7 ms·

No, Silly, Piracy is Theft

19 points by pbnaidu 18y ago

yters 18y ago
Another lame argument I hear is that all IP is essentially some number, and since you can't copyright a number, there is no such thing as IP.
- tocomment1 18y ago
  That's a good argument
  - carlio 18y ago
    http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Jun/pi.html http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Jun/pi.html
    - tocomment 18y ago
      Has anyone found anything copyrighted in Pi yet? That would be awsome to share at song by saying "the 1e74 + 2 digit of Pi for 6000 digits."
  - yters 18y ago
    It's lame because the number is irrelevant, so it is not the core of the IP. The important thing is whether a certain number maps to a mechanism. The mapping is the thing people are really copyrighting when they copyright IP, and that is not a number.
- softbuilder 18y ago
  I like the information entropy argument. Always makes me chuckle.
- rw 18y ago
  Representation is arbitrary. IP laws identify "intellectual property" by representation. IP laws are not adapting, and they aren't able to adapt. The situation is hopeless and unenforceable: encrypt a DVD-rip or music file and then ask someone to identify it as such. It's impossible. We have to move beyond believing in copyright and IP laws because they are not enforceable.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Why is this true? Why do you think DVD copy protection is doomed to fail? Smart tech people who think this are usually falling into the trap of assuming DVD copy protection has to be perfect. It doesn't; it just has to make large-scale copying and distribution economically irrational. So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this. Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them. Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files. Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware. And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it. I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.
    - rw 18y ago
      To make copy protection work, consumers have to be coerced/convinced into using locked-down systems. If we use systems that we have total control over, then copy protection will never succeed. There still is the analog hole, as well.
      - khafra 18y ago
noodle 18y ago
no, silly, piracy is not theft. piracy is piracy, its not a theft or not theft issue, its a different animal. the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop. so, piracy does not steal income.
- lunchbox 18y ago
  OK, accepting your made-up figure of 90%, what about the other 10% who would pay for the item they're pirating?
  - noodle 18y ago
    i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species. and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
    - lunchbox 18y ago
      I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".
      - noodle 18y ago
        thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income. what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
        lunchbox 18y ago
carlio 18y ago
People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing? Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free? I don't agree that you should be able to get stuff from artists etc for free. I make a point of paying for the albums I download if I like them, and I pay for movies and TV I like. But it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of what exactly it is you're paying or not paying for. Why exactly do so many newspapers publish content for free? Surely it's the same idea - they're publishers after all…?
- krschultz 18y ago
  That's the worst example I ever heard. A better example would be a company that invested a huge amount of money into creating the perfect strain of corn that allowed farmers to get 10 times as much corn per acre, solving the shortage caused by ethanol production. They sold this corn to a few farmers, who then grew a lot of it and gave it away for free to others. The original company never recouped their investment, ran out of money since no one would invest, and shut its doors in the middle of inventing a new kind of wheat that would also solve world hunger. The other farmers never would pay for the better corn, they already had corn, why pay for the better kind if they could get it for free? Right? Wrong, the better corn would have eventually forced the other farmers into buying it to be competitive, and the company could have recouped its investment and created better wheat, better apples, etc. Just because something doesn't have a variable cost, doesn't mean it didn't have a fixed cost to start with.
  - ericwaller 18y ago
    Yes, of course giving away the better corn is "wrong," but it's not theft. In violation of multiple laws and probably legal agreements, yes, but the point of the cartoon is that it doesn't fit the accepted (to my knowledge) definition of theft -- unlawful, physical removal another person's property.
nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
> A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket. Last I heard, you don't get sued/fined thousands of dollars for sneaking into a movie theater....
- tptacek 18y ago
  You also don't get sued or fined thousands of dollars for stealing a candy bar.
mrtron 18y ago
