From the readings, what exactly the DMCA say about piracy? What provisions does it have for dealing with infringement? What exactly are the safe-harbor provisions?
Is it ethical or moral for users to download or share copyrighted material? What if they already own a version in another format? What if they were just “sampling” or “testing” the material?
Have you participated in the sharing of copyrighted material? If so, how did you justify your actions (or did you not care)? Moreover, why do you think so many people (regardless of whether or not you do) engage in this behavior even though it is against the law?
Does the emergence of streaming services such as Netflix or Spotify address the problem of piracy, or will are these services not sufficient? Is piracy a solvable problem? Is it a real problem?
At its heart, the DMCA is about protecting economic interests. Similarly to patent laws, which in part help to incentivize inventors into creating and publishing their creations, the DMCA applies the notion of copyright to digital data in an attempt to secure economic benefit for content creators. The DMCA is seen as necessary because the extreme ease with which digital data can be copied requires that such copying be regulated to ensure that digital data can in fact be sold. Without any restrictions, a single copy of a media could be distributed to all of the Internet for free, which is a uniquely digital problem.
However, digital copyright restrictions are often cumbersome, overly restrictive, and almost always alienate customers. Such restrictions have no analog in the physical world: no one expects that when you buy one chair, you will get unlimited duplicates of that chair. In many ways, digital data is more malleable than a physical object, and digital copyright restrictions aim to reel those malleabilities in, often with disastrous results. Due to the seemingly alien nature of digital restrictions (applying physical rules to a digital notion), many users fail to believe that circumventing them is against the law. For example, purchasing a DVD of a film allows you to play that DVD to play on any television, lend it to a friend, fast-forward and rewind, etc. Some digital film distribution systems eliminate all of those abilities, shocking users who expect the same levels of freedom that exist in the physical world, often because digital media comes at the same price as physical media.
I do believe that accessing media that you have not purchased for free is illegal: it is stealing like any other. The trouble comes with the notion of copying data you have legally acquired. Personally, I believe that if you purchase a piece of media, you should have the ability to access and manipulate that media in a personal context without restriction. It would not be out of character for me to torrent a film I legally purchased in order to get around overly cumbersome digital copyright restrictions (for example, to watch it offline.)
The counterargument to my stance is that the creator of the media has exclusive rights to its distribution, and so they can levy any restrictions they want on it. I don’t necessarily disagree with this claim, but if that is the case, then I do not believe that it should be illegal to circumvent those restrictions. The content and distribution restrictions should be viewed as one product that the customer can use in whatever way he or she wishes. If content creators want to engage in an arms race with their consumers to alternatively create and crack restrictions, that is an acceptable pattern of behavior that a laissez-faire stance can acknowledge. Market forces allow content creators to compete not only on content but also on the restrictions surrounding its distribution, and customers win in such a competitive environment.
The logical alternative is to have the government regulate and enforce the distribution of digital material. In this scenario, the people have a say in the restrictions on digital content, and market forces are eliminated entirely. What is not acceptable, in my opinion, is when content creators try to have the best of both worlds: to decide upon their own copyright restrictions and get the government to enforce them. This is a difficult scenario for me to morally accept, and so piracy enters the scene as a pressure-release mechanism.
There are already examples of the first scenario being plausible: in the music industry, it has been shown that people are willing to pay for music that is conveniently accessible and will turn away from piracy to do so. At the launch of Apple Music, it was estimated that 7 million people paid for a music subscription service and 20 million pirated music (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-et-ct-state-of-stealing-music-20150620-story.html). This past February, however, Apple announced that Apple Music had over 11 million paying subscribers (Spotify’s numbers also went up), indicating that piracy has not eviscerated the market for music (http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/12/apple-music-tops-11-million-subscribers-icloud-reaches-782-million/). The government regulation scenario exists in monopolized markets in several industries, proving its plausibility.
Piracy helps inform content creators that their restrictions are imposing an economic cost on them, and it should either not be illegal for that cost to be felt by content creators, or the notion of the market should be removed entirely.
Zach's Ethics Blog 