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Copyright infringement is not stealing. Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource, e.g. taking money or property, u

Copyright infringement is not stealing. Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource, e.g. taking money or property, using your time without paying an agreed price. Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules. You aren't denied any resource you had before my infringement. Please stop calling copyright infringement stealing. It is not. Doing so is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of guilt in people (due to western notions of Stealing is Wrong).

DrJokepu 16y ago
Yes it is, in my opinion. It's up to the owner of the intellectual property to decide who can have access to his or her property, not you. If you refuse to accept the conditions that's fair enough, but in that case still accessing the copyrighted material is taking something that you're not entitled to. I don't agree with the behaviour of the recording industry or with criminalizing the general public but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion.
- lt 16y ago
  He's not saying that piracy isn't wrong. He's saying that the act is called copyright infringement, not theft.
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    I know, that's what I was talking about in the first part of my post. I had to add the the second part just to make sure that I'm not misunderstood.
- axod 16y ago
  > " but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion." I think that was his point - you're not taking something that's not yours. Say I take a photo of your cup, then feed the 3d image into a 3d printer, so that I have an exact replica of your cup, I haven't stolen your cup have I.
  - Kliment 16y ago
    It could be argued that you have stolen the design, in as far as the concept of stealing applies. Just as if you download a movie ripped from a dvd, there is no argument about whether you have stolen the DVD. The content is separable from the medium.
    - axod 16y ago
      Again, IMHO the definition of stealing supposes that you have deprived the previous owner of something. I don't think we should use 'stealing' to apply to 'design' or any type of non-concrete property.
      - Kliment 16y ago
        I agree with you, and indeed that is where the argument lies. You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense. Whether there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of intellectual property and whether this right in itself is legitimate is a different question. All I ask is that we do not conflate ownership of the copy with ownership of the rights to the design.
        axod 16y ago
        >> You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense. But the whole notion of 'right to determine how IP is distributed' is an artificial, and very recent creation. Why should people have such rights? Why do we need them when we functioned fine as a society for so many millennia without them.
        griftah 16y ago
        The whole notion of 'freedom' is an artificial and very recent creation. We functioned fine as a society for so many millennia with slavery.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  You are missing out on the fact that 'intellectual property' is a figment of our collective imagination. Would you respect intellectual property on the wheel or the hand axe in a stone age setting ? I know that sounds ridiculous, but intellectual property has its basis in 'information can be property' and that's so fraught with error that we would still be living in the stone age if it were true. If you want to keep your stuff to yourself: don't publish. Have it die with you, please do not make your thoughts/writings/music/movie/whatever available to the public in order to then turn around and claim it as your own again.
  - griftah 16y ago
    All human rights are "figments of our collective imagination". Should we abolish them too?
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles. We would not have culture or have achieved the level of society that we have if 'intellectual property' were the normal mode and could be deduced from first principles. Copyright and patents are supposed to foster creation and innovation but it seems they are hindering rather than helping our development in these areas.
      - shadowfox 16y ago
        > They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles Well. Some of these follow when you accept certain axioms and work from there. Not everyone accepts those axioms (at at least the same ones), if the vast variance in "human rights" across the globe is any indication. Now of course it can be argued that only a few countries in the "civilized western world" understand logic and can come up with the proper first principles. (People have told me that)
        baddox 16y ago
        It's logically fine to reject axioms. You could argue, for example, that torture is morally good because you disagree with the axiom that suffering is bad. That's logically consistent, and logic alone is built on axioms and therefore cannot discern which axioms are "better."
andreyf 16y ago
Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules Would you agree that an artificially scarce intellectual product is better than nothing?
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  I'd argue it's worse.
  - Cushman 16y ago
    I'd be interested to hear that argument.