It's not stealing. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts. To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent.
This is obviously a bit about the definition of words but I've only really heard it called stealing in the US where I think the narrative is pushed by corporate interests. In the UK where I live the offence is generally called copyright infringement because under UK law that's what it is.
You're correct that it's called copyright infringement, but it's not strictly an offence - it's a tort. Copyright holders can in certain circumstances sue for damages, but you cannot be prosecuted by the crown. Making an illegitimate copy for profit or in order to harm the copyright holder, though, is a criminal offence (see section 107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988[1]).
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson wasn’t scrambling to pay his mortgage with those ideas. See also: Amazon and open source, why should Amazon be the only one able to make a profit? If the ideas have no value, then all that matters financially is manufacturing and infrastructure
I don't even know what my personal stance on piracy is but the subject is clearly more complex than saying that theft applies only to physical objects.
The fact that some powerful organizations are trying to complicate a matter does not make it complicated per se.
In my country the law criminalizing theft begins thus:
> Stöld
> Stöld beskrivs i 8 kap. 1 §. Stöldbrottet förekommer i tre allvarlighetsvarianter:
> * Ringa stöld (tidigare snatteri): 8 kap 2 §
> * Stöld: 8 kap 1 §
> * Grov stöld: 8 kap 4 §
> Skyddsintresset vid stöld är äganderätten. Endast lösa saker samt del till fast egendom kan ägas.
The third sentence defines property as physical.
Reading texts on international property rights it’s always quite clear what everyone is talking about. “Intellectual property” is sometimes mentioned as an aside with an extra caveat that it is not widely recognized.
Yes, but people are allowed to express a strong opinion on a complex subject without also specifically mentioning all the caveats and possible counter-arguments to their position.
By all means argue back and add the nuance you think is missing, but it's intellectually dishonest and lazy to just say "ah, but it's more complicated than that".
Posting to HN is not like writing a finalized spec or publishing an academic paper. It’s ok to ignore complicated edge cases and speak in generalities. Nobody expects commenters to 100% cover every issue with every post.
I remember one RMS lecture that made me think. He pointed out that the so-called "intellectual property" doesn't really exist. What exists are certain laws, such as patents, copyright, trademarks and so on. Each of these recognizes the benefit to society of temporary restriction of freedom of others to use the ideas that were invented/transmitted by others.
> Each of these recognizes the benefit to society of temporary restriction of freedom of others to use the ideas that were invented/transmitted by others.
I'd say that in the context of intellectual property the correct word would be 'postulates' not 'recognizes'.
Benefit to society is hard to proove or measure. It's implied. What's very easy to measure is a benefit to minority of rich people at the expense of the society.
You can just drop "intellectual" and there will be no fundamental change to the argument, it's only the name of the laws defining "property" that change.
No, you can't. Property exists. You can replace the word intellectual with "personal," "private," "public," etc. But removing it does not work. Property is not a legal fiction. Who the property belongs to is.
Yes, but the association of that laptop with yourself as an owner is an abstract idea. Many mammals do not have such ideas of ownership as an exclusive right, though many will defend territory, mates, and offspring.
It can not be understated how foundational exclusive property rights are to modern society and technological advancement. Since at least the Magna Carta it’s considered a human right. The US Declaration of Independence almost enumerated property as an inalienable right in place of the pursuit of happiness.
How could I have forgotten: the idea of personal property is also essential to Jewish law, predating the Magna Carta by another 2,000 years. That’s at least 3,000 years of at least a portion of humans placing value on private property.
I updated my earlier comment to point out much earlier property laws. As best I can tell, copyright laws are around 500 years old, and about 230 in America. They were always written to give the creator a limited monopoly, unlike property, which is in perpetuity. Personal property is typically not considered to have the wide public value or cultural impact that ideas have.
There’s definitely a deep philosophical discussion to be had here about what value governments provide in return for your tax dollars on property that in reality they allow you to do certain things with, insofar as any human can claim to own any piece of this planet. In the end, it usually boils down to paying for them to defend it from invaders and anyone trying to take it from you, so think about the tax like a protection fee that entitles you to call up guys with guns to make whoever is trying to break that government’s rules about what you can and cannot do with that property you pay tax on stop. Consider US military strength (perceived and actual, as far as we can even measure that) vs rest of world, same with property values and wages in the US vs other places.