Piracy is a strange beast, but it is definitely NOT theft. If I download a song - it does not directly negatively impact the artist. They aren't out anything. The indirect impact on the artist is another matter. They are potentially out of a sale that could have otherwise happened without the piracy. However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy. Just like listening to a song on the radio isn't theft - yet if you are only listening to the radio and not buying music are you stealing? It most certainly should not carry harsher penalties than physical theft. Downloading a song should not result in a 1000$ penalty while a physical theft of a CD results in a lesser penalty.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  "However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy." The analogy breaks down because music and other forms of media are just pure information, so there is no reason to buy it if you already downloaded it, especially as the friction of obtaining an illegal copy is reduced to zero.
  - shard 18y ago
    Actually this analog is exactly what drives Baen Free Library. They gave ebooks away free, in a multitude of formats, and found that: 1. Many downloaders ended up buying physical copies because paper books are easier to use. 2. It drove up sales of older catalog items, which had been crowded out of the shelves at physical bookstores. 3. It created new fans of the authors, driving up future book sales. You can read about it at http://www.baen.com/library/ http://www.baen.com/library/
  - mrtron 18y ago
    I read this: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and then purchased the book later on. Why? Because I found it was a useful book and wanted to support the author and own a physical copy. I also would have never purchased the book if I hadn't been able to go through it first online. I realize that I wasn't pirating - but the analogy doesn't break down in the manner you suggest.
dfranke 18y ago
In constructing his analogy the author seems to take it as given that sneaking into a movie theater is theft. I don't consider that theft. I consider it piracy plus trespassing.
brlewis 18y ago
I think we all know piracy is not theft. It's robbery and murder at sea. Infringement is not theft either as best I can tell. But ask a lawyer if the question pertains to your specific situation.
- tjpick 18y ago
  I just recently went to a RMS talk, and this is what he said too. (I paraphrase) Piracy is people in boats killing other people and stealing their stuff. What about software piracy? As far as I know, pirates use guns and boats, not software. What people are talking about when they say "software piracy" is "sharing".
- jeroen 18y ago
  Surely the robbery part is theft. :)
blogimus 18y ago
"Piracy" is just as inappropriate and ridiculous as "theft" as a term to describe illegal copying or copyright infringement. Call it what it is, "illegal copying." It fits its own class, not theft of hard goods on land or piracy on the high seas. "Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?" How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil?
- bct 18y ago
  I'm OK with calling it "piracy", because nobody is in danger of confusing the details and effects of copyright infringement with those of real piracy. This is not the case with the word "theft".
  - dfranke 18y ago
    It also allows for a lot of silly pirate humor that would not otherwise be possible.
byrneseyeview 18y ago
I'd like the author of this post to know that to the extent that he persuades people that piracy is bad, and they are thus less likely to share things on peer-to-peer networks, he is forcing me to pay for stuff I'd otherwise download. This is not 'stealing revenue', but it is burdening me with expenses -- and at the bottom line, that's the same thing. So I'll assume he's consistent in his moral principles once the check clears.
m0shen 18y ago
In his attempt to provide a better analogy, the author's is no better than the "stealing" example: "A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket." The movie theater has costs associated with the playing of said movie. It pays employees, cashiers, ushers, cleaners, licensing fees, operators... etc etc... These costs are covered by the revenue from said ticket purchase. On the other hand, when a pirated copy is made, there is absolutely no ADDITIONAL cost to the content's creator(s). Actually, people typically use their own resources (time especially) to reproduce these works. As previously stated, this new medium needs new rules and new ways to participate. Besides, last time I checked the people complaining the loudest about piracy benefit the most from it.
philh 18y ago
>A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket. Some cinemas are set up to facilitate sneaking in: having passed the usher to get into one film, you can then stay and watch any number you like. This is semi-deliberate: it turns out that they gain more money from people who wouldn't otherwise bother, than they lose from people who would otherwise buy two. Maybe these people are committing "theft", but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship. This doesn't obviously apply to most internet piracy, as in that case nothing is bought at all, but it's worth considering.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  I'd like to see some evidence or indication that this is deliberate on any level.
  - noonespecial 18y ago
    I had friends who worked in a local theater and we hung out there quite a bit. The manager was locally famous for instructing employees to turn a blind eye to "lurkers" because "If you stay in a movie theater that long, you're gonna be hungry and thirsty eventually". Turns out that the rental on the reels was so high that the ticket sales themselves were basically a break even proposition. $7 popcorn and $4 sodas are a completely different story.
  - shard 18y ago
    Not quite the semi-deliberate situation that the parent referred to, but does an explicitly deliberate occurrence count? I've had a theater manager let me and my two friends in to see a film for free and to thank him, we bought snacks at the snack bar even though we just ate. The theater was mostly empty (the movie was "Jesus Is Magic" in case you were wondering), which was probably his motivation. No, I did not know the manager personally.