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      It's laid out much better than I by these guys: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne... But assuming you don't want to read an actual book... basically, the original reason that copyright was created was to encourage contributions to the public domain. By giving incentives to creators, we'd enrich the commons. However, the system does nothing of the sort today. This indicates to me that at the very least, we need to re-think the way we handle intellectual property. Even if you disagree, there are still many flaws in the implementation of intellectual property laws. Mostly, there are large questions as to who 'wins' if two people invent something simultaneously in different parts of the world (this happens quite a bit), the assumption that we can have a single repository of all useful knowledge that's been created, and that we can have skilled enough individuals working in said office to determine if something is novel. In addition to reform, I'd actually go a bit farther and say it's not necessary at all. There are a few different arguments, actually, depending on which angle you'd like to pursue. For those on the far, far left, IP seems to have the same accumulation and exploitation problems that private property has, but worse. Big companies have entire divisions that are basically IP farms, then abuse those portfolios to keep new, innovative companies out. Then, there's the leaky abstraction argument: IP law is trying to shoehorn existing property laws onto the concept of knowledge, but I'd argue that this abstraction is exceptionally leaky, to the point of not making sense. There are also the examples made in Against Intellectual Monopoly, showing many instances where IP was actually harmful for society, and where people actually made more money by disregarding their abilities to enforce infringement. Anyway, I'm almost to the point of rambling. My point is that this is a complicated and nuanced topic, and one can be opposed to IP without simply yelling "LOLOL I WANT MOVIES 4 FREE!!!111"
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Sorry, but no. If you jump the fence at a concert, or sneak into a movie theater, you are guilty of "Theft of Services". Note that this type of theft does not deprive the original owner that resource. If you want to pretend you are not stealing something when you infringe on copyright, that's up to you; I'd suggest that this is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of innocence One last thing: since when is "Stealing is Wrong" a "western" notion? The Buddhist prohibition on stealing is even more extreme in its condemnation of the type of behavior you are defending.
- sandal 16y ago
  First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually Secondly, while I can't know for sure, I think the 'Stealing is Wrong' mentality is not a statement about whether stealing is good or bad, but how strongly it is stigmatized in the west. So, likening some other unrelated activity (such as copyright infringement) to theft has a powerful mental effect. Finally, if you sneak into a movie theater or jump the fence at a concert, you are actually taking up a seat or space that could have been used by a paying customer. This isn't the same thing as downloading digital goods, in which your use of these goods has no impact on the producer unless it prevented you from purchasing something you otherwise might have. Copyright infringement is not an innocent act, but all acts of infringement are not considered equal. Honestly, I feel like you're the one oversimplifying things.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually Umm, no. Some modern Buddhist traditions may treat the precepts as "guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person", but that's a fairly recent innovation. The precepts (including the lay precepts) are described in painful detail in the Pali canon, the Agamas, and some Mahayana Sutras, and although the details of the prohibitions differ somewhat between various traditions, all of them go far beyond "guidelines". Trust me on this one. Second: I ask again-- do you know a non-Western culture where theft is not stigmatized? Finally: taking up space or a seat is not a factor in the legal definition of "theft of services"-- theft of Cable TV holds as well. The salient characteristc (which coincidentally agrees with the Buddhist precept) is "taking that which is not given." I understand that you'd like to divorce copyright infringement from the notion of theft, based on the physical deprivation of goods, but the legal notion of theft is (and as far as I know, has always been) a great deal broader than that, however inconvenient this happens to be to your conscience.
jules 16y ago
So what is the difference between stealing and copyright infringement? That the scarcity in the latter case comes from artificial rules? If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights, just like copyrighted content is scarce because of the government's protection of copy rights. Your ability to sell the oil depends on the artificial rules set by the government (or on your private army), just like your ability to sell a book depends on artificial rules set by the government (or on a private army). The argument that if somebody takes the oil out of your ground you don't have the oil anymore is not important in a discussion of whether it's ethical to do so, because the effects are the same for copyright infringement. If you write a book and I put a copy of it online, then the net effect is that you can't sell your book effectively anymore. Just like the case where I take the oil that's easy to get out of the ground and you can't sell your oil effectively anymore. So saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, while perhaps law technically true, is a dishonest presentation of the issue. The feelings of guilt are not unwarranted.
- DisposaBoy 16y ago
  That analogy doesn't apply because it's not the same thing. If I take some of your oil you lose some of your oil. Now if I went out and cloned it that's not stealing under the stated definition. This is the same nonsense the GPL tries to shove down peoples throats and I don't know why so many people are buying it. It's not about wrong right in this case so there's no need to bring pre-concevied biases into it.
  - jules 16y ago
    What are you suggesting? To eliminate copyright law, and thereby eliminate books, music, software, etc?
    - kbutler 16y ago
      The works of Shakespeare (died 1616) were written without copyright protection (Statue of Anne 1709). It can be argued, based on the amount of copying from previous authors, that they could only be written because there was their sources were not subject to copyright. Although copyright is one mechanism to create incentives for creative activity, it is far from the only mechanism. kb
bradly 16y ago
I'll bite. >Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item? Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
- mseebach 16y ago
  > Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Yes. > Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Yes. > Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item? No. For stealing to have occurred, the owner of the item must be deprived of ownership of the item. Pirating software or design is (probably) wrong, but that doesn't make it stealing.
