale, drepturilor generaţiilor viitoare, dreptăţii sociale, democraţiei, egalităţii şi politicilor publice în cele mai prestigioase reviste internaţionale: Ethics & International Affairs, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Philosophy & Economics. Lucrările sale au apărut în limbile engleză, franceză, germană, italiană, olandeză, spaniolă, portugheză, română şi letonă. El este editor asociat al revistei Ethical Perspectives, şi membru în board-ul altor reviste internaţionale de specialitate, între care şi Public Reason (editată de Facultatea de Filosofie, Universitatea din Bucureşti).
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