> Consider US military strength (perceived and actual, as far as we can even measure that) vs rest of world, same with property values and wages in the US vs other places.
While I agree with your comment, I think the last part is only partly true. The military strength of a country doesn't necessarily correlate with the property values and prices - it is enough to compare, say, Switzerland or the Netherlands with Russia or China. Rather, it is an intricate next of various factors that constantly change.
I’d highly recommend reading the 1840 banger * What Is Property? or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government* by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Property is theft! fame.
If you want to know how bullshit intellectual "property" is, ask the simple question of who owns the personal information the ad company collected about me?
Of course, the ad company owns it, because of their hard intellectual work of collecting it.
Me? No, why would I own information about me? What logic of property is this?
If you come to my restaurant isn't in my info that you walked in my door, sat at my table, ordered my food? Why do you think it's your info? When two interact both sides get to remember the interaction.
The question is whether you own information about their food choices that you can sell to a third party without even telling the customer it was collected.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that you have a right to observe, collect data, and sell it. On the other hand, ick.
Just ask TV and car manufacturers who collect telemetry about absolutely everything you do with their products and probably everything that happens on your connected phone and/or wifi network too.
Such things would use up the customer's (electrical) power for the company's profit in ways that were not intended by the purchaser. That is in addition to spying, which it also is.
The question is not if you can "remember" it. That is not what ownership in personal information is about.
The question is whether you can __sell__ the information that I had three double cheese burgers and extra greasy fries to my health insurance provider.
But if I walk into a franchise restaurant with a camera recording, they'll kick me out while happily recording and selling data with their own cameras.
That’s incorrect. One absolutely can steal ideas, it’s even used explicitly in the definition of multiple dictionaries: “to claim credit for another’s idea” [1]; “to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment” [2]. The word steal has many definitions that don’t involve taking physical property, e.g., stealing elections, stealing liberty, stealing base, stealing a kiss, making fraudulent deals, etc., etc..
Says who? Where did you get that definition? Your claim isn’t very well supported by either of the two dictionaries that I linked to, nor any searches on the etymology of steal that I can find. A valid definition is a valid definition. Common usage is common usage. It may be common to refer to something physical that is deprived, but it’s also extremely common and also completely correct to refer to things stolen that do not deprive. You can, in fact, steal ideas, according to the definition of the word steal.
> It may be used in that context in our society
Yes, and that makes it de-facto correct usage! Discussion of idea stealing has been commonplace in business, and academics, and literature, and among children, and …. You can find a never-ending supply of references to stolen ideas online and in print. It seems especially ironic for people on a startup forum to argue that ideas can’t be stolen when it happens and gets referred to regularly.
For me, the etymology of words have more importance because they have a strong connection to the truth of what it is we are trying to convey. Synonyms are a sort of half-truths, constructs we have to use to get by in the world, but IMHO don't correctly resemble the real meaning of what we are talking about.
I did some searching online and I couldn't find an good root example of stealing, it seems related to stealth which I don't think correctly explains the subject we are discussing. I think what we are both talking about is theft. When I looked up the etymology of theft I found it related to fraud, "a fraudulent production, something intended to deceive". and it goes on, "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose;" the word also seems related to defraud, which could be where you are going with this, "deprive of right, by deception or breech of trust or withholding,"
To clarify, I think you CAN deprive someone of an expression of an idea. I incorrectly lumped it into the idea part. Having an idea (and communicating it to the world) vs having an expression of an idea, for me are two different things.
I don't believe there is any good that can come out of protecting ideas from loss or theft, so I don't put too much stock in the idea of IP law.
The expression of an idea is another matter. but I err on the side of "deception practiced for the sake of what is deemed a good purpose".
For me this is really about protecting the common good. There has to be a balance between the dissemination of creativity vs getting compensated for a work.
Right now, copyright, if that is what we are talking about, is way out of balance. Copyrights are mostly owned and wielded harmfully by corporations. When corporations use copyright, to stop, or take away purchased products, or prevent individuals from sharing in the spirit of sharing, that's where I draw the line. When copyright is used in this way, it deprives the public of some common good. I don't think copyright was ever meant to do that.
