There is very, very little difference. If you had mentioned the difference between stealing an apple and downloading a film, I'd agree that there's a difference, but the raw materials involved in pressing and distributing DVDs are of small concern compared to the cost of creating the film in the first place.
Not sure what "little difference" means. I wouldn't tend to think morality is very black and white in general. Ethics is so interesting precisely because of the subtleties involved. It might very well be the case that the "little difference" you see between the two acts is the key that makes one of them permissible.
I'll just assume you compared it to something more finite like food, though, for the sake of argument.
Don't assume this, since its unreasonably inaccurate. I think it's easy enough to model what's involved in downloading a film.
[I will try to draw a schematic about this "model"; there are many levels of interaction, so it is not so intuitive as it may appear]
Nope, lending is not stealing.
Okay.
But then again, copying en masse isn't lending, either.
Now wait a second. The begs the question... at what point does lending become en masse? I'm being careful to avoid the continuum fallacy when I ask this question. Yes, at a certain point, copying en masse certainly
does become something other than lending. I will not attempt to argue that there is no limit to lending. However, I guess what I am trying to clarify here is that it is not so simple to just affirm a distinction; it is necessary to identify the point at which something permissible becomes something impermissible. When does lending in itself become impermissible? It would no doubt occur when the negative, harmful effects to the makers of the product being lent outweigh the positive effects to the borrowers of the product being lent. The moment that this point occurs is, I claim, attached to the statements below about the collective solubility of the studio system.
This is obviously an area where the law is unable to keep up with technology, but I don't think that changes the moral component of the situation.
I've often wondered about this. I don't think it's that way at all, unfortunately. For example, you can see my IP address, and so can just about anyone with the right software; you can be sure that "the law" has this kind of software. How easy it would be for one of them to simply access any number of the bit torrent websites and round up clearly guilty IP addresses. A huge list of names would appear, and all that would be needed next is a ground police crackdown. Maybe not even this, consider the fact that certain software can actually remotely access computers through the internet (or something like this). In other words, it is not akin to the war on drugs---i.e. a futilely bombastic struggle against vast, unconquerable forces---but rather, it is, as of current, a non-prosecutable issue. I would say much of this is due to the pettiness viewed in the "crime". We can again return to the question of whether one download is a crime (one act of lending and borrowing) as opposed to, let's say, hundreds of downloads (en masse).
I agree that the theft of intellectual property is a sticky situation and fairly different from the theft of something finite and tangible.
Okay.
But I don't think this makes it fundamentally different, provided you accept (as I'm sure you do) that art has value and does not merely create itself.
Again... while above you identify your clear perception of an ambiguity, here you assert that there is none; at least, fundamentally, which must be the level that we work upon.
We both love film, which means we both recognize how hard it is to create a great film, and how valuable a great film is.
Okay.
At that point you need only concede that people should be allowed to "own" their art
I can't concede this at all based on my understand of what you mean, which is not clear. What people? The filmmakers or the audience? I take this to mean that the filmmakers should stake claim to their artwork as property. The dialectic between art having value solely in its relation to the audience and the inherent value bestowed upon a work due to the work put into it seems complex to me. I have homework tonight (physics), so I won't go into it, but I think this is yet another important issue.
As a quick counterexample, I only need to bring up the accepted notion that all artworks, after a certain amount of time, are supposed to be released into the public domain, thereby acquiring a collective ownership.
I'd also like to bring up something radical and anarchistic that will not seem so much so when only applied to art; namely the notion that
all property is already theft.
See the longer of my responses in the previous post. "Capable of making films" isn't the issue, because the situation isn't binary. It's not as if a studio either makes films or doesn't; they make more or fewer films, too, and those films can be given larger or smaller budgets. They can take more or fewer chances on unusual types of films, too. Studios that do well make more movies with bigger budgets, start sub-studios like Fox Searchlight to spotlight smaller films, and take more chances on riskier projects.
A company is either soluble or insoluble. MGM was heading on a downward track for a long time, but nothing became certain until they declared their mission of an independent future impossible. So, maybe through this logic we can never "know" of a studio's capability until their admission of incapability, which, unfortunate as that seems, might be the only practical way of going about this issue when considering the nature of the film industry as composed of large, discreet projects. I'm sure a studio could be, in a binary sense,
one film away from bankruptcy or massive rebirth. Imagine if MGM had released
Avatar (barring all worldly oddities in realizing this notion). Everything for them would have changed. To me this
does seem binary.
I'm not sure I made that claim; I only claim that it makes some kind of difference, and that it'll probably become a bigger problem over time. This doesn't mean that I attribute all studio problems to file-sharing. A well-run study will probably still stay afloat and a poorly run one probably shouldn't blame file-sharing for its demise. For now, at least.
The idea of "for now" is yet another interesting one. How do we know that "for now" is not the limit of the problem? Filesharing has been around in some form or another for at least 10 years now (happy anniversary!
), I believe, so perhaps this is its limit? I think this is important, because it brings up the question whether or not "lending" will ever become "en masse", assuming that it is not proper to describe the current state of affairs as "en masse".