Rice University philosophy professor Tim Schroeder on textbook piracy

By Tim Schroeder     9/2/25 7:56pm

The question of the week asks, “Is it ethical to pirate textbooks for my college courses?”

We all know the obvious answer here: pirating textbooks is stealing them, and stealing is wrong. But is there anything to complicate the obvious answer?

Sometimes, theft is morally permitted or even required. If my hot-headed cousin is enraged to learn that his girlfriend is having an affair, it’s probably OK for me to swipe his gun until things cool down. That’s one sort of case: I seem to be allowed to steal things to interrupt or prevent worse sorts of wrongdoing (like murder). 

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Another sort of case would be one in which I’m allowed to steal because the good I’m doing is truly enormous in comparison to the harm. For instance, if I’m starving in the woods, I seem to be allowed to enter a cabin that I stumble on and eat any stored food I need because a life saved is worth much more than a case of Spam.

These exceptions to the general moral obligation not to steal are neat, but they don’t seem to apply to pirating textbooks. Pirating a textbook doesn’t deprive a bad actor of a needed tool for doing wrong, and it doesn’t do an enormous amount of good in the world. You could maybe make the case that, although it does not do an enormous amount of good in the world, it does a vanishingly small amount of harm, and so it might still turn out that the ratio of good to harm is the same as in the case of saving a life by stealing $39.99 worth of processed ham. 

But this argument looks dubious too. Imagine someone stole a few dollars from you, used them to buy a cheap scratch-off lottery ticket and won (and kept) a hundred dollars. That would not strike you as a good justification for the theft. How can you then turn around and use the savings to you to justify stealing a few dollars of profit from the publisher?

Some say, “I’m stealing from a company, not a person,” and this suggests a different line of thought. Interactions with businesses are, in most societies, treated as a sort of competition, in which forms of deception and exploitation that would be immoral in other contexts are accepted as part of the game. Is pirating a textbook just another way to gain a competitive advantage? 

The publisher would say that it isn’t, because the rules of the marketplace are set by our laws, which include copyright laws. But I’m not sure this is the end of the story. Many companies act as though the law is not itself a constraint on their actions but instead a structure that sets out possible costs that might be imposed for acting contrary to it. When a company expects to save lots of money by violating EPA regulations and then paying any fines, it sometimes chooses to violate the regulations. 

Is the publisher who argues that you have a moral duty to follow the laws of the marketplace arguing that you have a duty to act in a way that it feels free to ignore? And does this matter to your own actual duties? I’m running out of insight and column-inches. But if you need a critique of the free market in order to justify your textbook choices, maybe you should just borrow a copy from someone.

Assigned reading: C. Vica and E.M. Socaciu. 2017. “Mind the Gap! How the Digital Turn Upsets Intellectual Property.” Science and Engineering Ethics 25, pp.247-64.

Extra credit: L. Murphy and T. Nagel. 2002. The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dr. Tim Schroeder is a professor in the Department of Philosophy. If you have a question about reality, knowledge, ethics, consciousness, truth, beauty or other abstract theoretical realms (or about how they apply to what your roommate just did), why not ask him about it? Email your questions to askaricephilosopher@rice.edu.

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