So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
Oh hey I almost missed your reply. So yes, correct, the etymology of the words steal and theft, in addition to accepted common usage and modern dictionaries, all unanimously support the notion that an idea can be “stolen”, in direct contradiction to @stcg’s claim 5 comments up. You initially made an incorrect assumption that the word or phrase has to imply that you’re depriving someone of their idea, but that’s not what the definition nor the etymology nor the current usage of the word steal implies. Perhaps that’s the same assumption that @stcg was making, but it’s a bit of a straw man because there is a different valid definition of steal in common usage that does not insist that the thing stolen is also taken away from someone, nor that it’s even “theft” in any legal sense at all. You may have temporariliy forgotten about poetic usage, such as “she stole my heart.” That common usage is hundreds or thousands of years old and obviously doesn’t refer to depriving me of my actual organs.
It’s important to remember that etymology is a tool to understand history, and is not the arbiter of word meaning. In fact, it’s extremely common for the etymological historical roots of words to have very different meanings from what they are now, and to have meanings that are no longer accepted or correct. Often with English, word roots come from different languages, and the etymology has little bearing on today’s usage or accepted dictionary definitions. The arbiter of word meaning is common usage, period. Language is not prescriptive, not defined by dictionaries or etymologies, those are just tools to help us document common usage over time. Language is defined by how it’s used, and when a lot of people say “he stole my idea”, it necessarily becomes correct usage, regardless of what the historical documents say about the word steal. This is one of the most fun aspects of language, but easily misunderstood and often forgotten, especially in forum discussions.
> So respectfully, I disagree with you on this topic, the way contracts and copyrights are being used is harming our society.
How on earth did you arrive at the idea that I said anything at all about copyrights or contracts in this thread? What exactly are you disagreeing with?? I’m so confused by this. It is a wild and completely non-sequitur detour from my perspective.
Metallica made sure that argument doesn’t hold water in court back when they were suing all their fans for downloading their music on Napster. To this day I remind everyone who will listen why I refuse to listen to them ever again whenever their name comes up.
they are greedy hateful bunch, I'm always wary of their fans flashing with Metallica t-shirts and expect them to be the same greedy hateful bunch as well
"Stealing" has been used as a common word for "copying without permission" in the digital age. To try to play word games by trying to walk back the definition of stealing to mean only "taking someone's physical property" is completely pointless and futile unless you're just trying to feel OK with yourself copying without permission.
If I produce and distribute content like music or videos, it's fair for me to want people that want to rent or own it to pay for it. I put a lot of time and effort into it, I have to manage and market it, maybe store it, and I want to make a living at it.
If people are stealing it, ahem, copying without permission, it undercuts my living. I have a right to earning from my work, and you don't have a right to just download it or copy it or distribute it to others without me getting paid for it. It's literally preventing earnings for me that would otherwise happen if you didn't copy it without permission (ahem, stealing).
"Stealing" is morally charged and too associated with the loss of property to be a fair or accurate term here. It's not word games; it's conceptual analysis and a basic understanding of rhetoric.
Digital piracy, broadly speaking, is unauthorized copying. Depending on the context, it could be theft. Sometimes that theft is legal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Other times that theft is illegal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Sometimes, it's just not theft at all.
Yeah but if you sell them something and they click “buy” or “purchase” and not “rent” and then you revoke the license years later you’re the thief, not the person downloading what they purchased on utorrent.
I’m increasingly convinced that the right of first sale must extend to copyrighted work licenses to individuals to rebalance the benefit to society. Movies, video games, and music are all “sold” primarily in a way that prevents them from being shared, lent, or transferred to others. Books are probably the only medium left that is still primarily physical (71% in 2022).
You really don't. If you don't work on things that are profitable at the moment you don't have any innate right to earn anything from your work. Right to earn comes from specific agreements with employers. Earning might also come from innate profitability but it's not a right then as the profitability is ephemeral thing.
When the people who sell it to us are free to revoke access at any time, then there's no walking back being done by us. We're just recognizing that the accepted state of things was reneged on by one party and they can't insist on being in the right when we decide we're not obligated to follow their arbitrary rules anymore.
Tl;dr: Supreme Court ruled bootlegged/pirated media does not constitute theft as it does not deprive the legal owner of his/her property. That’s why they had to invent the term—“Copyright infringement”
Of course you can steal information, there's no reason why the notion of theft ought to be limited to physical goods, we're not living in the stone age. 90% of what we do and own exists in digital form. We can take possession of it, protect it, lock it away, attribute ownership to it as much as we can do to any physical property. If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.
People just try to rationalize their behavior and play silly word games because they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.
