Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Kinda sounds like it might be easier to get away with if it was a crime and the burden of proof was higher

"I didn't know the router Comcast gave me came with an unprotected 'Guest' network enabled by default. Someone in one of the other apartments must have been using it to download torrents"

Sounds like a reasonable doubt to me, I'm sure there'd be plenty of other explanations. Plus the work to retrieve everyone's computers to investigate who actually downloaded it would be prohibitively intensive in anything other than the most extreme cases

Sure, but breaking and entering is a crime - just like theft. Copying someone’s documents is wrong, but it’s not a crime (not unless you commit a crime with those documents, eg fraudulently take out credit). In that case, it’s a civil offense against the victim - just like copyright infringement.

My issue is mostly just to do with the moral status of piracy rather than the criminality of it. It feels like in some cases piracy should be justified and in others it shouldn't be. The criminality of an act is a separate thing. I think I was kind of explaining things poorly with my examples. The distinction between breaking into a home vs not in my example was meant to show the act of copying somebodies personal documents could still be wrong whether or not a crime had taken place under current laws.

Crimes are prosecuted by the government. To be convicted of a crime you have to be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt - in other words, it’s more than 99% likely you did it.

Civil offenses are prosecuted by the victim. The burden of proof is “the balance of probabilities”, ie it’s more than 50% likely you did it. The victim must also show actual damages.

This is very interesting. Establishing damages over reproduction of ones personal documents seems like it would be almost impossible to establish unless an actual crime had also taken place.

In the US, media companies have perverted the law around copyright infringement, and they manage to get awarded statutory damages well in excess of any actual damages they incur. This is why we had all those ridiculous Napster lawsuits where people were fined hundreds of thousands for downloading a handful of songs. In the rest of the world, they could only be awarded actual damages, and the lawsuits weren’t really worth anything.

Media companies would really like copyright infringement to be theft, and they’ve lobbied hard for that. However they haven’t managed it, not yet anyway. They did manage to establish a crime of commercial copyright infringement, though, where if you pirate a significant amount of material or do it for profit you could be criminally charged.

This train of thought for me seems to lead towards the most satisfying justifications I can think of for why media piracy is probably morally justifiable.