A Right to Download Books

While I doubt that this post signals the onset of a period of regular updating, I found myself today with a thought that I felt was a little too deep to simply post as a g-chat status or link to from my facebook page (don’t get me started on the generally idiocy of facebook questions before anyone suggests it). Then again, considering all of six people will actually read these thoughts (and I’m probably overshooting that number by four or so), perhaps the medium doesn’t really matter. And that thought is actually a perfect segue for my musings.

Is torrenting a book (downloading it illegally) morally wrong if one owns the book in another format?

Two interesting posts brought this to my attention; one from a literary blog decrying torrenting as morally bankrupt and the other examining it as a symptom of the commodification of literature. Both of these were linked from one of my favorite websites: ReadandFindOut.com.

My own thoughts on the issue are somewhat muddled. I’ve considered torrenting books before, but I also understand why moralists argue that downloading books without paying for them is theft. At the same time, if one already owns the novel, is it theft to simply regain access to something you’ve already paid for?

What this boils down to is whether the purchasing of a novel grants one an access right to the underlying metaphysical object, the text, or to the physical implementation of it, the book you actually purchased. I concede that it would be nonsensical to argue that purchasing the e-book version of a novel gave you the right to steal an actual, physical hardcover. But this can be explained due to the fact that physical hardcover books cost something to create. An electronic copy of a text costs almost nothing (that almost is actually pretty important, but I am going to ignore for it for the moment) and thus, assuming you’ve purchased right to access the text, you’ve taken (almost) nothing from the author.

Under copyright law, making a copy of the text for backup purposes is almost certainly fair use and it’s possible that it’s fair use even if the copy is to allow you better access (although in that case, the fourth factor of fair use analysis, how the use affects potential markets, which is generally considered to be the most influential of the four factors, may way against fair use if there is significant evidence that people are likely to purchase both the e-reader version and the physical version). While law might recognize a difference between actually making the copy and downloading an identical copy, I do not see a particularly strong philosophical difference between them. Although it is true that a person who makes the copy and then disseminates it is violating copyright, someone who makes software or hardware that allows one to perform this act probably isn’t violating the law (unless one reads the DMCA incredibly strictly). We can draw this distinction out until the actual cost to the book owner is so negligible as to be even with the cost of downloading the book, thus rendering the distinction moot.

Although it may be legal (and this is an assumption), the question still remains whether it is moral (I don’t hold to the belief that either legality or morality are subsets of one another). Considering that a book owner has already paid for the right to access the work, there is a countervailing moral interest in preventing people from being charged twice for the same item. We don’t require consumers to pay every time they play a particular piece of music (for that matter, am I pirating music by listening to it online? what if that online access is so ubiquitous - such as youtube - that for all intents and purposes I own the song?), nor do we think that people are thieves when they copy their own music from a CD onto a computer or on to a mix tape. Change of format is usually not seen as thievery as it takes something one possesses and changes it into something else possessed by that person.

What this ramble has been trying to reach is the idea that ownership is a peculiar thing, more often defined by legal rather than moral terms. I own a book, but what that ownership implies vis a vis the text of that book is not simple, it’s incredibly complex, partly due to legal issues and partly due to moral issues. If I choose to back up my books in an electronic format, I don’t feel that I’ve committed a crime. And if I were to choose to obtain those backups via torrents, arguing that I am the same as a person who never purchased the book seems suspect. I am not implying that people who do this are white knights, only that they are not necessarily black hats.