  - Jach 16y ago
    Agree, though the last one is more interesting semantically. It's not really stealing, it's borrowing without permission... Though the bigger deal there is home intrusion.
    - baddox 16y ago
      If I steal your car, and the cops find me, arrest me, and return the car to you, does that mean I didn't really steal it and just "borrowed" it, since you eventually got the car back? I think it's pretty clear semantically that stealing means depriving you of your property for any amount of time.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- cabalamat 16y ago
  > Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Yes. And the law agrees with me. Copyright infringement != theft. You could, of course, say they're the same because they're both illegal, but by that logic parking on a double yellow line is the same as genocide.
aditya42 16y ago
Denying a resource would also include denying benefits from that resource, right? In that case, if you distribute say, a movie, for free without permission from the publisher, you're effectively "taking" his "money" that he would've earned from the display of his material in a controlled environment. Wouldn't that be stealing?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  For that to be true in individual cases you'd have to come up with some pretty hard evidence that a sale would indeed have been consummated. In the case of the pirate bay the quantity is so large that some aggregate effect can be postulated without stretching credulity, and I think that is the major reason why this judgment sticks even if there is not a single item of hard proof of any lost sale directly caused by the pirate bay.
- sophacles 16y ago
  Sweet. I now have a way to get back all money I have ever put into bad stocks. The "stole" my "right" to earn money from a good stock by sucking! Put the bankers in jai! </sarcasm>
rbranson 16y ago
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's a little more nuanced. Widespread copyright infringement causes those who would otherwise purchase to not purchase, which DOES deprive the copyright owner of money. There's no reason to believe all pirated IP could have been a potential purchase, but even if 1% or 2% of it was, and I'd wager to say that this figure is much higher, that's a significant amount of money. Of course, there's also the argument that piracy increases music discovery and perhaps is a form of fair use (as a backup, alternative to a streaming service you purchase, etc), which might drive revenue in other ways. I have yet to find or hear of any substantial empirical evidence for this, though. EDIT: by the way, I think the best way to argue this is that you are never actually given ownership of any IP, only a LICENSE to use it, therefore you are simply violating the license agreement.
gfodor 16y ago
Yes, because of all the issues surrounding the prevalence of copyright infringement, surely the pedantic argument around it being referred to as "stealing" is the most pressing issue to lay to rest. Does anyone actually care about this oh-so-important issue other than people who are regularly committing the crime?
dctoedt 16y ago
> Copyright infringement is not stealing. ... [it] happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules." These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible. Yes, copying is a good thing; it's how the human race makes progress. But life is a movie, not a snapshot; even in the not-so-long run, it would be counterproductive to elevate copying to the status of an absolute, preemptive Good Thing. Consider: 1. Someone has to invest money in creating intellectual property. At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing. (I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.) 2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare). 3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money. (As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.) 4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect. 5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public. EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times. EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine. 6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative. 7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.
- ataggart 16y ago
  >These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible. This is the common utilitarian refrain, though utilitarian arguments usually include some cost-benefit analysis. In the IP debate, it is simply (and erroneously) assumed to be a net positive. >3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money... Then perhaps it's not a sustainable business model. Perhaps that's why they spend money on such things as DRM, or making online-only services. Perhaps, in the absence of state coercion, some other things will be invented to deal with the potential loss of profit. >4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect. What "effect" would that be, less profit? And thus activities of others which result in less profit for you should be illegal? I'm sure you don't think that, but it necessarily falls out of your utilitarian position. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
tzs 16y ago
If you infringe my copyright, you ARE taking away a resource I had before the infringement: the right to negotiate the terms under which you would be granted access to my work.
tzs 16y ago
When people say copyright infringement is "stealing", they are speaking English, not Legalese. In ordinary English usage, "stealing" generally means taking something you should not take. For instance, when a baseball team positions someone so that he can see the signals that the opposing catcher is sending to the opposing pitcher, we say he is "stealing their signals". You generally don't see people jump in to correct that and argue we should be saying he is invading their privacy or some such. Or when your best friend makes a move on your girlfriend, no one generally nitpicks if you say "He tried to steal my girl!" and argues that since slavery was abolished in this country around 150 years ago, he cannot steal a girl--all he was doing was betraying your friendship (unless he physically tried to take her away, in which case he was trying to kidnap her, not steal her). There are many more possible examples of common usage of "steal", but I think the above make the point.

