(upbeat music) - We have an email today all the way from Middle Earth. Hello, Pastor John, my name is Simon from New Zealand. I've been thinking a lot about copyright and often wondered how copyright fits with scripture. I'm a video content creator and sometimes the copyright laws matter deeply to me, other times not so much.

How should believers view intellectual property rights? What would you say to Simon? - Let's start by laying down a few biblical precepts which are perhaps taken for granted by everyone. But in our day, historical forgetfulness and widespread expectation of unmerited entitlement and pervasive individual autonomy with the individual self as the supreme value and the supreme arbiter in the world with all of that reality around me, perhaps what I'm about to say cannot be taken for granted or for being obvious, but here they are.

Here are the precepts that lay the foundation for I think the understanding of intellectual property rights. Namely first, God has ordained in this present world that stealing is wrong. Ephesians 4:28, "Let the thief no longer steal," or Romans 13, nine, "You shall not steal." Now those are New Testament precepts, not just Old Testament legal statutes.

And the assumption is that this is the way born again people will be led by the Holy Spirit freely and joyfully to act. And it's the way that at the level of behavior, God commands the world to live. It also seems to many of us who reflect on it that this command not to steal implies so there must be some right that a person has to keep or possess or use as he sees fit the property that he owns.

We call this private property. May not be the best term, but I think we know what I mean. The command not to steal assumes the rightness of personal ownership. There's another phrase for it maybe, which implies the right to trade what I have or sell what I have so that I could make a living.

If I could get some appropriate or just or fair value from another person for what I have just created. That's the first precept, don't steal, and the right of personal ownership and selling and trading. Second, Colossians 3.9, do not lie to one another seeing that you have put off the old self with his practices.

So what God expects from Israel once upon a time and from the church today is that we are new people in Christ and these new people in Christ do not lie to one another. We have put off in putting on the new man, Jesus Christ, we've put off lying and that same behavior is normative for the world at the level of behavior.

Not lying, telling the truth, which would imply that if you say that something is yours, when it's not yours, you have sinned against God as well as your fellow man. So if a student, say in my class, says that a paragraph in his essay is his when he has copied it straight out of Wikipedia without giving any credit, the teacher, John Piper, will say, "You're lying." And he'll say, "No, no, no, no, I really believe "what's in this paragraph.

"It's really my idea. "I agree with it, it's mine." And I would say, "No, by copying it verbatim "from Wikipedia and giving no credit, "you have taken over not just an idea "but a way of saying it that belongs to somebody else "and you're not telling the truth. "You're a plagiarist and you're gonna get a lower grade "because of it, maybe even not pass." Third, and I think it's very relevant to intellectual property issues, Ephesians chapter four, verse 28, same one we referred to earlier.

Paul goes on to tell that thief who should no longer steal, "Let him labor, doing honest work with his hands "so that he may have something," that's important, "to share with anyone in need." So there are at least these three important things in that verse. One, doing honest work that produces some kind of value, might be a product, might be a service.

Second, he should be compensated for it so that he has something, that's how he's making his living now, he's not stealing, he's making things or doing things or producing things or performing things so that people say, "That's valuable, "I'll give you $15 an hour for doing that "or I'll pay you $14 for that shirt you just made." And third, he should be inclined in freedom and love to use his resources to help others who may not have his advantages.

So the precept of the goodness of work and the rightness of making a profit or earning a living and the goodness of sharing what we earn with others and the goodness of having it to share so that it's free and not coerced, all of that seems to be implied in verse 28 of chapter four.

So I would say that all three of these larger precepts, not stealing with the implication of the rights of personal ownership or private property, number two, not lying and thus claiming something to be yours that's not yours, and three, gainful employment which is justly compensated so that we can possess things and then have things to share with others freely, I think that all of that underpins contemporary understandings of intellectual property rights.

They flow, these rights flow from these principles and I know that it is possible, I've read some, to approach intellectual property rights from a very different perspective and justify them on the basis of selfishness and hoarding and the desire to be rich and the need to give incentives to people to maximize their wealth by coming up with inventions and other things, but this would not be the first time, would it, when bad motives and good motives lead to the same laws?

I can think of lots of illustrations of that in life, but Christians aren't to be motivated by bad motives even if they come up with the same laws that people with bad motives come up with. So intellectual property rights include things like patents for inventions of material things and there's a fuzzy line between material things and other kinds of copyrights and industrial design rights and I mean, there's all kinds of stuff.

So patents is one, copyrights for the verbal creations, which doesn't mean that you have mere information or an idea that you own, but rather your form of expression of it is owned. Trademarks are another example, like you design something and it signifies, oh, that's the Pillsbury or the 3M or the Apple or the Microsoft trademark and you can't start using that for your own company without legal entanglements and I'm saying that these rights are rooted in those biblical principles.

So those are three examples of property rights and there's lots of others or intellectual property rights and the essence of the matter seems to be that just like a person can build a car or a bicycle or make a shirt and sell it in order to make a living, so a person can invent a certain wiring circuitry that can be used in every phone on the planet that has never been thought of before and make a living by owning that patent for at least a season in history.

Similarly, a person can write a poem or a novel or song or make a video or a short story or an essay, could sell it in a store or sell it to a newspaper and make his living that way and copyright laws exist to protect that way of making a living and so it seems right to me that Simon in New Zealand should care about copyright laws and should not consider it sinful to be thankful for their protection of his work so that he can make a living.

This is not about boasting, this is not about arrogance, this is not about selfishness, this is about protecting a way of making a living the way selling a shirt would be. And the only other thing I would add is that Christians, Christians are not simply shrewd business people. Our citizenship is in heaven.

We do not exist to lay up treasures on earth. We want to draw attention to the supreme value of God over all material things including the ones we create and so Christians will be lavishly generous with the things we create and the money we make from them. It will not be wrong to take the things we create and make a living with them but we will seek in every way we can to be generous with those in need and especially to spread the good news of the gospel making it as free as we can.

- Yeah, amen, we love to create content and to spread it online free of charge to the world and I would encourage you to get familiar with all of the content that we have online at desiringgod.org and be sure to check out Look at the Book, it's a series of videos where John Piper marks up biblical passages with a pen to show you how he dissects those passages in order to extract principles of truth.

You'll want to check those out. They're deeply valuable resources free online and you can also find many thousands of articles, sermons, free books, lots of free books. You can find all of that at desiringgod.org and we close out the week with a very important question tomorrow. If I read the Bible and I feel nothing happening in my heart, nothing in my affections, what do I do next?

I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow on the Ask Pastor John Podcast. (whooshing) (silence) (silence) you