4 ms·
There is no such thing as "Stolen" content.
by sismoc 11y ago
There is no such thing as "Stolen" content.
- smt88 11y agoIf that's true, there's also no such thing as "stealing" at all. Consider a novelist who works for 10 years on her novel. A hacker steals the document from her computer and publishes it online under his own name. He makes $100M. Is it wrong for the novelist to feel like someone stole from her? What word would you use instead?
- anonyfox 11y agoThe book has not yet been published, so this is stealing. But once you put up something in the internet, it is officially available to everyone. Doing stuff with public information is fine IMO. Same as analyzing tweet data (tweets are public).
- smt88 11y agoWhat if the book has been published in paper form? The book is public as long as you pay for it. Since internet isn't free, you're still paying for content. At what point are you paying "enough" that the information isn't public anymore? Are you saying no one should monetize their content using ads unless they're willing to allow anyone else to do that as well?
- aaronwall 11y agoIt is worth pointing out just how pissed off Google engineers were publicly when they felt Bing was copying their search results. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses... http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
- jsizz 11y ago> What word would you use instead? Infringing. (duh)
- smt88 11y agoI can't tell if you're joking, but "infringe" means "to violate" which implies that there is a law or agreement that's being broken. That makes it sound like you agree with the idea that this is stealing.
- lordCarbonFiber 11y agoThe law you're looking for is ~copyright~. The fact that the work isn't actually stolen is the keystone in how you can take the copyright case to trial. It's pretty hard to prove infringement if you have no record of the original work (ie it's been stolen).
- gtremper 11y agoStealing means the victim doesn't have the stolen item anymore.
- jsizz 11y agoI absolutely do not agree with the idea that this is stealing. How can it be stealing, when the owner still has the thing that was supposedly stolen? Different circumstances, different terminology. The correct terminology (see US Title 17 or CDPA 1988) is "infringing". Anyone who insists on using the word "stolen" is signalling their ignorance of the first, most basic fact of copyright law.
- smt88 11y agoIn my example, the specific crime may not have been stealing, but there was revenue stolen.
- rustynails 11y agoThe revenue was lost. Look at legal web sites. There is a specific vocabulary. The language you are using is from what I call "Mcadonalds Journalism" sites who have a vested interest in vilifying anyone who infringes. By politicising the language, these sites use emotive language to sway your views. I'm sure these are articles on this. It's similar to yellow journalism.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoHow are people still arguing about this? Saying that someone is "stealing" when they infringe copyright is like saying someone is "killing you" when they present convincing arguments against your cause. It isn't literally stealing or killing, it's an exaggeration made for emphasis. The reason there is so much contention is that a) the same language has been extremely common among hysterical content industry lobbyists who insist that it is literally stealing, and b) stealing and copyright infringement are both unlawful (and therefore more easily confused) even though there remains a meaningful distinction between stealing and copying. But that distinction is very important in practice because we can't treat stealing and infringement the same. If you don't like someone's speech you can't be allowed to steal any of their webservers but you have to be allowed to copy some of their work in order to effectively criticize them.