Ethics of "using" nonfree music and movies

Hmm, a tough call.

I think this comes under the selflessness v. selfishness banner. One must weigh both and see which would be better for the community.

For inctence with Star Trek, could you be selfish (to yourself and close aquentances) and distribute copies against the licence. Or do you adhear to the license.

If you do the former you spread Star Trek to maybe a wider community and get more fans. But if you do the latter, Paramount will get money for Star Trek and thus deem it possible to invest in more programs.

I don't come to much of a conclusion here (maybe since I should be doing past papers now!), but one has to justify which is the best, by trying to look at both the selfish an selfless way you could use the material.

dylunio

Well, if you break the license and share you grow interest in it, its popularity, which again does translate in more money for the Paramount. Not all money actually goes from sales of DVD's, but from showing it on TV. That said, it might even be that if you share DVD's freely, and therefore grow popularity of trek, there will be more watchers on TV and therefore more TV houses would buy it and Paramount will earn more and stay motivated to produce more shows.

That's actually one point with which we could urge Paramount and/or CBS to release DVD's under terms that allow free sharing. :-) That option definitely does seem better than just breaking the license.

With software, there are three choices you have. You can use proprietary software and adhere to its license therefore acting unethical against your friends and peers (one evil), use proprietary software and break the license to share with friends (lesser evil because it is ethical, but not lawful) or just use Free Software (best option as it's both ethical and lawful, in most cases)

I think that may apply to movies and music as well. The only problem is that some of the greatest and most inspiring works of culture are still proprietary and confining yourself to using only free culture (stuff in public domain and stuff license under licenses allowing sharing and derivates) may severely limit the culture that inspires and influences you. I'm not sure if the effect of that would be very good either... One could say we should then just create more culture, make more free music and more free movies, but when you limit your sources of inspiration that is even harder to do.

Maybe we are still in a stage when we can't build free culture without building upon inspiration by proprietary culture works, much like Richard Stallman had to use proprietary software at first to build Free Software.

It does seem like the whole dilemma is a bit different one from the one you'd be faced with in a software realm. Software can inspire and can be artistic, but it is functional, meant to do the work instead of being the work. Music and movies are different in that sense.

What do you think?

I would say that in this case we really don't have much choice.

In the case of software, using free software has some small drawbacks in the beginning until you learn enough and overcome beginners troubles. If all applications you need have their free equivalents that satisfy your needs, then it is indeed much better to use only free software.

In the case of movies and music, you cannot lock yourself out of the vast majority of content. In the case of movies there are some legal ways to share them and cheap ways to watch them.

For example, it is completely legal to give or borrow your movie to a friend, or to watch it together with him. As most people watch movies once, most will be satisfied with this. Even more, most, if not all, new movies appear in cinemas and videotheques (I really don't know a word for the place where you can borrow movies, so if this is the one, then I'm a lucky guesser) so you can watch them cheaply. With music it is different, because people tend to listen to same music over and over.

I don't see anything wrong in copying older movies, the ones that already dropped out of cinemas. Most of those movies, if succesful, banked several (dozens of) millions of dollars of profit, so I don't see copying them as ripping anyone off anything. I see buyers of those mega-successful movies as being ripped off by movie companies that already made sky-high profits. The same goes with music - if someone makes 400% profit on an album and someone else copies it, I don't see it as stealing. Just think about it: if you made an album that brought you a million dollars profit, wouldn't it be ethical to put it in public domain?

The point is: if artists (musicians, directors, actors ...) can make a living out of creating content, and consumers can easily see/hear that content, then the system works. The problem today is that there are middlemen between artists and consumers which take most of the profit and try to scare everyone from sharing the content. Their line of thinking is "hey, if we eradicate sharing, we'll have 800% profit instead of 400%", and it is them that are being unethical. I am sure that if copying all content was suddenly made legal, the profits of artists wouldn't change a bit, but the middlemen might get some competition, which is what they are scared of.

When it comes to music middlemen should definitely be eliminated. I think that much should be clear to anyone by now. As for movies the situation seems a bit different because it is still much harder for just anyone to make them. Sure you have a camera and a 3D animation and mixing software, but you don't always have trained expert actors, ability to travel to all kinds of exotic shooting locations and the computing power to make the kind of quality graphics that movie companies can make. So in this case it is still movie companies that can make the best movies and therefore the existance of middlemen seems less obvious because its mostly agreements in place between movie making companies and their distributors (discovery, continental and whoever). However, maybe these middlemen are a bigger problem then paramount pictures or dreamworks or whatever movie studios. They are the ones who enforce the nonfree licenses much like music labels do.

You have some good points.. I suppose much of Star Trek, at least previous to Enterprise (whose shooting stopped April last year) is already in the "old" category and should harm noone to be freely shared. The only problem is that it still doesn't change the fact that sharing it is illegal because the terms of their licenses are still valid. It never does go to the public domain.

So we're again left to choose between law and ethics or apstinence from the whole proprietary culture (which seems most ethical). Most people choose the second, they share regardless of law. RMS also seems to condone this.

See the first two questions in this interview.

The second answer he finalized with:

And from what we know from his Free Software advocacy he does indeed advocate the right to share above the obligation to the law. If law is wrong and the only way to excercise your ethical right is to break it, then break it. In the software realm there is a better solution which is Free Software. In realm of culture there is also such a solution, a free culture licensed works, but the nature of culture makes things a bit more complicated, because of its diversity it seems harmful limiting yourself to only what was produced as free culture so far.

It seems that ultimately the best one can do is excercise their ethical rights while trying to convert and create as much of culture into lawfully free culture.