Kant gave us a good principle, universalizability. If everyone pirated, creators would not get compensated, therefore they could not sustain themselves and it would be obvious that the value of their work is being stolen. Evidently, pirates are free-riders and their theft just isn't evident because enough people usually compensate for it.
If everyone pirated, the only people who would create content would be people doing it purely for the sake of art or their own enjoyment, far more people would be personally involved in creating art (in music for example, there would be far more people going to see local performances if there were less music produced as mass media due to loss of profitability), mass media would be reduced and more art would be local (and still physical), increasing the richness and diversity of the media landscape.
In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.
How would you create Titanic locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make a film, especially one like that, without expecting a return?
How would you create the Encyclopædia Britannica locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make an encyclopedia, especially one like that, without expecting a return?
People who want to see it created and are able to rally other people to help them of course.
That's not to say that no copyright means no way to fund big projects, you just have to collect those funds up front or rely on generosity - both of which are less likely to succeed because copyright makes the result into something you "own" rather than society and people are less inclined to fund your own private enrichment.
It might have come out 50 years later than it did but then it might have been done thousand times cheaper made by a handful of people using appropriate technology for fun.
Does society really benefit that much by seeing piece of entertainment 50 years earlier at the cost of millions of dollars?
If making a movie about going to space costs more than actually going to space maybe you shouldn't do it and wait instead till video creation technology advances enough so that single person can do it as passion project? Maybe what copyright enables is just a pathology?
That’s a whole different discussion. I was replying to a comment that seemed to suggest that we could have a remotely comparable but decentralized entertainment industry somehow.
I’m not interested in a conversation about whether we really even need entertainment, that’s a whole different premise.
> If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.
I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.
Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.
Right, so when you give your credit card info to a vendor, they are free to pass it on. They have no obligation to keep it private between agreed upon parties.
> they're attempting to avoid the simple fact that piracy is robbing other people of their labour.
It's not. A pirate is just another non-customer. There's robbing involved when someone chooses not to buy something. Watching a movie at a friend's house isn't robbing the producers of anything. Neither is buying something second hand. These are all non-customers of the original creator.
That's a huge stretch to say anyone that watches or listens to pirated entertainment would never pay for it. I wish people that use pirated entertainment would just admit that they don't want to pay for it.
It's the same stretch as saying people pirating content will never pay for it. All non-customers are simply not paying a creator for content. It doesn't fucking matter why they're a non-customer. From the perspective of a media publisher a pirate is no different than someone buying media second hand or never watching it in the first place.
If I buy a used Blu-ray I'm not giving a dime to Disney. I get to watch the Avengers all I want without ever paying them anything. They have lost nothing because I didn't take anything from them nor prevented them from selling a copy of the Avengers to someone else.
If you replaced my second hand copy of the Avengers with a pirated copy, nothing would change about the situation. Disney was deprived of nothing. The same is true if I rent it from the library, borrow it from a friend, or just never watch it. To Disney I am simply a non-customer.
And if you read or watch much about all the musicians reviewing their Spotify Wrapped this year vs how much they were paid, you’d see that we’re already there. The value of their work went to music streaming services and everyone using their music in their productions, very little made it back to the creators.
It works very differently, as getting a free digital copy of anything don’t leave others without it. There’s no shortage of the product. If I steal a piece of bread from a shop, it won’t be there. If I pirate an episode of whatever tv show, it won’t disappear for others who were to buy it. Company won’t see a difference if I won’t buy the product otherwise. Even the opposite, it’s net positive for the company, as more people familiar with the product may come back to it later and buy it, or make others buy it. See Windows, Photoshop. Or for books, I may download expensive books to read, and if I see the book is worth buying, I may buy it if I can afford it. And/or I may tell others the book is great, so they will buy it. And in the end it gives the company more benefit then me not ever touching their product in the first place.
That's a coherent position, but it is also perfectly reasonable to argue that it's not because you have a copy and have not removed the original.
Edit: Note that this doesn't inherently make piracy okay, since it may deprive the owner of revenue or other benefits; there's a difference between objecting to piracy and saying that it's exactly theft.
I mean, why do you think we really got away from the idea of tying currency to something physical? Money and property are just ideas that enough people agree about to matter. If you don’t agree, too bad and good luck convincing all the others that you’re right, especially with all the resources and power that the winners under this system have gained under it.
what word would you use if you hired a lawyer or accountant to do some paperwork and when they finished you just copied the documents and then didn't pay them because "it's not stealing, it's just communication"?