  - philh 18y ago
    Good point; I heard it second-hand, but I think it came from the book How Economics Explains Everything.
pg 18y ago
The mistake in this analogy is that the stars in boxes represent things one already has, while the dollar signs represent things one might get in the future. Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft. If it were, giving someone bad financial advice would also be theft. Because taking something someone already has is so much more serious than causing them not to get something they hoped to get in the future, we have a specially bad word just for this situation: theft. And the RIAA and MPAA deliberately misuse this word in order to make file sharing seem worse than it actually is.
- boredguy8 18y ago
  "Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft." If it were, Blizzard would lose the biggest class-action lawsuit in the world! I mean, if all the time I spent playing Starcraft were spent doing something productive...
- blogimus 18y ago
  I would say "A mistake" rather than "The mistake." Another mistake in this analogy is that between criminal and civil law. Theft, in most if not all countries, is a criminal offense. Piracy, formally known as copyright infringement (or copyright violation), is a criminal offense when done for financial gain, civil offense otherwise in countries which recognize software copyright. The vast majority of occurrences of copyright violation we see in the media are for personal use, not financial gain, thereby a largely civil legal matter, than a criminal one. Hence theft as a comparison is inaccurate.
  - alex_c 18y ago
    That's what annoys me about this endless argument. The entire reason it's endless is because it confuses and mingles legal and moral aspects: - Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not, but somehow it still keeps popping up as an argument to support that it's theft. - Legally, as far as I know, theft and copyright infringement have very different meanings. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to bet that neither are any of the people arguing piracy=theft. Anyway, I don't really see how arguing and personal opinions can come into this. The law is what it is. - Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right, but at least this is the only part where you CAN actually have any kind of debate. People arguing about different things without realizing it = recipe for endless, unproductive argument.
tlrobinson 18y ago
If you're going to get all pedantic about these terms, certainly you must bring up the actual definition of "piracy": Piracy is a robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on the shore, without a commission from a sovereign nation. That said, whatever you want to call it, it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate", then by all means go ahead.
- mindslight 18y ago
  it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate" It may be illegal, but that does not mean a pirate is breaking the law. The basis of piracy is to sovereignly act, without blessing from the land oligopoly. A pirate may be attacked by a nation, but the concept of law is absent from such interaction.
  - tlrobinson 18y ago
    I was referring to piracy of intellectual property. I should have been more clear.
mattmaroon 18y ago
Isn't this all just semantics? It all just depends on how you define theft. From what I understand, given the legal definition, it generally (but not always) is not exactly theft.
randallsquared 18y ago
Leaving aside whether pirates would pay for the item, the idea that someone has a right to future sales is wrong. The guy who opens a competing business "hurts" Best Buy in exactly the same way that a pirate does, but this doesn't mean that he's actually taken anything from them, because they don't own future sales -- they only hope to eventually own them. [Edit: but, reading down the page, I see that pg already made a similar point more concisely. Oh, well. :) ]
bart111 18y ago
to understand that it does not steal income, you would need to live in place where authorized copy of MS Office exceeds net month salary of an Engineer. Would you pay one month salary for MS Windows? This is something that Western companies just do not understand when making business in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam. When they hire guys to work for 300usd a month that's perfectly fine. When they offer software written by Indians for the same price in India as in the US - they consider it normal too? Very interesting logic. I make over 100usd/hr and I pay for my software. My colleges in developing countries make it in a week and I don't blame them for copying software. Otherwise they would stay forever poor instead of learning stuff.
dionidium 18y ago
I think part of what gets confused in these discussions is that there are (at least) two reasons we might restrict a behavior: 1) because the act itself causes harm; 2) because allowing the act to occur will lead to an undesirable outcome. Historically, copyright law is type (2) -- specifically, it's a response to the threat that creators will not create without financial incentive. The copying isn't itself undesirable; we're more interested in encouraging a specific outcome. Where most of the purportedly analogous arguments go wrong is that they describe actions that are type (1). As an example, lots of people here are suggesting that a better analogy to file sharing is the act of sneaking into a movie theater. But this seems pretty clearly to be a case of an act that is restricted due to (1); that is, it's illegal because it's trespassing, which is undesirable in its own right.