DrJokepu 16y ago

Yes it is, in my opinion. It's up to the owner of the intellectual property to decide who can have access to his or her property, not you. If you refuse to accept the conditions that's fair enough, but in that case still accessing the copyrighted material is taking something that you're not entitled to. I don't agree with the behaviour of the recording industry or with criminalizing the general public but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion.

lt 16y ago
He's not saying that piracy isn't wrong. He's saying that the act is called copyright infringement, not theft.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  I know, that's what I was talking about in the first part of my post. I had to add the the second part just to make sure that I'm not misunderstood.
axod 16y ago
> " but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion." I think that was his point - you're not taking something that's not yours. Say I take a photo of your cup, then feed the 3d image into a 3d printer, so that I have an exact replica of your cup, I haven't stolen your cup have I.
- Kliment 16y ago
  It could be argued that you have stolen the design, in as far as the concept of stealing applies. Just as if you download a movie ripped from a dvd, there is no argument about whether you have stolen the DVD. The content is separable from the medium.
  - axod 16y ago
    Again, IMHO the definition of stealing supposes that you have deprived the previous owner of something. I don't think we should use 'stealing' to apply to 'design' or any type of non-concrete property.
    - Kliment 16y ago
      I agree with you, and indeed that is where the argument lies. You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense. Whether there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of intellectual property and whether this right in itself is legitimate is a different question. All I ask is that we do not conflate ownership of the copy with ownership of the rights to the design.
      - axod 16y ago
        >> You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense. But the whole notion of 'right to determine how IP is distributed' is an artificial, and very recent creation. Why should people have such rights? Why do we need them when we functioned fine as a society for so many millennia without them.
        griftah 16y ago
        The whole notion of 'freedom' is an artificial and very recent creation. We functioned fine as a society for so many millennia with slavery.
jacquesm 16y ago
You are missing out on the fact that 'intellectual property' is a figment of our collective imagination. Would you respect intellectual property on the wheel or the hand axe in a stone age setting ? I know that sounds ridiculous, but intellectual property has its basis in 'information can be property' and that's so fraught with error that we would still be living in the stone age if it were true. If you want to keep your stuff to yourself: don't publish. Have it die with you, please do not make your thoughts/writings/music/movie/whatever available to the public in order to then turn around and claim it as your own again.
- griftah 16y ago
  All human rights are "figments of our collective imagination". Should we abolish them too?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles. We would not have culture or have achieved the level of society that we have if 'intellectual property' were the normal mode and could be deduced from first principles. Copyright and patents are supposed to foster creation and innovation but it seems they are hindering rather than helping our development in these areas.
    - shadowfox 16y ago
      > They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles Well. Some of these follow when you accept certain axioms and work from there. Not everyone accepts those axioms (at at least the same ones), if the vast variance in "human rights" across the globe is any indication. Now of course it can be argued that only a few countries in the "civilized western world" understand logic and can come up with the proper first principles. (People have told me that)
      - baddox 16y ago
        It's logically fine to reject axioms. You could argue, for example, that torture is morally good because you disagree with the axiom that suffering is bad. That's logically consistent, and logic alone is built on axioms and therefore cannot discern which axioms are "better."

andreyf 16y ago

Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules Would you agree that an artificially scarce intellectual product is better than nothing?

steveklabnik 16y ago
I'd argue it's worse.
- Cushman 16y ago
  I'd be interested to hear that argument.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It's laid out much better than I by these guys: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne... But assuming you don't want to read an actual book... basically, the original reason that copyright was created was to encourage contributions to the public domain. By giving incentives to creators, we'd enrich the commons. However, the system does nothing of the sort today. This indicates to me that at the very least, we need to re-think the way we handle intellectual property. Even if you disagree, there are still many flaws in the implementation of intellectual property laws. Mostly, there are large questions as to who 'wins' if two people invent something simultaneously in different parts of the world (this happens quite a bit), the assumption that we can have a single repository of all useful knowledge that's been created, and that we can have skilled enough individuals working in said office to determine if something is novel. In addition to reform, I'd actually go a bit farther and say it's not necessary at all. There are a few different arguments, actually, depending on which angle you'd like to pursue. For those on the far, far left, IP seems to have the same accumulation and exploitation problems that private property has, but worse. Big companies have entire divisions that are basically IP farms, then abuse those portfolios to keep new, innovative companies out. Then, there's the leaky abstraction argument: IP law is trying to shoehorn existing property laws onto the concept of knowledge, but I'd argue that this abstraction is exceptionally leaky, to the point of not making sense. There are also the examples made in Against Intellectual Monopoly, showing many instances where IP was actually harmful for society, and where people actually made more money by disregarding their abilities to enforce infringement. Anyway, I'm almost to the point of rambling. My point is that this is a complicated and nuanced topic, and one can be opposed to IP without simply yelling "LOLOL I WANT MOVIES 4 FREE!!!111"