In the case of cars (the go-to object for all analogies) the bad guy is charged with "unauthorized use of a motor vehicle". That's not stealing either.
You’re using one of the intransitive definitions but general speaking it’s the transitive forms that apply to digital content, ideas, information, etc.
1. to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
2. to take away by force or unjust means
3. to take surreptitiously or without permission
You may not want stealing to mean that… but that’s irrelevant to reality.
The point is that stealing has traditionally meant denying the rightful owner the thing that has been stolen. What is going on here is that a copy has been made without permission - piracy is copyright infringement, this is different to stealing.
Now there has been a lot of effort by the media industry to equate copyright infringement with stealing, I think because the public at large doesn't really understand infringement as a terrible thing. Stealing appears in the 10 commandments, so in our judeo christian societies it's a home run to get 'right thinking' people on side.
Also in these transitive definitions, stealing is about taking. And in the case of piracy (communicating information to others without permission of the original source), nothing is taken.
The person that came up with the idea still has it. The photographer still has the picture. The programmer still has the program.
It's just about what another person may do with it, the one receiving the picture. May they also send it to someone else? We could have different ideas about that, but calling it "stealing" is inaccurate.
Taking can simply mean “to gain or acquire”. So, once again, incorrect. Sorry.
I’m sympathetic to the moral argument you’re making—though when the raw goods are digital too I think it’s an impractical & ill conceived one—but both legally AND linguistically… it’s incorrect
Which dictionary defines taking as simply gaining or acquiring something?
If you "take" something from someone else it generally means that they no longer have what you took.
Hot take, take a photo, take part, take the bus, take a left, take a shower, take pride in your work, take a joke, take something apart, take my word for it, take a while, take an oath. Being over precious about definitions is unwise.
Curious choice of example. I know what you mean of course, but the point is words shift meaning.
For a counter-example connected to your choice, I was recently made aware of the Latin word for "to abduct", and how that word may well be why it took so long for spousal abuse to become recognised as an offence — to paraphrase your own question to demonstrate how this goes very wrong, how can you "abduct" someone you live with?
Say one counterfeits a hundred dollar bill perfectly. Does he steal? Say he is able to do this in large quantities. Does he steal? You still have you hundred dollar bill. No loss to you right? Wrong. Your money’s worth is lessened by the counterfeiting, the copying. That is what they mean by stealing: you are decreasing the value of their products by providing identical copies outside of their control.
Copying movies is copying things congress said you can't, a crime distinct from both theft and fraud.
Piracy has for whatever reason been co-opted to refer to copying despite that having no relationship to piracy on the high seas, but no one is playing linguistic games to argue that they're the same thing so whatever.
By that definition, whenever I create (on my own) a product that is both superior and cheaper than a competitor's offering, lessening the value of their product, it is stealing.
There are actually people who reason like this. I remember being struck by this attitude when reading Bloomberg's book - effectively morally eqivocating business competition with stealing food out of their children's mouths.
If Alice breaks Bob’s leg, does she steal his mobility? Sure, but criminally she’d be charged with assault or battery or both.
Likewise, the legal definition of theft or stealing does not apply to copyright infringement despite decades long campaigns to get the public to believe that to ge the case. Relatedly, there are similar campaigns to redefine violence as something that offends someone.
Since value is only defined by what people are willing to pay for it, and lacking any extra common rules, these acts of copying simply signal not accepting the demanded price: so the value claimed by the owner was not the actual value, thus they have lost only their self-deception about the value.
If you've managed to create a perfect hundred dollar bill then you've done nothing different to what the bank did. Are both of you stealing?
One way of looking at it is that the banks didn't have to expend a tiny fraction of $100 worth of effort to obtain the dollar bill, whereas any normal person would have to. The question is does the bank deserve that $100? Especially at a cost to everyone else (who are largely unaware/tricked).
Personally I'd class that as "fraud" but it all comes under a similar umbrella.
Theft is taking something you don't deserve, without the other party's consent.
Fraud is taking something you don't deserve, with the other party's _misplaced_ consent.
So yes, in the case of copying music for example, I agree - you're copying someone's idea, which is essentially taking the product of their work without their consent. Their work is no longer scarce, and so loses half its value. It's not really any different to stealing half the money they've worked for, other than that it seems almost impossible to stop you without creating paradoxes such as this topic.
