Stealing Public Domain Books Is Still Stealing

I really find it staggering how many people can’t see the difference between stealing a physical object and copying something you don’t have permission to copy. Here, for example, is Doug Mataconis who’s sufficiently wedded to the analogy that he seems confused about what the problem is with stealing a book:

None of this is to endorse the current state of copyright law, much of which has been weighted far too heavily in favor of copyright holders for far too long. That’s a policy matter, however, that needs to be dealt with by Congress at some point. From a philosophical and moral point of view, there seems to me to be no question that there’s very little difference between stealing a physical copy of a book and illegally making a copy of a digital version of that same book. In both cases, the creator of the work has been deprived of an economic benefit to which they’re clearly entitled, and the person committing the act is gaining possession of something for which they haven’t paid for. That’s stealing.

By this logic, if you steal my copy of Pride and Prejudice you haven’t done anything wrong because Pride and Prejudice predates Mickey Mouse and Batman and thus the powers that be in the United States Congress have seen fit to allow it into the public domain. I’ve also seen various people hang framed copies of US Geological Survey maps as decoration in their homes. If you steal one of those, just as if you steal my copy of Pride and Prejudice no creator rights have been violated. And yet my view is that stealing my books, whether the books are copyrighted or not, and whether or not the author of the book has released the text as Creative Commons, is still wrong. Morally speaking. That’s because you’re stealing my books!

My guess is that there’s actually no disagrement on this point. The copyright status of a given text is actually irrelevant to the question of whether or not stealing the text from its owner is permissible. This, I think, clinches the argument. Stealing a copyrighted book, like Jared Diamond’s Collapse, arguably involves two separate crimes. On the one hand, you’ve stolen my book, exactly the same crime as committed in the Pride and Prejudice case. On the other hand, you’ve deprived Diamond of some royalties, a non-issue in the case of Jane Austen who’s not entitled to any royalties. But these are conceptually separate issues. What’s more, note that you are equally depriving Diamond of his royalties when you borrow Collapse from the library or borrow a copy from a friend.

Now as it happens, the powers that be have decided that it’s socially beneficial to allow friends to borrow each others’ books even though this results in losses of royalties. The government even funds, at taxpayer expense, institutions dedicated to helping members of the public obtain books without paying royalties to the author. Now the policy implications of copying digital files without paying license fees to owners are in fact different from the policy implications of borrowing books without paying license fees. So it’s not totally crazy that Congress treats copying of files differently from lending of books. But Mataconis and I agree that copyright law “has been weighted far too heavily in favor of copyright holders for far too long” and is in need of reform. And nobody genuinely thinks that it’s okay to steal public domain books or that borrowing copyrighted books from the library is a kind of stealing. Right?