19 points by pbnaidu 18y ago

yters 18y ago

Another lame argument I hear is that all IP is essentially some number, and since you can't copyright a number, there is no such thing as IP.

tocomment1 18y ago
That's a good argument
- carlio 18y ago
  http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Jun/pi.html http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Jun/pi.html
  - tocomment 18y ago
    Has anyone found anything copyrighted in Pi yet? That would be awsome to share at song by saying "the 1e74 + 2 digit of Pi for 6000 digits."
- yters 18y ago
  It's lame because the number is irrelevant, so it is not the core of the IP. The important thing is whether a certain number maps to a mechanism. The mapping is the thing people are really copyrighting when they copyright IP, and that is not a number.
softbuilder 18y ago
I like the information entropy argument. Always makes me chuckle.
rw 18y ago
Representation is arbitrary. IP laws identify "intellectual property" by representation. IP laws are not adapting, and they aren't able to adapt. The situation is hopeless and unenforceable: encrypt a DVD-rip or music file and then ask someone to identify it as such. It's impossible. We have to move beyond believing in copyright and IP laws because they are not enforceable.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Why is this true? Why do you think DVD copy protection is doomed to fail? Smart tech people who think this are usually falling into the trap of assuming DVD copy protection has to be perfect. It doesn't; it just has to make large-scale copying and distribution economically irrational. So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this. Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them. Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files. Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware. And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it. I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.
  - rw 18y ago
    To make copy protection work, consumers have to be coerced/convinced into using locked-down systems. If we use systems that we have total control over, then copy protection will never succeed. There still is the analog hole, as well.
    - khafra 18y ago

noodle 18y ago

no, silly, piracy is not theft. piracy is piracy, its not a theft or not theft issue, its a different animal. the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop. so, piracy does not steal income.

lunchbox 18y ago
OK, accepting your made-up figure of 90%, what about the other 10% who would pay for the item they're pirating?
- noodle 18y ago
  i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species. and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
  - lunchbox 18y ago
    I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".
    - noodle 18y ago
      thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income. what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
      - lunchbox 18y ago

carlio 18y ago

People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing? Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free? I don't agree that you should be able to get stuff from artists etc for free. I make a point of paying for the albums I download if I like them, and I pay for movies and TV I like. But it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of what exactly it is you're paying or not paying for. Why exactly do so many newspapers publish content for free? Surely it's the same idea - they're publishers after all…?

krschultz 18y ago
That's the worst example I ever heard. A better example would be a company that invested a huge amount of money into creating the perfect strain of corn that allowed farmers to get 10 times as much corn per acre, solving the shortage caused by ethanol production. They sold this corn to a few farmers, who then grew a lot of it and gave it away for free to others. The original company never recouped their investment, ran out of money since no one would invest, and shut its doors in the middle of inventing a new kind of wheat that would also solve world hunger. The other farmers never would pay for the better corn, they already had corn, why pay for the better kind if they could get it for free? Right? Wrong, the better corn would have eventually forced the other farmers into buying it to be competitive, and the company could have recouped its investment and created better wheat, better apples, etc. Just because something doesn't have a variable cost, doesn't mean it didn't have a fixed cost to start with.
- ericwaller 18y ago
  Yes, of course giving away the better corn is "wrong," but it's not theft. In violation of multiple laws and probably legal agreements, yes, but the point of the cartoon is that it doesn't fit the accepted (to my knowledge) definition of theft -- unlawful, physical removal another person's property.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago
You also don't get sued or fined thousands of dollars for stealing a candy bar.

mrtron 18y ago

Piracy is a strange beast, but it is definitely NOT theft. If I download a song - it does not directly negatively impact the artist. They aren't out anything. The indirect impact on the artist is another matter. They are potentially out of a sale that could have otherwise happened without the piracy. However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy. Just like listening to a song on the radio isn't theft - yet if you are only listening to the radio and not buying music are you stealing? It most certainly should not carry harsher penalties than physical theft. Downloading a song should not result in a 1000$ penalty while a physical theft of a CD results in a lesser penalty.

