What Is Digital Piracy Ethical

Levi Magnus

For: Ruth Lowe-Walker

Word Count:

25 February 2018

The Ethics of Digital Piracy

Most people would agree that illegally downloading a book online to avoid paying for it is unethical, but what if you have already purchased a physical copy of the book? Does that entitle you to a pirated copy of the book so that you can also read it on your tablet or e-reader? I will argue that even if you have purchased the physical copy of a book, downloading the book illegally for viewing on your digital devices is still unethical. By analyzing this topic through the lens of various philosophers and their theories, I will try to show that there is no way to justify the download as an ethical action. Recently, New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen

After all, nobody knows that you downloaded a copy of the book and it doesn’t really affect the company, right? While you might be able to keep your illegal activity a secret, it does, in fact, impact the company in a significant way. First and foremost, you are undermining the owner’s control and interfering with the exercise of their government granted rights. John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which defines justice as fairness and aims for everyone to have as much freedom as possible, would be violated when you download an unauthorized copy of a book, as you are violating the author’s and/or publisher’s freedom of intellectual property through copyright infringement. Unauthorized downloads also hurt the company economically, even if you purchased the physical copy. One way publishers make money is by controlling the supply of their product on the market so that it never quite meets the demand. This allows them to keep their product at an attractive price. So when people assume that taking one of an infinite supply of digital copies has no effect on a company because it didn’t cost them anything, they are wrong. Each additional copy on the market, whether physical or digital, creates a reduction in the value of all other copies through the economic concept of dilution. With this in mind we can analyze the scenario using John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism view of the Greatest Happiness

Ethics in a computing culture. Boston, MA Course Technology, Cengage Learning

Carmen, C., Carmen, A., & Javier, R. (2014). Technological and ethical antecedents of e-book piracy and price acceptance: Evidence from the Spanish case. The Electronic Library, 32(4), 542-566. Retrieved from https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1108/EL-11-2012-0149

Cohen, R. (2010, April 2). The Ethicist E-Book Dodge. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04FOB-ethicist-t.html

Masnick, M. (2010, April 5). NYTimes Ethicist: Not Unethical To Download Unauthorized Copy Of Physical Book You Own. Techdirt. Retrieved from https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100404/2115408870.shtml

Robertson, K., McNeill, L., Green, J., & Roberts, C. (2012). Illegal Downloading, Ethical Concern, and Illegal Behavior. Journal of Business Ethics, 108(2), 215-227. Retrieved from