A reader writes:
Is it wrong or sinful to copy music if it is legal to do so?
In Canada, right around the birth of MP3 and affordable CD burners, the music industry (Canadian and US companies) lobbied the government incessantly about pirating. They wanted Canada to put a tax on all recordable media especially blank CD’s that would be shared among artists and studios. Anyway, the government eventually caved and now there is a tax on tapes, blank CD’s, and even MP3 players regardless of whether you intend to use them for copied music or not.
In exchange for the tax, the law allows for Canadians to make copies of music for personal use. The only restriction is that you must copy the music yourself (i.e. your friend cannot make a copy and give it to you). There is doubt on whether downloading the music with p2p file sharing clients fits under that law. Yesterday the courts ruled that it is allowable under that law but there are going to be plenty appeals by music companies. Some legislators are planning on introducing legislation to disallow p2p downloading of copyright materials but for now its legal.
So what would be the Church’s view on this? Would there be a difference between physically copying a CD vs downloading a file in given that the former is clearly legal and the later is ambiguously legal?
Here’s are a few supporting links: Yesterday’s Ruling, Copyright Board of Canada
The ultimate standard of right and wrong is the divine law, but the divine law often contains principles that much be given more concrete form in particular situations by human legislators. Thus, for example, the divine law would require that, if one drives an automobile, one must drive it safely (apart from emergency circumstances). It is not determined by the divine law, however, whether one should drive the car on the right or the left side of the road.
Given the way many streets and highways work–and the way human being work–it will be necessary to adopt a policy of either driving on the right or the left for safety reasons, but God doesn’t determine a single policy that all much follow on this point. Instead, it is left up to human legislators to give give the requirement of safe driving more concrete form by determining, in a particular region, whether driving or the left or the right will be required.
Once the legislators have determined that, we are bound by it and–correspondingly–liberated by it. In other words, if they decide that motorists are to drive on the right hand side of the road then when we are in their domain we are bound not to drive on the left hand side of the road but (unless something else intervenes to affect the situation) we are at liberty to drive on the right.
Something similar pertains to music copying. There are basic principles regarding economics, labor, and property embedded in the divine law, but the particular form in which these are to be cashed out (no pun intended) in a paricular society are left to human legislators to determine.
Once they’ve done that in your society, however, you are both bound and freed by what they do. You are bound not to violate the law but also free to take advantage of the liberty it affords.
Thus if Canada (or some other country) rules that a particular form of music copying is legal then it should be regarded as morally permissible–until the contrary is proven.
It is possible for human legislators to so badly botch their job that they make laws which are fundamentally unjust. In these cases one would (at least theoretically) have moral liberty to exceed what the laws allows one to do. Conversely, one might not be morally free to take advantage of what the law allows you to do.
However, there is a moral presumption in favor of the law. If you want to argue that a particular act of a human legislature is unjust, the burden of proof will be on you.
This is going to be very difficult to do in the case of laws relating to electronic copying of music. The whole subject of copyright law is slippery enough and liable to change due to technological innovation that I don’t see a clear argument that it is unjust toward copyright holders and thus that one would be morally bound to refrain from exercising the liberty that copyright law affords one.
Until such an argument emerges, it seems to me that one is within one’s moral rights to avail oneself of the liberty that copyright law permits one. Thus if Canada allows music copying in particular circumstances such as the ones you mention, I don’t see why you can’t do it.
The law you mention regarding personal copying of CDs, tapes, etc., seems settled, and so if I were a Canadian then I wouldn’t have a problem doing that.
If Canadian law regarding peer-to-peer copying is more tentative then it would seem to me that you would be within your moral rights to act on the law as you presently understand it, in keeping with the virtue of prudence.
Thus if it appears that the law would allow you to do p2p copying then you could go ahead and do so unless you foresee a substantial chance that the law will be reversed and that you will be sued for having done the copying during the period when the law was unclear. (The latter doesn’t seem that likely to me, but then what do I know about Canadian law?)
Hope this helps!
Part of the confusion people have is that they don’t realize that “intellectual property” is not a natural right, but is entirely a creation of the positive law. In fact, it is not really property at all, but rather a license granted by the state. (Legal positivists, of course, would say that that’s a distinction without a difference; for them *all* property rights are granted by the state.) It never occured to anyone that you could have a natural right to prevent other people from making copies of your work, until the invention of the printing press made it possible for police copying, at least if it used the new technology. If you had asked Plato, Cicero, or St. Thomas, they’d have laughed at the notion that you had a property right in anything more than the physical book you wrote (or that a scribe wrote for you). The idea that the government had some sort of obligation to keep people from copying that book once they had bought it from you would have struck them as absurd.