ryanwaggoner 18y ago
"However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy." The analogy breaks down because music and other forms of media are just pure information, so there is no reason to buy it if you already downloaded it, especially as the friction of obtaining an illegal copy is reduced to zero.
- shard 18y ago
  Actually this analog is exactly what drives Baen Free Library. They gave ebooks away free, in a multitude of formats, and found that: 1. Many downloaders ended up buying physical copies because paper books are easier to use. 2. It drove up sales of older catalog items, which had been crowded out of the shelves at physical bookstores. 3. It created new fans of the authors, driving up future book sales. You can read about it at http://www.baen.com/library/ http://www.baen.com/library/
- mrtron 18y ago
  I read this: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and then purchased the book later on. Why? Because I found it was a useful book and wanted to support the author and own a physical copy. I also would have never purchased the book if I hadn't been able to go through it first online. I realize that I wasn't pirating - but the analogy doesn't break down in the manner you suggest.

dfranke 18y ago

In constructing his analogy the author seems to take it as given that sneaking into a movie theater is theft. I don't consider that theft. I consider it piracy plus trespassing.

brlewis 18y ago

I think we all know piracy is not theft. It's robbery and murder at sea. Infringement is not theft either as best I can tell. But ask a lawyer if the question pertains to your specific situation.

tjpick 18y ago
I just recently went to a RMS talk, and this is what he said too. (I paraphrase) Piracy is people in boats killing other people and stealing their stuff. What about software piracy? As far as I know, pirates use guns and boats, not software. What people are talking about when they say "software piracy" is "sharing".
jeroen 18y ago
Surely the robbery part is theft. :)

blogimus 18y ago

"Piracy" is just as inappropriate and ridiculous as "theft" as a term to describe illegal copying or copyright infringement. Call it what it is, "illegal copying." It fits its own class, not theft of hard goods on land or piracy on the high seas. "Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?" How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil?

bct 18y ago
I'm OK with calling it "piracy", because nobody is in danger of confusing the details and effects of copyright infringement with those of real piracy. This is not the case with the word "theft".
- dfranke 18y ago
  It also allows for a lot of silly pirate humor that would not otherwise be possible.

byrneseyeview 18y ago

I'd like the author of this post to know that to the extent that he persuades people that piracy is bad, and they are thus less likely to share things on peer-to-peer networks, he is forcing me to pay for stuff I'd otherwise download. This is not 'stealing revenue', but it is burdening me with expenses -- and at the bottom line, that's the same thing. So I'll assume he's consistent in his moral principles once the check clears.

m0shen 18y ago

In his attempt to provide a better analogy, the author's is no better than the "stealing" example: "A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket." The movie theater has costs associated with the playing of said movie. It pays employees, cashiers, ushers, cleaners, licensing fees, operators... etc etc... These costs are covered by the revenue from said ticket purchase. On the other hand, when a pirated copy is made, there is absolutely no ADDITIONAL cost to the content's creator(s). Actually, people typically use their own resources (time especially) to reproduce these works. As previously stated, this new medium needs new rules and new ways to participate. Besides, last time I checked the people complaining the loudest about piracy benefit the most from it.

philh 18y ago

>A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket. Some cinemas are set up to facilitate sneaking in: having passed the usher to get into one film, you can then stay and watch any number you like. This is semi-deliberate: it turns out that they gain more money from people who wouldn't otherwise bother, than they lose from people who would otherwise buy two. Maybe these people are committing "theft", but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship. This doesn't obviously apply to most internet piracy, as in that case nothing is bought at all, but it's worth considering.

ryanwaggoner 18y ago
I'd like to see some evidence or indication that this is deliberate on any level.
- noonespecial 18y ago
  I had friends who worked in a local theater and we hung out there quite a bit. The manager was locally famous for instructing employees to turn a blind eye to "lurkers" because "If you stay in a movie theater that long, you're gonna be hungry and thirsty eventually". Turns out that the rental on the reels was so high that the ticket sales themselves were basically a break even proposition. $7 popcorn and $4 sodas are a completely different story.
- shard 18y ago
  Not quite the semi-deliberate situation that the parent referred to, but does an explicitly deliberate occurrence count? I've had a theater manager let me and my two friends in to see a film for free and to thank him, we bought snacks at the snack bar even though we just ate. The theater was mostly empty (the movie was "Jesus Is Magic" in case you were wondering), which was probably his motivation. No, I did not know the manager personally.
- philh 18y ago
  Good point; I heard it second-hand, but I think it came from the book How Economics Explains Everything.

