Like it or not, Copying is moral and it’s not theft or piracy and will never be.

According to Rick Falkvinge, “Using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties. When people are saying “I downloaded a copy of Avengers“, that use of language erodes their liberties just a little bit further. It is wrong, as in technically and factually wrong. Looking at the use of “downloading a copy” or “getting a copy” and how this is incorrect, we need to examine why it is important to use other words.

For that’s not what happens. “Getting” or “downloading” doesn’t describe the process. No copy pops onto the wires, travels through the net, and sets itself on the hard drive on the person’s system. This is the copyright industry model of reality, their fake model, which they use to push for harsher laws and erosion of liberty. This is how they equate “stealing a copy of the Avengers” with “stealing a gallon of milk”. That the object is somehow stolen through the internet. That’s not what happens.

What really happens is that you have instructed your system to listen to a complex series of protocol packets, and using them as instructions, you manufacture a copy at your end. You are making a copy using your own resources and property, by listening to instructions online. If nobody listened to these instructions at the time, no copy would get manufactured. The copy isn’t downloaded, it is manufactured. This technical distinction is crucial for three reasons of net liberty.
What really happens is that you have instructed your system to listen to a complex series of protocol packets, and using them as instructions, you manufacture a copy at your end. You are making a copy using your own resources and property, by listening to instructions online. If nobody listened to these instructions at the time, no copy would get manufactured. The copy isn’t downloaded, it is manufactured.

Selmer Bringsjord argues that all forms of copying are morally permissible (without commercial use), because some forms of copying are permissible and there is not a logical distinction between various forms of copying:
http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/bringsjord_copying.pdf

Morality

First, the argument must rest on the basic elements. So put aside the secondary consideration of economic effects assuming particular social or legal constructions, and look at copying in itself.

To evaluate something morally, we can follow Kant, whose fundamental moral rule is: Act only if the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal law. That is, we ask: would we want an action to be a general law?

If a digital object is good, then copying it duplicates and spreads that good. And the incidental cost of copying is practically nothing. We can certainly wish this were a general law: if everyone copied freely and widely, we would all benefit – we would all receive very much more good, and at negligable cost. Copying seems clearly moral, and any restriction such as copyright must therefore be partly immoral.

Creative production can be addressed similarly, with a similar result: We ought to help cultural items be produced because we will all benefit. So helping production, and copying, are both moral. One is not intrinsically antagonistic or limiting on the other – in fact they are mutually supportive. You have a duty to do both.

It is difficult to see how, under any rational ethical measure, copying could be anything but highly moral.
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/anti-copyright-summary_hxa7241_2009.html

According to Professor David Koepsell, There is no way to exclusively possess an expression type (– the abstract ‘pattern’, as opposed to token – the concrete instance), nor does reproduction/copying of an expression type once expressed require force or violence. Nor does it impinge upon individual autonomy to do so. If someone comes up to you and rips a picture from your hand, that’s a very different act from if someone copies the picture. Unlike land and moveables, IP laws are not ‘grounded’ in any brute facts of possession.

IP law is solely pragmatic: it is to support a particular commercial arrangement proposed as practically beneficial overall.

Just laws are grounded in brute facts. The positive law may be unjust if it conflicts with ‘grounded’ laws. For example, if laws were passed to make private property unlawful, those laws would be unjust. IP is not a ‘natural right’ nor is it ‘grounded’, so a critical inquiry is: are there parts of the world for which the granting of IP rights conflicts with other, grounded, rights? – and hence where it is unjust.

There are two types of commons: ‘commons by choice’ and ‘commons by necessity’. Commons by choice involve parts of the world that could be possessed, but for which we make conscious decisions to keep them in the public domain (for example, national parks, international waters). Commons by necessity are parts of the world that cannot be possessed or enclosed in any meaningful sense. Examples include: all of the oxygen in the atmosphere, bands of the radio spectrum, laws of nature.

The human genome, for example, is a constantly evolving object that involves every member of the species, and is a commons by necessity, like outer space, the atmosphere, sunlight, laws of nature, and radio spectra. We have rights in common to these objects. These common rights supersede conscious decisions about how to use them.

And this isn’t a pragmatic argument: it is distinct from the idea of ‘anti-commons’. It is an ontological argument: about the nature of the things themselves.

‘Who Owns You’; Koepsell; 2009.

IP laws restrict expression and freedom

IP rights are exclusionary rights that prevent the unauthorized expression of protected idea types.

While an author or inventor ‘owns’ their IP, they can exclude others from making unauthorised reproductions of their expressions. They can receive royalties for any reproduction made. They can enjoin the expression of others of their protected idea types.

The law allows some types of restrictions on expression, typically to prevent physical harms or incitement of physical harms – consistent with Mill’s liberty principle. But IP laws are government restrictions on expression having nothing to do with physical harms or incitement.

Expressed ideas belong to the category ‘commons by necessity’, but IP as a category of law presumes to enclose this. This is an ethical wrong. To ‘own’ such commons is to demand exclusion of people from these commons by necessity – to prevent the free use of these ideas. This is immoral because our shared rights to commons by necessity are grounded in the brute facts of their unenclosability. And to attempt such enclosure is to interfere with and curtail our mental and physical autonomy and our freedom of expression – in contradiction to the initial axioms above.

Expressed ideas are non-exclusive and unenclosable. Attempts to enclose them are as morally wrong as attempts to enclose genes, sunlight, oxygen, or any other commons by necessity.

Physical goods are rival: if two people sit on the same chair at the same time, it gets rather cosy, and clearly, the more people who want a slice of my cake, the less there is to go around. But intellectual property goods are nonrival: as many people as want can have a copy of a poem, or a computer program, and there is no difficulty in everyone singing the same song at the same time.

This nonrivalrousness of intellectual property goods has important consequences for how we should view the justification of moral rights to own them. For when we think of the justification of private physical property, two features are usually foremost: first, the kinds of things that we want to own are potentially scarce (that is, it is possible that there will not be a sufficient supply of them to meet the desires of everyone who might want them), and second they are rival (and so they can only derive their full usefulness for their owner if the owner is able to exclude others from them). But each intellectual property good is nonrival, and so by its is nature abundant: there is no physical reason why each person should not make use of a particular idea. Insofar as there is a scarcity in the supply of a given song or computer program, this is due to us creating an artificial scarcity – turning what would otherwise not be a scarce good into one, by the establishment of enforcement mechanisms which make it possible to exclude people from access to the ideas in question.

Creating an artificial scarcity in this way has seemed morally suspect to writers since at least Grotius: “If any person should prevent any other person from taking fire from his fire or a light from his torch, I would accuse him of violating the law of human society, because that is the essence of its very nature . . . Why then, when it can be done without any prejudice to his own interests, will not one person share with another things which are useful to the recipient and no loss to the giver?” (‘On the freedom of the seas’, p45; Grotius; 1609.)
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/copyright-ethics-against_hxa7241_2010.html