And someone from St. Thomas’s day would have held all kinds of erroneous notions about the intrinsic value of gold and the impermissibility of taking interest. They lived in an economy that was markedly different and less developed. I wouldn’t rely on what they thought about economics as the acid test of the way economics is.
Yesterday’s ruling was December 12, 2003?
“They lived in an economy that was markedly different and less developed.”
I agree. That’s one of the reasons that the whole concept of copyright is dependent on the technology and economic relations that arose with the invention of printing. It cannot therefore be regarded as a natural and universal right, comparable to the natural right to tangible property. What kind of “property” is it that only springs into being with the filing of a copyright notice and which disappears after 14 or 28 years (as under the Copyright Act of 1790), or which disappears 70 years after the death of the author (as under current copyright law)?
The obligation to refrain from copying works derives entirely from the fourth commandment (dealing with obedience to lawful authority), not from the seventh (dealing with respect for property). (And if an author sells his books subject to a condition that the buyer not copy them without permission, then I suppose that could be a contractual obligation that would be binding under the eighth commandment (regarding adherence to one’s promises).)
BillyHW,
Oops, that was my mistake. I was the one that asked the question. I did a search on the google news and that article was linked with a date of Aug 4, 2005. I trusted it and forgot to check the date on the actual article.
Actually, economic thought was fairly advanced back then. Be careful when you say that today we “know better”. These are often the same people who say abortion is not immoral because we “know better in the 21st century”. E.g.:
http://www.mises.org/content/juandemariana.asp
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1516&id=71
(i.e. ask about usury after the housing bubble bursts and the harsher bankruptcy law takes effect – I think there will be many converts).
Another side note – usury was considered a sin against charity as it normally applied not to investment, but for example if someone got sick and needed food or medicine and would be enslaved or put into debtors prison if he could not repay. If someone was in trouble, charity would dictate help without asking for repayment. If it was a case of investing in a business, then it was a risk to be borne (and you didn’t think about 30 year mortgages when the average span of adulthood didn’t exceed 30 years).
I would also note that one of the accusations by protestants was that the bible (the product of several man-years of work using expensive materials, think of something like an automobile) was chained to monastery walls.
Yet many of these same people use Digital Rights Management and copyright to chain their bibles – or translations in a way that doesn’t really differ in kind, except that the chains are virtual and not physical.
There is one point here I think was missed: it’s possible the Canadian tax on blank media and so forth only benefits Canadian artists. Therefore a foreign artist who doesn’t have corporate connections would have no renumeration whatever.
Actually, one of the sore points of scholarly life before the printing press was that many people who owned books didn’t want anybody else copying their books, even if that book was the Bible. I submit the case of Columba, with the famous judgement that “to every cow its calf, to every book its son”. Even though the cow and calf in question were a psalter and another psalter.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/COLUMBA.htm
Actually, I suspect the real reason the judgement went against Columba is that he went to see St. Finnian’s new Vulgate psalter under false pretences of merely studying the Psalter (abuse of hospitality, lying) and then copied the Psalter surreptitiously (doing anything secretly made it two or three times worse in Irish law). So the brehon/king was essentially fining him the whole book (which, including parts and labor, was a huge fine worthy of his princely, scholarly, and clerical status), while attempting to put the kibosh on similar scholarly skulduggery. I don’t necessarily agree with the principle laid down by the decision, but given the surrounding circumstances, St. Columba had it coming.
And heck, at that point Jerome probably still had the Vulgate under copyright…. 😉
http://www.rarebooks.ie/cathach.htm
Btw, St. Columba’s illegally copied psalter, the Cathach or Battler, is still in existence.
Our Columba didn’t have bad handwriting. I particularly like his funky S’s.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/Picts/cathach.shrine.jpg
Here’s the reliquary the Cathach used to be kept in.
http://www.raphoediocese.com/history.htm
And the other side of it. (Scroll down.)
http://www.ria.ie/publications/e-publications/cathach/
The Royal Academy has a CD-ROM, and a Flash demo thereof. (I rather hope the copyright notice tells folks “to every book its Bittorrent.”)
http://www.activate.ie/sites/clarelib/cathach_legend.html
The book should not be confused with this Cathach, which Sandra Miesel probably knows a bit about.
Btw, I noticed some pages say the Irish version of St. Columba’s monastic name, Colum Cille, meant “Church of the Dove”. (Like the BBC one.) Actually, ‘cill’ is what’s in the genitive there. His name means “Dove of the Church” or “church dove”, which is why his Latin name is just plain “Columba”, Dove. (I guess you could call him ‘church rat’ if you have no opinion of pigeons….)
I only say this because people get into some amazing tangles of misinformation with Irish, which they then remember and spread.
(And banshee comes from “bean sidhe”, woman of the hill people/Sidhe, not Bane of the Sidhe. Which is what I keep seeing. Thank you, Mercedes Lackey and John Ringo…not.)