For the undergraduate Christian Ethics: Sources class last week, I had the opportunity to lead a class debate on the resolution, “This house believes that the downloading of music and media without copyright permission should not be considered an issue of conscience”—a fun topic for me, given my ongoing interest in the issue of property, and the many discussions/debates I have had with friends about this issue.  

I was curious to see what students would make of it—given how many students nowadays violate media copyright with no compunction whatsoever, I expected a vigorous case to be made in favor of this resolution, but was surprised to find, on the contrary, a very vigorous and thoughtful opposition, and a very half-hearted defense of illegal downloading, ready to concede before the debate was even quite over.  Students seemed to find little merit in the Pro arguments, and to find the Contra arguments unanswerable.  While this might demonstrate a laudatory law-abiding spirit, it also confirmed what I had long suspected was the case—few people nowadays have any grasp of the contingency of property relations.  Consider the following arguments that I supplied to the students:

Pro:

1. According to the Christian ethical tradition, the principle of common use has priority over private property rights—property exists for the benefit of the whole community, not merely for the owner.  Current intellectual property law is unjust, perpetuating monopolies and stifling art and culture.  We have a duty to protest this wicked system.
2. Intellectual property is not real property; it cannot be stolen the way physical property can, since it is infinitely replicatable.  For this reason, it is wrong to apply moral and legal paradigms of ownership and stealing to intellectual property.
3. Property rights are simply a matter of social convention; they have no natural basis.  Nowadays, almost everyone considers media downloading to be fine, so conventions have clearly changed, and existing law is outdated.
4. Such downloading may be illegal, but law is only valid insofar as it is enforced and enforceable.  By the nature of intellectual property, and especially given the proliferation and rapid advance of digital technology, restrictions on illegal downloading are in fact impossible to enforce.  So the law is a dead letter and shouldn’t trouble our consciences.
5. Producers of media are still fabulously wealthy, and indeed, still have access to many sources of income (such as live concerts) even with the existence of widespread illegal downloading.  So the downloading isn’t harming anyone. 
6. It might not be good if everyone violated copyright, but it’s not fair that access to media should be restricted to those who can pay for it, so people who really can’t afford it shouldn’t feel any qualms as long as they observe reasonable limits.

Contra

1. Natural law and Christian ethics enshrine the sacred principle of property rights—“Thou shalt not steal.”  The music someone produces is rightfully theirs, and to take it without their permission is stealing.
2. Downloading media without paying violates the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” 
3. The producer of the media has a moral right to a just reward for their labor.  Their right to receive the profits from the sale of their production is the means, in our economy, whereby they receive this just reward.  Therefore, illegal downloading wrongfully depriving them of this reward and exploiting their labour.
4. Even if there were not a moral case for such legal restraints, the law has an objective authority that the Christian should respect, and failure to do so will undermine our Christian witness in the world.
5. Failure to protect the income stream of media producers will result in a collapse of the media industries; they will be unable to continue to produce media, and not only consumers, but jobholders and society as a whole will suffer as a result.
6. The fact that many people have a sense of discomfort about downloading media in violation of copyright is a sign that conscience is testifying to us about it.  We should not ignore this testimony.

To my mind, arguments 1-3 were easily the strongest Pro arguments, but remarkably, the debate team showed little interest in them.  Of them, the only one they tried to use was argument 1, and they misunderstood its intent entirely, taking it to be an idealistic argument for a sort of Acts 2 communal property; needless to say, they didn’t put up much of a fight when the opposition argued that it was unrealistic to insist on Acts 2 as a paradigm for modern intellectual property arrangements.  Correspondingly, I thought that argument 1 for the Contra was the weakest—indeed, I put it in there primarily to see how quickly the Pro side would tear it down—but the Contra debate team wielded it like a sharp two-edged sword, and the Pros did not make a very vigorous attempt to rebut it.  

In other words, students made the remarkable, and remarkably common, mistake of assuming that the definitions of current property law correspond straightforwardly to an underlying, univocal, natural right of property.  The referent of “Thou shalt not steal” is taken to be perfectly obvious, and that referent, it is assumed, can be mapped directly onto current property law.  To determine what property is, we assume, and therefore what stealing is, all we need to do is look at current law.  No one seemed to recognize that the very definition of property, or what constitutes a just title to ownership and a just title to exclusive use, not only can be, but is, very much up for debate.  Indeed, the mere fact that modern intellectual property law is so recent an invention, and that even today, intellectual property law differs radically in different countries, shows that there is not one, obvious, natural way of defining and regulating it. 

The key Contra argument, in my view, is argument 3—we must ensure that artists get a just reward for their labor.  But we must avoid hastily concluding that there is only one way to do that, which is to treat artistic and intellectual creations in the exact same legal terms as physical objects.  Doing so is likely to in fact prove quite unnatural, and lead to quite problematic results.  Indeed, no sooner did I start wondering whether it was a bit over-the-top to assert “Current intellectual property law is unjust, perpetuating monopolies and stifling art and culture.  We have a duty to protest this wicked system,” than I stumbled upon this story, in which the Saul Zaentz Company has asserted its “exclusive worldwide rights to motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights in certain literary works of JRR Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit” as a basis for forcing a twenty-year-old Southampton pub called The Hobbit to change its name (thankfully, intervention by no less than Sir Ian McKellen has forced the the SZC to back down.  

In short, whatever you think about the ethics of online media downloading, it is high time that we gave some serious thought to the subject of what property actually is and how it should be regulated, and if music piracy acts as a catalyst for that thought, then for that at least we can be thankful.