michael_dorfman 16y ago

Sorry, but no. If you jump the fence at a concert, or sneak into a movie theater, you are guilty of "Theft of Services". Note that this type of theft does not deprive the original owner that resource. If you want to pretend you are not stealing something when you infringe on copyright, that's up to you; I'd suggest that this is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of innocence One last thing: since when is "Stealing is Wrong" a "western" notion? The Buddhist prohibition on stealing is even more extreme in its condemnation of the type of behavior you are defending.

sandal 16y ago
First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually Secondly, while I can't know for sure, I think the 'Stealing is Wrong' mentality is not a statement about whether stealing is good or bad, but how strongly it is stigmatized in the west. So, likening some other unrelated activity (such as copyright infringement) to theft has a powerful mental effect. Finally, if you sneak into a movie theater or jump the fence at a concert, you are actually taking up a seat or space that could have been used by a paying customer. This isn't the same thing as downloading digital goods, in which your use of these goods has no impact on the producer unless it prevented you from purchasing something you otherwise might have. Copyright infringement is not an innocent act, but all acts of infringement are not considered equal. Honestly, I feel like you're the one oversimplifying things.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually Umm, no. Some modern Buddhist traditions may treat the precepts as "guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person", but that's a fairly recent innovation. The precepts (including the lay precepts) are described in painful detail in the Pali canon, the Agamas, and some Mahayana Sutras, and although the details of the prohibitions differ somewhat between various traditions, all of them go far beyond "guidelines". Trust me on this one. Second: I ask again-- do you know a non-Western culture where theft is not stigmatized? Finally: taking up space or a seat is not a factor in the legal definition of "theft of services"-- theft of Cable TV holds as well. The salient characteristc (which coincidentally agrees with the Buddhist precept) is "taking that which is not given." I understand that you'd like to divorce copyright infringement from the notion of theft, based on the physical deprivation of goods, but the legal notion of theft is (and as far as I know, has always been) a great deal broader than that, however inconvenient this happens to be to your conscience.

jules 16y ago

So what is the difference between stealing and copyright infringement? That the scarcity in the latter case comes from artificial rules? If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights, just like copyrighted content is scarce because of the government's protection of copy rights. Your ability to sell the oil depends on the artificial rules set by the government (or on your private army), just like your ability to sell a book depends on artificial rules set by the government (or on a private army). The argument that if somebody takes the oil out of your ground you don't have the oil anymore is not important in a discussion of whether it's ethical to do so, because the effects are the same for copyright infringement. If you write a book and I put a copy of it online, then the net effect is that you can't sell your book effectively anymore. Just like the case where I take the oil that's easy to get out of the ground and you can't sell your oil effectively anymore. So saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, while perhaps law technically true, is a dishonest presentation of the issue. The feelings of guilt are not unwarranted.

DisposaBoy 16y ago
That analogy doesn't apply because it's not the same thing. If I take some of your oil you lose some of your oil. Now if I went out and cloned it that's not stealing under the stated definition. This is the same nonsense the GPL tries to shove down peoples throats and I don't know why so many people are buying it. It's not about wrong right in this case so there's no need to bring pre-concevied biases into it.
- jules 16y ago
  What are you suggesting? To eliminate copyright law, and thereby eliminate books, music, software, etc?
  - kbutler 16y ago
    The works of Shakespeare (died 1616) were written without copyright protection (Statue of Anne 1709). It can be argued, based on the amount of copying from previous authors, that they could only be written because there was their sources were not subject to copyright. Although copyright is one mechanism to create incentives for creative activity, it is far from the only mechanism. kb

bradly 16y ago

I'll bite. >Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item? Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.

