Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

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Personally I find EULAs to be slightly immoral.

Since the company has a monopoly on the product they are distributing in a sense they are coercing you into agreeing to the EULA. (admittedly a very very mild form of coercion, but a form of coercion nevertheless.) As an aside I believe this is why all the forms you have to sign in order to take a chemistry class waiving the school of any responsiblity should you get hurt are invalid. They wouldn't let you take the class without the form so they were coercing you into signing it. The end result is the same as if you hadn't signed the form, the school is liable if they were negligent and/or actively caused you harm and not liable if they weren't. Sorry I'm tired, it tends to cause more pointless asides...

Back on topic... Since the EULA is basically forced upon you it is not valid. On the other hand one can't have uneforceable agreements because in a certain sense everything is coercion because if both sides didn't need what the other had, why were they deeling in the first place? So a compromise must be reached. The company can't ask you to agree to *anything* in order to use thier product and the customer must still follow certain agreements if they are considered to be reasonable requests.

Strangely enough this has come up before in history... I don't know the exact chain of historical events. But the long and the short of it was somebody tried to prevent libraries from loaning out books on similar legal grounds to what we are discussing. Understandably the libraries sued. The courts saw that this was silly and came up with the "doctrine of first sale". A copywrite owner has the right of first sale of their product. After that the new owner can do whatever they please with their purchase. Including loaning it to a friend. As far as I'm concerned, this is the appropriate moral ground for software sale as well. Liscensing is like "renting" a book. Not just renting a book, but forcing me to rent a book by not offering the reasonable opportunity to buy that book. (EULAs also often force you to read that book in only one certain location and with only one pair of glasses....)

Transactions involving copywrited materials can not work perfectly using free market ideals because they are inherently mini-monopolistic things. Since they are monopolies the consumer needs protection against the copywrite holder. The right of first sale is an important protection for the consumer and I, for one, am dissapointed to see it thrown out of the world in the digital age by the despicable legal trick of EULAs. Consequently I think it is the moral thing to do to continue to act as if the contracts governing the sale of books are in force with software as well.

So back to the original question posed by Fyron. Yes it is immoral to copy your SEIV game and give it to a friend (no matter how long or short they intend to use it). Because this is something that you could not do morally do with a book. On the other hand it would not be immoral to uninstall SEIV from your computer and loan it to your friend for a bit and then get it back.

There is a wrinkle here though. With a traditional boardgame you are not required to buy one copy for each player involved (not even such games as Magic:the gathering in which most players do just that). So why could you not set up your SEIV game on several different computers at once for simultaneus (or even PBW) play assuming (since this whole discussion is hypothetical anyways) that the players only played games with each other. I believe that you could do so and still remain morally in the right.

One more thing I just thought of. It is not immoral to make a mixed tape for your friend. I suppose this is because of the fair use provision. It is permissible to copy something when used for certain purposes and one of those is furthering the bonds of friendship by sharing something with your friends. How the fact that I want to say making a mixed tape is ok, but copying SEIV is not ok can be resolved I'm not sure... In any case I'm sure I have rambled enough...

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