Social Harmfulness of Offences Committed Against Goods Acquired Through Immoral Means

Abstract

Summary The article discusses the issue of the degree of social harmfulness of acts detrimental to goods obtained through immoral means (specifically, infringement of copyright to legally produced pornographic films). All film productions (also those of a pornographic nature) are works within the meaning of the Polish Act of 4 February 1994 on Copyright and Related Rights. The protection of rights to them is not limited by any moral assessments, but by objectively verifiable features of the work. For legal pornographic works, while their content itself may be regarded as controversial or even unacceptable from the point of view of social norms, the assessment of the social harmfulness of the act is determined not by their content but by the degree of the infringement of the object of protection. The moral assessment of the content contained in the work is irrelevant, if the content is in itself legal and disseminated lawfully, because the protection of non-property rights and, in particular, property rights to a work is not about the protection of the content of those works, but about the author’s rights. The finding that the act involved the dissemination of a someone else’s pornographic work cannot serve as a basis for considering the degree of social harmfulness of the offence as negligible. It is only the degree of copyright infringement that matters in the specific case.