Is Piracy morally the same as Bumping the Tube?
A friend of mine asked me a question a few months ago. Is piracy morally the same as bumping the tube?
Oddly out of all the many things we have spoken about between then and now this question has stuck in my mind. Like a lingering cold I haven’t been able to clear it.
‘Bumping the tube’ for those unaware is the act of either following directly behind someone that has paid for a journey or simply pushing through the barriers at a tube station (the British Underground). Bumping is the colloquialism for not paying.
I have in the past made clear my opinions on bumping. I am of the view that it is extremely corrosive to the social fabric of society.
The argument put forward is that the Tube is the most expensive transport network in the world, and the trains were going to run without me, so why don’t I just get on?
Even granting that TfL fares are among the highest in the world, the reason that irritates me the most is the ‘the train is going anyway’. It is only functional in the sense that you view yourself as an atomised individual. It is the logical conclusion of extreme individualism as you don’t view society as an existing institution.
The only reason that there is a train is because you exist in a society that is willing to pay for the trains to run. If everyone took the view that the train would run whether or not I pay, the whole system would collapse.
This is where piracy comes into the conversation.
Piracy is usually the act of illegally downloading copyrighted media such as movies, TV shows, or books.
Both bumping and piracy are the acts of consuming something without paying for them. They both share the similar excuse that the individual doing the act changes nothing.
However, I think piracy differs in three key ways that make it distinctly different from bumping.
Firstly, the tube is what is known as a ‘rival good’. The tube has a finite capacity funded by ticket price (and the signal for increasing capacity is ticket sales). So one person bumping takes away space from a person legitimately paying for their ticket. Whereas piracy is a non-rival good — a person illegally downloading the file doesn’t remove it from someone that legally bought it. People who typically illegally download files were unlikely to have bought the content so it isn’t a case of lost sale rather no sale. Whereas those who bump the tube were going to use the system regardless of payment or not.
Secondly, bumping the tube shifts the cost onto other customers and TfL directly. This is because the system is a shared pool with fixed costs so there is a real marginal cost to someone’s bumping — electricity, staff, station upkeep. But piracy in contrast is a system dominated by digital downloads and streaming services, the marginal cost of production is near zero — it isn’t a finite resource — and once the sunk costs of production have been recovered the additional sales are largely pure profit.
Lastly there is a public/private dimension to each of them. Bumping occurs in front of people who have paid for that good — oftentimes bumping actually occurs with someone pushing the person who has paid through the barriers so that they can get through fast enough. It is a rather visceral violation of the implicit deal made between those who ride the tube.
Whereas piracy is a solitary act — the act of downloading a file is usually done in the privacy of one’s own home with no one watching. Whilst this seems like a spurious claim there is a distinction in moral philosophy between wronging an identifiable person in a shared space versus wronging a diffuse, distant party.
T.M. Scanlon defended this view known as contractualism — an act is wrong if its rules can be reasonably rejected by others, therefore morality is about finding principles we can defend and accept together. In this case wronging someone by pushing them through the barriers or forcing your way through in front of someone paying for the tube is a different moral failure than marginally contributing to an incremental harm to a diffuse body spread across millions, even if the harm in aggregate is mathematically the same.
My point, to be clear, is not that piracy is good or that bumping is uniquely evil. I think both are wrong. This piece has been spent arguing that piracy is the lesser of the two. That is because it is a non-rival good, with low marginal cost, and a diffuse responsibility. This however, isn’t a defence of piracy. Whilst it has a smaller, more distant and harder to trace harm there is still harm, and a smaller harm is not the same as no harm.
Therefore the comparison of them isn’t a moral ranking to let one off the hook rather it’s an attempt to understand why treating them as morally equivalent is a mistake. But I think that they are different types of harm and they are not the same.