mseebach 16y ago
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Yes. > Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Yes. > Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item? No. For stealing to have occurred, the owner of the item must be deprived of ownership of the item. Pirating software or design is (probably) wrong, but that doesn't make it stealing.
- Jach 16y ago
  Agree, though the last one is more interesting semantically. It's not really stealing, it's borrowing without permission... Though the bigger deal there is home intrusion.
  - baddox 16y ago
    If I steal your car, and the cops find me, arrest me, and return the car to you, does that mean I didn't really steal it and just "borrowed" it, since you eventually got the car back? I think it's pretty clear semantically that stealing means depriving you of your property for any amount of time.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
cabalamat 16y ago
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Yes. And the law agrees with me. Copyright infringement != theft. You could, of course, say they're the same because they're both illegal, but by that logic parking on a double yellow line is the same as genocide.

aditya42 16y ago

Denying a resource would also include denying benefits from that resource, right? In that case, if you distribute say, a movie, for free without permission from the publisher, you're effectively "taking" his "money" that he would've earned from the display of his material in a controlled environment. Wouldn't that be stealing?

jacquesm 16y ago
For that to be true in individual cases you'd have to come up with some pretty hard evidence that a sale would indeed have been consummated. In the case of the pirate bay the quantity is so large that some aggregate effect can be postulated without stretching credulity, and I think that is the major reason why this judgment sticks even if there is not a single item of hard proof of any lost sale directly caused by the pirate bay.
sophacles 16y ago
Sweet. I now have a way to get back all money I have ever put into bad stocks. The "stole" my "right" to earn money from a good stock by sucking! Put the bankers in jai! </sarcasm>

rbranson 16y ago

I tend to agree with you, but I think it's a little more nuanced. Widespread copyright infringement causes those who would otherwise purchase to not purchase, which DOES deprive the copyright owner of money. There's no reason to believe all pirated IP could have been a potential purchase, but even if 1% or 2% of it was, and I'd wager to say that this figure is much higher, that's a significant amount of money. Of course, there's also the argument that piracy increases music discovery and perhaps is a form of fair use (as a backup, alternative to a streaming service you purchase, etc), which might drive revenue in other ways. I have yet to find or hear of any substantial empirical evidence for this, though. EDIT: by the way, I think the best way to argue this is that you are never actually given ownership of any IP, only a LICENSE to use it, therefore you are simply violating the license agreement.

gfodor 16y ago

Yes, because of all the issues surrounding the prevalence of copyright infringement, surely the pedantic argument around it being referred to as "stealing" is the most pressing issue to lay to rest. Does anyone actually care about this oh-so-important issue other than people who are regularly committing the crime?

dctoedt 16y ago

> Copyright infringement is not stealing. ... [it] happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules." These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible. Yes, copying is a good thing; it's how the human race makes progress. But life is a movie, not a snapshot; even in the not-so-long run, it would be counterproductive to elevate copying to the status of an absolute, preemptive Good Thing. Consider: 1. Someone has to invest money in creating intellectual property. At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing. (I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.) 2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare). 3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money. (As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.) 4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect. 5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public. EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times. EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine. 6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative. 7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.

ataggart 16y ago
>These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible. This is the common utilitarian refrain, though utilitarian arguments usually include some cost-benefit analysis. In the IP debate, it is simply (and erroneously) assumed to be a net positive. >3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money... Then perhaps it's not a sustainable business model. Perhaps that's why they spend money on such things as DRM, or making online-only services. Perhaps, in the absence of state coercion, some other things will be invented to deal with the potential loss of profit. >4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect. What "effect" would that be, less profit? And thus activities of others which result in less profit for you should be illegal? I'm sure you don't think that, but it necessarily falls out of your utilitarian position. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

tzs 16y ago

If you infringe my copyright, you ARE taking away a resource I had before the infringement: the right to negotiate the terms under which you would be granted access to my work.

tzs 16y ago

When people say copyright infringement is "stealing", they are speaking English, not Legalese. In ordinary English usage, "stealing" generally means taking something you should not take. For instance, when a baseball team positions someone so that he can see the signals that the opposing catcher is sending to the opposing pitcher, we say he is "stealing their signals". You generally don't see people jump in to correct that and argue we should be saying he is invading their privacy or some such. Or when your best friend makes a move on your girlfriend, no one generally nitpicks if you say "He tried to steal my girl!" and argues that since slavery was abolished in this country around 150 years ago, he cannot steal a girl--all he was doing was betraying your friendship (unless he physically tried to take her away, in which case he was trying to kidnap her, not steal her). There are many more possible examples of common usage of "steal", but I think the above make the point.