Buddhism, the Second Precept and Piracy
~immy
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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.