Why online piracy isn't theft

huntjump said:
When you put "global warming" in quotes, I assume because you disagree it is real, correct?
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Off subject: I don't think of it as a farse, Adam, and I do believe in environmental protection. I mentioned it because I feel the term is often abused for all kind of agendas. Right subject for a beer at some point ....
 
ferider said:
Off subject: I don't think of it as a farse, Adam, and I do believe in environmental protection. I mentioned it because I feel the term is often abused for all kind of agendas. Right subject for a beer at some point ....
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Considering we are in the bay area, I should take you up on that sometime. Sounds like we agree though. Carry on!
 
When people talk about stealing popmusic in context of downloading, I have to smile. Would you say someone stole dog's poop when it stepped into it?

Software is another, at least better part of software. That's why I endorse use of GPL software for private needs. Heck, it's easy to donate if you like it. Stuff like angry birds or other time wasters? Come on, respect yourself and stay away.
 
When you say "theft" instead of "copyright infringement" or something more appropriate you're simply exploiting legal terminology to gain a rhetorical advantage. It's dishonest. Tangible property and intellectual property are two very different things, covered by different areas of law.

Like they say... "I wouldn't steal a car - but I'd download one if I could." 😉
 
dazedgonebye said:
We can chose as a society to call it anything we wish, but I missed the part of the article that made a compelling argument for not calling illegal downloads "theft".
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The point is that if you call something "theft" but people intuitively do not agree that it is the same thing as theft then they will simply not have the same moral response to it as they do to 'old-fashioned' theft, no matter how hard you push that rhetoric. You cannot shame people by calling them thieves if they do not believe they're commiting theft.
If, however, you tackle the problem of illegal downloading in all its complexity you have a much better chance of convincing people that what they're doing is wrong.

As a previous poster said, a lot of misplaced morale outrage in this thread. The article is in no way condoning illegal downloading. All it's saying is that maybe some of the problems of our modern society require an approach that's a bit more complex than just referring to one of the ten commandments.
 
Jamie123 said:
The point is that if you call something "theft" but people intuitively do not agree that it is the same thing as theft then they will simply not have the same moral response to it as they do to 'old-fashioned' theft, no matter how hard you push that rhetoric. You cannot shame people by calling them thieves if they do not believe they're commiting theft.
If, however, you tackle the problem of illegal downloading in all its complexity you have a much better chance of convincing people that what they're doing is wrong.

As a previous poster said, a lot of misplaced morale outrage in this thread. The article is in no way condoning illegal downloading. All it's saying is that maybe some of the problems of our modern society require an approach that's a bit more complex than just referring to one of the ten commandments.
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That the thief doesn't share the moral outrage of the victim is sort of besides the point.
Yes, I get that so many people do it that as a society we don't think of it as theft...I just disagree that legally we should go along with that sort of dumbing down.
 
A lot of reactions here stem from just reading the title of the opinion page... better read from the bottom people
 
I knew a guy in high school who stole things all the time. He shoplifted all the time, and even owned a set of lock picking tools! He taught his little brother to shoplift too! He wasn't poor, his father worked with mine, and made very good money, and gave his kids money to spend on anything they wanted. This guy stole for sport. It was fun, and he thought he was smarter than his victims because he never got caught. He knew it was not merely illegal but was also morally wrong and didn't give a damn. He proudly called himself a thief.

People downloading music and movies are the same. I have a friend now who downloads movies all the time. She calls it stealing herself but doesn't care about the copyright owners because she knows she won't likely get caught. She has HUNDREDS of downloaded movies. She freely admits she is stealing. Not 'downloading' or 'infringing copyright'. She calls it stealing. The thieves are smart enough to know what to call their activity, but many people who don't do it are not smart enough to know what it is. Amazing. If its not theft, why aren't you guys doing it and like someone else said, why aren't your photos online in full-res files for free download?
 
Steve M. said:
I read this a few times to make sure I didn't miss something. None of it makes any sense to me. We all know that that many things are situational, and stealing some things is worse, or lesser, than stealing other things. Sometimes it depends on circumstances. If a father steals food because his family is starving, and it's because no one will hire the father due to his race/religion/etc, that's one thing. Yes, it's still stealing, but I'd do it too. It's doing what you need to do. But what if someone who DOESN'T need to steal (nearly everyone I've ever met in the US) decides to steal, that's a totally different situation. That's theft w/ a capital T.
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yeah, here's the problem with that.

it's 100% arbitrary and in the US at least we have decided that you have a fundamental right to equal protection under the law. that applies to the bad people as well as the good.

a good example, and I hate to agree with Kanye but this was really what happened, is that after Katrina when it was a white family getting food out of a flooded grocer it was "surviving" but when it was a black family it was "looting".

a man who steals for his child has still stolen and is subject to the same punishment as a dick who steals for himself. we exclude career criminals because they got equal protection the first time they did it.

IP infringement is not the same as property theft, but it's still illegal. It has been correctly pointed out that it is not zero sum, because it's non-rival. that is just the way it is. but, we need IP rules and property rights to keep things running smoothly so that's the way it is.
 
