Buddhism, the Second Precept and Piracy

~immy

Recently I've started researching Buddhism with the intention of following the teachings of the Buddha myself. However, doing so has presented something of a learning curve. One source of this learning curve is that these teachings do not necessarily always reflect the modern world. One area where this is apparent is the second precept: "Abstain from taking what is not freely given."

At a first glance this precept may seem as simple as an instruction not to steal. In other words, do not deprive somebody of material goods. But I think that this precept is probably deeper than that. For example, using coercion or other underhanded means to obtain something would probably be covered by this precept even if it is not strictly stealing.

One area that raises a lot of questions for me is whether piracy is covered by this precept. This is a complicated question because in the Buddha's day intellectual property did not exist and creative works were copied and shared freely.

One potential answer to this question is that piracy is not in violation of this precept because nobody is deprived of any material goods. Furthermore it could be argued that pirated goods are freely given as the pirated material is given freely by the uploader to the person downloading the pirated material.

Conversely though, one could take an anti-piracy stance in regards to this precept. Most obviously it could be said that pirated goods are only "freely given" under the circumstances laid out by the material's owner. It could also be argued that even if the pirated material is "freely given" to the downloader it was not ultimately the uploader's material to give in the first place and thus cannot be consider "freely given".

Personally, I'm leaning towards the perspective that piracy does violate the second precept as piracy still potentially deprives creators of their livelihood just as stealing material goods would. So even though I don't consider piracy to be theft I still think that pirated material is not "freely given" and therefore it would be more skilful for me to avoid it.

Although, even in this view I admit there are complications in this view of the precept. The main problems that I see are whether it is skilful to break DRM for private use, whether it is skilful to copy media to another format (for example dumping cartridges or ripping CDs), whether it is skilful to use an adblocker, whether it is skilful to pirate media for the sake of archival and whether it is skilful to pirate media that isn't available via legal means. Personally I think it would be most skilful to avoid all of these things except for copying media to another format since doing so does not breach any protections that the copyright holder put on the media, it doesn't deprive the original copyright holder and it has been found to be legal in court (and therefore should be considered a reasonable expectation that if one distributes media on a DRM-free format it may be copied to another format.). I also think that I could still archive skilfully assuming that I'm not doing it with the intention of violating the copyright holder's rights.

The final thing that I want to talk about is pirating media owned by companies that engage in unskillful practices. For my practice personally I think I would prefer to avoid media by these companies in the first place. If I find their practices so distasteful that I would want to steal from them then why would I want to engage with their content in the first place?

I hope that if nothing else my musings proved insightful in some way. Note that I don't intend this blog post to be a condemnation of piracy, especially since I'm not sure what would be considered skilful practice in this domain myself. I also don't consider piracy to be theft, rather it's "taking what is not freely given", these things may initially seem to be the same but they are not. Perhaps I'll update everyone as my opinions evolve; I know that I still haven't made up my mind.