pg 18y ago

The mistake in this analogy is that the stars in boxes represent things one already has, while the dollar signs represent things one might get in the future. Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft. If it were, giving someone bad financial advice would also be theft. Because taking something someone already has is so much more serious than causing them not to get something they hoped to get in the future, we have a specially bad word just for this situation: theft. And the RIAA and MPAA deliberately misuse this word in order to make file sharing seem worse than it actually is.

boredguy8 18y ago
"Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft." If it were, Blizzard would lose the biggest class-action lawsuit in the world! I mean, if all the time I spent playing Starcraft were spent doing something productive...
blogimus 18y ago
I would say "A mistake" rather than "The mistake." Another mistake in this analogy is that between criminal and civil law. Theft, in most if not all countries, is a criminal offense. Piracy, formally known as copyright infringement (or copyright violation), is a criminal offense when done for financial gain, civil offense otherwise in countries which recognize software copyright. The vast majority of occurrences of copyright violation we see in the media are for personal use, not financial gain, thereby a largely civil legal matter, than a criminal one. Hence theft as a comparison is inaccurate.
- alex_c 18y ago
  That's what annoys me about this endless argument. The entire reason it's endless is because it confuses and mingles legal and moral aspects: - Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not, but somehow it still keeps popping up as an argument to support that it's theft. - Legally, as far as I know, theft and copyright infringement have very different meanings. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to bet that neither are any of the people arguing piracy=theft. Anyway, I don't really see how arguing and personal opinions can come into this. The law is what it is. - Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right, but at least this is the only part where you CAN actually have any kind of debate. People arguing about different things without realizing it = recipe for endless, unproductive argument.

tlrobinson 18y ago

If you're going to get all pedantic about these terms, certainly you must bring up the actual definition of "piracy": Piracy is a robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on the shore, without a commission from a sovereign nation. That said, whatever you want to call it, it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate", then by all means go ahead.

mindslight 18y ago
it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate" It may be illegal, but that does not mean a pirate is breaking the law. The basis of piracy is to sovereignly act, without blessing from the land oligopoly. A pirate may be attacked by a nation, but the concept of law is absent from such interaction.
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  I was referring to piracy of intellectual property. I should have been more clear.

mattmaroon 18y ago

Isn't this all just semantics? It all just depends on how you define theft. From what I understand, given the legal definition, it generally (but not always) is not exactly theft.

randallsquared 18y ago

Leaving aside whether pirates would pay for the item, the idea that someone has a right to future sales is wrong. The guy who opens a competing business "hurts" Best Buy in exactly the same way that a pirate does, but this doesn't mean that he's actually taken anything from them, because they don't own future sales -- they only hope to eventually own them. [Edit: but, reading down the page, I see that pg already made a similar point more concisely. Oh, well. :) ]

bart111 18y ago

to understand that it does not steal income, you would need to live in place where authorized copy of MS Office exceeds net month salary of an Engineer. Would you pay one month salary for MS Windows? This is something that Western companies just do not understand when making business in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam. When they hire guys to work for 300usd a month that's perfectly fine. When they offer software written by Indians for the same price in India as in the US - they consider it normal too? Very interesting logic. I make over 100usd/hr and I pay for my software. My colleges in developing countries make it in a week and I don't blame them for copying software. Otherwise they would stay forever poor instead of learning stuff.

dionidium 18y ago

I think part of what gets confused in these discussions is that there are (at least) two reasons we might restrict a behavior: 1) because the act itself causes harm; 2) because allowing the act to occur will lead to an undesirable outcome. Historically, copyright law is type (2) -- specifically, it's a response to the threat that creators will not create without financial incentive. The copying isn't itself undesirable; we're more interested in encouraging a specific outcome. Where most of the purportedly analogous arguments go wrong is that they describe actions that are type (1). As an example, lots of people here are suggesting that a better analogy to file sharing is the act of sneaking into a movie theater. But this seems pretty clearly to be a case of an act that is restricted due to (1); that is, it's illegal because it's trespassing, which is undesirable in its own right.