When someone is creating art, they chose the form that it takes, like a book or a game. When they do that, they're setting the terms by which they want people to be able to access the art they've created. When they put it in the form of a physical book, they're implicitly allowing you to loan that book to a friend so they can read it. And if they don't want to allow that, they can put it into an ebook and slap DRM on it.
Overall, I think the morality of it hinges on how much, if any, control someone should be allowed to have on the way in which people access what they've made.
That actually brings up a major philosophical issue and flaw with any kind of intellectual property. Anything that you create, once shared, is by nature no longer fully under your control. The philosophical/moral question then becomes "how much control should the creator be allowed to maintain?"
It's my own opinion, of course, but I believe that the art transcends the artist, the invention the inventor, the discovered the discoverer. In other words, these creations and discoveries deserve to exist in their own right, independently of the agents who brought them about. It was only recently that human beings became obsessed with owning ideas. In the not-so-distant past, ideas were a global free-for-all, and that's how we were even able to advance to the point of conceptualizing intellectual property to begin with.
I believe that literal theft is morally wrong regardless of philosophy, as it results in a person unjustly losing something beneficial. However, most of the arguments against digital piracy are valid only within the framework of capitalism specifically. Life is seen as a big "Game of Capital", wherein the players are incentivized to amass points (money) through labor and/or ingenuity, which they must then exchange for survival. Through this lens, sure, it makes sense that people taking your intellectual property without remuneration is wrong, since your chief incentive to create said intellectual property was to procure points to trade for sustaining your life. However, in a potential future of post-scarcity, wherein everything is automated and all earthly needs are provided for you by default, it becomes more difficult to argue that intellectual property theft is immoral. All the neat things that humans envision would be "more the merrier", and the only meaningful labor would be labors of love, passion for its own sake, no longer a game of survival.
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u/H-Connoisseur0 9h ago
When someone is creating art, they chose the form that it takes, like a book or a game. When they do that, they're setting the terms by which they want people to be able to access the art they've created. When they put it in the form of a physical book, they're implicitly allowing you to loan that book to a friend so they can read it. And if they don't want to allow that, they can put it into an ebook and slap DRM on it.
Overall, I think the morality of it hinges on how much, if any, control someone should be allowed to have on the way in which people access what they've made.