Aaron Swartz: The New York Times Upfront asked me to contribute a short piece to a point/counterpoint they were having on download. (I would defend downloading, of course.) I thought I managed to write a pretty good piece, especially for its size and audience, in a couple days. But then I found out my piece was cut because the Times had decided not to tell kids to break the law. So, from the graveyard, here it is.
In this piece, I think Aaron misses the ethical issues entirely, and draws an analogy between file sharing and libraries that simply doesn’t hold up. In his piece, Aaron states:
“Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn’t stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There’s no ethical problem.”
Stealing is more than just denying someone availability. When you shoplift from a store, it impacts the store (which has already paid wholesale for the item) and sometimes the artist (as occasionally, and I know this for a fact from book writing, that shrinkage is forced back on the distributors who in turn, punk it back against my royalties). The person it affects the least is the consumer who wanted to buy it but couldn’t because it was ripped off first.
As someone who makes a living from my creative output, I actually agree that there is nothing wrong with downloading. The act of downloading isn’t illegal at all nor should it be. The questions arise from the content you are downloading, not the act of downloading
Aaron’s library analogy fails miserably; Library’s first purchase the books they loan out. And they loan the books, they don’t let you keep them forever. To imply downloading is analogous to libraries is a leap of logic right off a cliff. If everyone who offers a file for download (be it text, video or music) first purchased it, and then if everyone who downloaded it only used it for 7 days and deleted it, then and only then would downloading be like a library. Some may try to argue that, like a library, in the downloading scheme at least one person has purchased the content. However, that fails as well. In the library system, each library purchases a copy of the item to be loaned out (often purchasing multiple copies of popular items). The New York Public Library doesn’t get a photocopied version of The DaVinci code from the Chicago
Public Library and start loaning it out to patrons.
The problem here is that by treating the ethical issues surrounding file sharing and downloading so callously, Aaron does more harm than good. It’s no wonder the New York Times didn’t run his piece. It doesn’t tell kids stealing is okay, it doesn’t even really examine what stealing is. And downloading is not necessarily stealing, but it’s not necessarily all rainbows and lollipops either.
There are real issues to be addressed as technology allows information to be exchanged more easily among consumers. Pieces like Aaron’s don’t do anything to really address those issues… they preach to the choir about the virtues of filesharing while ignoring legitimate criticism from those in opposition. If we proponents of filesharing and downloading hope to really change the world, we should stop spinning our wheels with ill conceived rhetoric, and address the real issues at hand.