4 ms·

Following this logic, anything that is digital can not be stolen? After all, you only steal a digital copy - not the original, and not something that is physica

• concinds 1y ago
  Correct. Piracy is potentially copyright infringement, not "theft". People insist on using that word, despite it being factually wrong, due to its emotional valence and persuasive value. The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
  • 9dev 1y ago
    You can hold that stance, but it completely undermines the source of income for artists or inventors. If you want a world where only rich and privileged people can afford the time to create art, this is the way to go. Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit. You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills. So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
    • rcxdude 1y ago
      The "therefore isn't a problem" was not, I believe, present in the original post. It's entirely possible to believe that copyright infringement is not theft and yet also still a problem. It's mainly an appeal to not misrepresent the situation, because theft in a literal sense refers to a situation which is generally worse than copyright infringement.
      • 9dev 1y ago
        I fail to see how it’s not just nitpicking. Yes, pirates only copy something and the original owner still gets to keep it. The end result however is that someone gets something for free that they otherwise would have to pay for, similar to sneaking on a train or into a concert. In these cases, I don’t think many people would argue that what you’re doing isn’t wrong, or meaningfully different from theft; safe for lawyers of course, but I fail to see why the quibbling is relevant for normal people.
        • rcxdude 1y ago
          It's, if anything, more important for normal people: I think there's a very important moral difference between something that actively harms another person and not paying for something that benefits you. The latter, for example, should be much more acceptable for someone who lacks the means to pay to do. It's also much more important, (i.e. we should spend more resources), to prevent theft. Preventing piracy and your other examples is only important to the extent that it keeps the endeavor viable, or at least the effort in the prevention is worth the increase in payments. Coalescing this all into one thing is behind a lot of what I consider to be very harmful rhetoric and politics.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • FeepingCreature 1y ago
      If you follow this logic, it gets really close to arguing that open source is price dumping. Nobody has an obligation to an income in a particular field of work.
      • 9dev 1y ago
        Open Source is the conscious renunciation of any profit and intellectual property rights, whereas artists generally expect compensation for their work. Plus, open source code gets mostly written by people with a stable and well-paid day job. Take that away, and I doubt there’s much open source code left.
        • FeepingCreature 1y ago
          So it's not just price dumping, it's also gatekeeping against unemployed developers. What a terrible practice. Open source only looks better here because it has a different cultural context. But to a person trying to make money in the field, I'm not sure why that should matter.
  • amelius 1y ago
    They never said "theft in the legal sense". Also they mean "theft of income" not "theft of data". This is not a legal text obviously.
    • concinds 1y ago
      > Also they mean "theft of income" Right. It's the debunked, bad-faith argument that "piracy is theft" because the pirates would have bought a movie were it not for The Pirate Bay, to justify calculating monetary damages that are completely unmoored from reality. We shouldn’t let people revive this nonsense, even in the context of AI.
      • amelius 1y ago
        In case of AI it is closer to actual theft because income (of an artist) is taken away, and someone else (AI capitalists) makes money from it. I don't think the comparison is unreasonable here.
        • xscott 1y ago
          How come it's just an "artist" and not an "artist capitalist"? And isn't this "rent seeking" behavior on the part of the artist? It would be nice if the world used clinical terms to describe what's actually going on instead of using emotional terms to equate "copying" to "stealing" or "pirating", but people would rather confuse the issue than argue it logically in good faith.
          • amelius 1y ago
            OK in clinical terms, A wants to use X which is something that B produces, and by taking X, that will reduce B's opportunities to make an income, while at the same time increasing A's opportunities to make an income. Since A does not even ask for permission, in normal language we call that theft.
            • therealpygon 1y ago
  • kgwgk 1y ago
    People have been using the word for thousands of years so they may not stop now because you say so. (Romans were already using “furtum” - theft - and “plagium” - kidnapping - for ideas and not just for things and people.)
    • sam_lowry_ 1y ago
      Why don't we make a conscious effort and call it "sharing" and not "piracy"?
• ghosty141 1y ago
  I would say yes this is not theft. What happens is you just copy and/or modify something. Kinda like duplicating money, it's not theft since you don't steal from anybody, no ownership or similar changes.
• bestouff 1y ago
  Exactly. Copyright infringement (a.k.a. pirating) is not theft. The owner is only deprived of a theoretical revenue/leverage/whatever (s)he could have exerced, but (s)he can still enjoy its original work.
• looofooo0 1y ago
  No you copy it, the file remains on the server. The problem is the semantics and all what comes with it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.en
• dandellion 1y ago
  Absolutely, yes. Even as a professional software engineer I think software should be free, and tell everybody I know to pirate software, if they can. Imagine we discovered a way to generate almost unlimited energy for very cheap, then we told poor people if they want any they have to pay it at the same price per kilowatt hour as current energy or it's stealing. It would be morally wrong. Digital content is the same, current copyright laws are unethical.
  • hn_throw2025 1y ago
    > tell everybody I know to pirate software, if they can. I can see where you’re coming from on a philosophical level. On a practical level that’s just asking for malware, especially for software that’s been cracked. I would tell people the opposite.
  • wiseowise 1y ago
    Better ask them to support OSS when they can.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• hau 1y ago
  Makes sense. There is very little in common between physical theft and unauthorised information copying. It may be an act worse than theft in ethical or other way, but it's a different thing. Crude theft analogy is good to colour it a particular way and evoke emotions, but harmful for a reasonable discussion.
• tialaramex 1y ago
  Yes. Theft explicitly requires "Intent permanently to deprive". Copying things is not theft because the supposed "victim" was never in fact deprived of their thing, not even temporarily. England has a whole bunch of legislation to prohibit activities that are not theft because it turns out that sometimes we care about other things. TWOC is an example, "Taking Without Owners Consent", because it turns out that it's also very annoying to have people take your car and then drive it somewhere and abandon it for a laugh ("Joy riding"), compared to them say, stealing it to ship abroad, break into parts or just to set it on fire. Insisting that it's all theft gets us in the same muddle as when we decide that holding up a protest sign is terrorism, or that a billion dollar bribe is speech.
  • anileated 1y ago
    Theft of IP permanently deprives the author of ownership claim. It’s quite a problem if you want people to innovate or create new stuff, because they usually do this with an expectation to be able to claim ownership and have a healthy degree of control over how the work is used and/or monetized. Actually, IP theft is more of a problem than theft of physical property. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late.
    • tialaramex 1y ago
      The pretence that three almost entirely unrelated "intellectual property rights" somehow make ideas property, at least akin to personal property and sometimes even akin to real property (aka land to lay people) is very silly. Each is silly in its own distinct way, with the most defensible probably being Trademark, an extension of the rather older legal concept of "Passing off". But really abolishing all three of them might be a reasonable step, up there with getting rid of smoking. Do you remember when there was smoking on aeroplanes? The little glowing sigil telling you not to smoke would go out at cruise altitude and then you could fill the already inadequate and stale air with smoke. Who thought that was a good idea? Well, a lot of the same people who thought Copyright was great. Maybe all the lead damaged their brains? Does any of this somehow mean what the LLM companies are doing is good? No. But we can't understand what's happening if we insist on giving it the wrong name. Russia is not in Ukraine to undo nazification, the babies Israel is starving aren't terrorists. "But I want to use this word" doesn't make it the correct word.
• wiseowise 1y ago
  > In which case, the following is not theft Now you’re getting it. Keep going, you’re almost there.
• gr4vityWall 1y ago
  > Following this logic, anything that is digital can not be stolen? Yes. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]