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Infringing on people's legal rights is often wrong, but not everything that's wrong (or illegal) should be called "theft".
by paul 19y ago
Infringing on people's legal rights is often wrong, but not everything that's wrong (or illegal) should be called "theft".
- palish 19y agoOkay. Is your argument about semantics? I'm fine with renaming the act, but I have no idea what to call it. Do you have a suggestion? Just "illegal copying" perhaps? Also, do you feel the law should punish the act as if someone had shoplifted an item of equivalent value, or some other punishment? I'm worried that if the punishment is a fine, people might risk it anyway because the chance of getting caught seems so small in peer to peer networks.
- paul 19y agoWorking out the right laws and punishments is a difficult problem. Before we can solve the problem, we must understand it. Using misleading terms just causes confusion and leads us in the wrong direction.
- daniel-cussen 19y agoCopyright infringement is never treated the same as property theft. In any jurisdiction. In any case, copyright was not established to help companies like Warner or Scholastic---in fact, it was originally designed to protect authors from having large corporations distribute their stuff without paying authors anything, as opposed to today's model, in which companies pay authors relatively little.