According to your values, is illegally downloading a song, TV show, or movie immoral?

[DanTex]

112. You're only depriving the craftsman of payment if you would have been willing to pay otherwise.

If you pirate a book or song that you wouldn't have been willing to pay for, then you aren't depriving the creator. In such a situation the piracy is net beneficial to society, because an extra person gains the benefit of the work, but nobody loses anything.

It's similar in a way to the issue of illegally importing prescription drugs. Researching the drug costs a lot, producing it costs much less. Companies charge a lot in the US because Americans, by and large, can afford to pay. But some Americans can't. Is it unethical for those people to purchase those drugs from other countries, where the price is set lower? Perhaps. But it seems kinda harsh to tell a person that the ethical thing for them to do is suffer or even die because to heal themselves would mean violating the international pricing structure that the pharma company has set up.

One very annoying example of IP protections is that most academic journals are behind paywalls. That means that the general public can't access research, they can only read about research secondhand in the media. To make things worse, the prices are very high, because the places that need to have subscriptions (universities and research labs) are willing to pay a lot of money for them. Some researchers disagree with this, and post copies of their research for free on their websites, which is a violation of the copyright agreement with the academic journals. Do you think these professors are behaving unethically?

As I see it, from the point of view of economic efficiency as well as fairness, there is a dilemma. Once a book or song or study is created, given that reproduction costs are basically zero, preventing some people from benefiting from them is an economic loss. But without this economic loss, creators can't be compensated and eventually people would stop creating things. I don't know how to resolve this dilemma, but I think there is a better way than labelling 99% of college students thieves.