Piracy is wrong

[Nomen Nescio]

Suppose you know someone who has been working for years on a novel.
But he lacks confidence in his work and he's never shown it to anyone.
Finally you persuade him to let you look at a copy of his manuscript,
but he makes you promise not to show any of it to anyone else.

Hopefully it is clear in this situation that no one is doing anything
"evil".  Even though he is giving you the document with conditions beyond
those specified in the current regime of copyright, he is not taking
advantage of you.  Even though you hold the bits to his manuscript and he
has put limitations on what you can do with them, he is not coercing you.
You voluntarily accepted those conditions as part of the agreement under
which you received the document.

It should also be clear that it would be ethically wrong for you to
take the manuscript and show it to other people.  Even if you take an
excerpt, as allowed under "fair use" exemptions to copyright protection,
and include it in a document for commentary or review purposes, that
would be a violation of your promise.  This example demonstrates that
when two people reach a mutual agreement about how they will handle some
information, they are ethically bound by it even beyond the regulations
of copyright law.

And surely it is clear that no decisions by Congress or any other
legislative or judicial body can change the ethics of this situation.
In fact, it is absurd to look to Congress for guidelines on ethics!
Surely everyone reading is aware that it is one of the least ethical
bodies in existence.  Those who look to Congress to justify breaking
their promises are not looking for ethics, they are looking for excuses.
Congress excels at providing those.

The point is that this situation is exactly analogous to what might happen
if you purchased a song or other information content by downloading,
and restrictions were placed on how you could handle it as a condition of
that purchase.  One of the restrictions might be that you can make no more
than 2 copies of the song for personal use.  Another restriction might
be that if you give a copy to someone else, you have to delete your copy.

Such restrictions cannot be evil, any more than was the even more
strict restriction imposed on the recipient in the book example above.
Evil only exists when someone is forced to do something they don't want
to.  Offering a song or a book with conditions does not force anyone to
do anything, because the offer can always be refused.  There can be no
evil in making someone an offer, even an unacceptably restricted one.

In fact, making or accepting any kind of offer, with any restrictions
which the parties choose, is a fundamental freedom which everyone
here should fight to support.  To say that people can only make or
accept offers which some third party deems acceptable is a coercive
infringement on people's liberty to make their own decisions and to
control their lives.  It is despotism of the worst sort.  Third parties
have no right to interfere in the agreements which others make.