It's detrimental as they no longer have the same incentive to do that work and so society doesn't progress.
You've taken the reward from the person that did the work and shared it amongst the whole of society who didn't work for it. It's pure socialism - and we can see the effects of it in the quality of modern music.
But that isn't what it means in the context of theft, and linguistically the distinction is clear unless you are being disingenuous. There is absolutely no linguistic foundation for equating theft and duplicating information.
Legally the distinction is also clear - transgression of copyright law is specifically given the term "copyright infringement" in law in English speaking countries and in international agreements. A person cannot be convicted of theft for copying information. The US supreme court, among others, ruled on exactly this:
You seem to be using a dictionary with very short entries. Mine contains 10 different meanings of the verb "take" and one of them is "obtain, gain, acquire".
Dictionary definitions and legal definitions may or may not overlap. If not discussing the legal definition, than steal could mean someone enjoyed an appropriately licensed copyrighted work secretly or in private.
> To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent
That's one meaning. As with many English words that one has several. Here are several examples of how "steal" is used in English for things that involve other than taking physical taking of property:
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
False. When someone without your permission copies your source code, plans or inventions, which are not physical things, is this not theft? What about the non physical bits and bytes in your Dropbox or bank account? That's just like, an exchange of information, man. Why must the "physical" qualifier be there?
One does not merely copy the numbers in a bank account when committing theft. The key part is depriving the original owner of the use of the item.
Whether you think piracy is right or wrong, there is a crucial difference between traditionally understood stealing or theft, in that the original owner no longer has the thing. With copyright infringement that’s not the case.
As for piracy, of course it's wrong, though far less serious than what I responded to.
> depriving the original owner of the use of the item
When someone invests to make a film, do you think the use of the resulting film to the owner is to watch it or sell it?
To break it down, did someone invest millions to make millions, or did someone pay millions to watch one movie?
You know the answer and thus we know that stealing a copy without paying does does in fact deprive the original owner of the use of the item, which was always to sell copies of it, that's the reason and criteria for its existence.
At small scale though the industry still makes do, so it's less serious than stealing for example, a company (e.g. their information). Every act of piracy also wasn't technically a stolen sale, because not everyone stealing would ever have bought it if stealing wasn't an option.
Well actually (Yeah I’m going to well actually you) many movies are quite literally produced in such a way that structures the production companies to not make any money and instead shift any profits up the pyramid while extracting the maximum value of possible tax credits and grants offered any number of political entities, as well as disbursing themselves from several liabilities.
On paper many incredibly successful films lose money. The game is rigged. The industry more than makes do.
People are free to draw their own lines. I pay for some things and don’t pay for others as far as digital content goes. The structure of it doesn’t even necessarily fit into this clean cut idea however. If I pay for Prime and download something that I could watch via prime ( and I do, because I’d rather watch it in my preferred video play whenever and not only if I have an internet connection or on specific devices or god forbid the thing I’m watching or intending to watch in the near future slips off the service) what is the math in that?
Copying something does not remove the thing from the original owner, hence these are different acts.
Referring to such things as theft or stealing is lazy and incorrect, regardless of relative severity.
The fact you use the term “stealing” in your justification of the act being “stealing” kinda points to your own circular reasoning there, rather than a good defence.
We can agree it’s wrong without polluting the semantic space. Otherwise we may as well just call everything “murder” or “terrorism” and be done with it.
> The key part is depriving the original owner of the use of the item.
I know that’s been a tribal shibboleth of piracy since the 2000s, and I’m sympathetic to the moral argument to this view… but it’s just factually untrue (both in terminology AND in law)
It’s not though, in law, as they are different crimes. And that’s where copyright infringement even is a crime rather than a civil matter as it is in many places.
Correct! The parent post here isn't really productive, I also have some misgivings on this school of internet debate where a disagreement needs to start with any of:
- False.
- Incorrect.
- Nope.
Is it just me or is this needlessly smug? Again, the parent isn't productive, but a terse "You are wrong." in the grandparent isn't really a good way to start a productive conversation either.
I can agree with that, though when something is patently false, I don't think it's wrong to point this out clearly. A misinformed reader could miss the nuance and mistake facts for options, which in this case could land someone in jail.
As for smugness and the format of posts, you sure don't live as you preach.
