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Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copi

Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find and the corporation gives no credit to the source in their product and marketing. Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge. Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? > Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :) Sadly, I'm moving and a bunch of those books are going to get turned into pulp as I'm not going to keep lugging them around the world with me for the rest of my life. Where are the Archive guys when I need them?

ssl-3 1mo ago
> Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? I can't answer that as-asked. I am but one person; I do not represent anyone but myself and I'm not about to pretend to know what others may or may not think. But I will say that no, I do not consider this scenario to be theft. Nobody was stolen from. A physical item was purchased from another party, and the new owner of that item did what they wanted with it. If you or I or Corporation A buy one of these rare books and use it as toilet paper, or to cut up and make little paper boats out of, then: Still no theft. Furthermore, maybe I buy your grandfather's rare book from a yard sale and use it to learn about the amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Or I borrow a copy from the library. Either way: The book is legitimately in my hands and I'm reading it. I'm learning from it. I integrate that method (your grandfather's method!) into my little pea-sized brain's model of life, the universe, and everything. And then: I write about the method I learned about. Maybe I publish a zillion copies and scatter them as leaflets that blanket the Earth, or I make one single-copy gilded print that I sell for a zillion dollars, or I set the scribes forth at dawn to duplicate it onto scrolls of Charmin to use as toilet paper. That's still not theft. In terms of copyright (which is also not an issue of theft): Copyright doesn't protect ideas. Perhaps it should, but it does not.
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  I appreciate you articulating this viewpoint in more detail, and I understand it better now. Thanks.

ssl-3 1mo ago

> Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? I can't answer that as-asked. I am but one person; I do not represent anyone but myself and I'm not about to pretend to know what others may or may not think. But I will say that no, I do not consider this scenario to be theft. Nobody was stolen from. A physical item was purchased from another party, and the new owner of that item did what they wanted with it. If you or I or Corporation A buy one of these rare books and use it as toilet paper, or to cut up and make little paper boats out of, then: Still no theft. Furthermore, maybe I buy your grandfather's rare book from a yard sale and use it to learn about the amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Or I borrow a copy from the library. Either way: The book is legitimately in my hands and I'm reading it. I'm learning from it. I integrate that method (your grandfather's method!) into my little pea-sized brain's model of life, the universe, and everything. And then: I write about the method I learned about. Maybe I publish a zillion copies and scatter them as leaflets that blanket the Earth, or I make one single-copy gilded print that I sell for a zillion dollars, or I set the scribes forth at dawn to duplicate it onto scrolls of Charmin to use as toilet paper. That's still not theft. In terms of copyright (which is also not an issue of theft): Copyright doesn't protect ideas. Perhaps it should, but it does not.

sebastiennight 1mo ago
I appreciate you articulating this viewpoint in more detail, and I understand it better now. Thanks.