"From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible. "
Where's his source for this load?
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
People downloading music and movies are the same. I have a friend now who downloads movies all the time. She calls it stealing herself but doesn't care about the copyright owners because she knows she won't likely get caught. She has HUNDREDS of downloaded movies. She freely admits she is stealing. Not 'downloading' or 'infringing copyright'. She calls it stealing. The thieves are smart enough to know what to call their activity, but many people who don't do it are not smart enough to know what it is. Amazing. If its not theft, why aren't you guys doing it and like someone else said, why aren't your photos online in full-res files for free download?
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So millions of people in the world are just pathological cleptomaniacs? Give me a break.
And what your friend calls it doesn't really matter. Kids call it 'fraping' (facebook raping) when they log on into a friend's account and write embarassing stuff on their profile. Doesn't mean they think what they're doing has anything to do withactual rape.
Either your friend's quite an a-hole (in which case you should get a new friend) or she doesn't really think she's doing any harm to anyone who doesn't deserve it (she might think she's only harming some big company).
But sure, she might really be just an a-hole. There will always be some of those but if it was only them doing it it wouldn't be much of a problem. The problem is that the majority of those who do it are people who make an effort not to be a-holes.

And to your question, if it's not theft, why am I not doing it? Well, punching random people in the face is not theft either and I'm not doing it. I'm quite capable of fathoming other concepts of wrongdoing besides theft. Although...now that I think of it....maybe one of those random people is a model and my punching him in the face deprives him of potential financial gains he could receive in the future. So maybe I'd be stealing from him afterall.
 
ferider said:
Because the article is wrong. Copyright infringement and illegal downloading is easy to equate to theft for me, because of the monetary value of what is stolen. Enough said.
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Well said!

Let us say you and some friends pool your money, total $800,000. You hire some really great software people and have them develop a really good software development environment to be sold.

Scenario A: You decide your product should sell for $100,000 a copy. 7 companies buy it for a total of $700,000. 3 other companies tell you "no thanks" but secretly use the demo copy thus robbing you of $300,000. Theft? most would say so.

Scenario B: You decide your product should sell for $10 a copy. 70,000 people pay for it with a total of $700,000. 30,000 people use bootleg copies robbing you of the same $300,000. Theft or "misuse of intellectual property?"

In both cases you got only $700,000 back of your original $800,000. You lost $100,000 instead of making $200,000 for your efforts because $300,000 worth of your product was not paid for.

Do you want to agree that Scenario B was "misuse of your intellectual property" and not outright theft as in Scenario A?

Roland is right, we need to call a sp*de a sp*de.
 
thegman said:
The fact is if someone uses one of my photos without asking, then I've not lost anything, I've just not gained anything.
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Lack of gain from your work is a loss.
I think the whole problem had a little different start. Before event of internet, sharing of the music was by lending a record. We still lend books, music and movies from the library, but we do not pay for the usage of intellectual property. Most people extended this on the internet - The Biggest Library On The Earth. The problem is from a library we bring home real item (and return it). "Lending" from the internet can be done only by copying. Now copying copyrighted material is illegal but, is this theft to many people ? In the library is a photocopier and I can copy parts of the book, if I need and that was always morally OK. I don't think it will be easy to change that way of thinking. It is a mess.
 
Nothing Lost, Nothing Gained?

Nothing Lost, Nothing Gained?

thegman said:
'The fact is if someone uses one of my photos without asking, then I've not lost anything, I've just not gained anything. .

Also, I think that the law needs to be a lot more centred around fair-use.'

I'm a song writer, and by your reasoning I shouldn't miss my gain. (on average it takes me one month to write, arrange, rehearse, and record a song). Most farmers, when their apples are stolen, haven't gained anything either. The issue isn't the 20th v. 21 st Century product either, it isn't even that a creating a photograph time wise takes almost nothing to produce.

While I agree that exposure may be equated with investment, this has always been the case, this was not born of computers and the net. The creator decides how much he is willing to invest (free exposure), while always reserving his right to make a buck if something breaks.

Fair Use is indeed a real issue; for the creator of new material, not so much, for the consumer it is just plain piracy. This is because there isn't anything that is completely original under the sun. I can easily take to task another creator who blatantly uses my material, but I'm completely unable to tag someone who reproduces my art for either gain, to give away, or just because he can.
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Chriscrawfordphoto said:
If its not theft, why aren't you guys doing it and like someone else said, why aren't your photos online in full-res files for free download?
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Oh, I'm doing it, just like pretty much everyone I know and his mother along with 20% of the Swedish population (according to SCB, a government agency).

Thanks to file sharing I discovered the indie music scene about 9 years ago and my interest in music exploded.

Before that, I spent maybe 100-200 USD per year on CDs, never went to any shows.

After that, I've downloaded a massive amount of records. I found a whole new world and started going to concerts and festivals all the time. Got my dad's old record player and started collecting vinyl.

I estimate that I now spend 1000-2000 USD per year on music; and nearly all of it gigs, festivals and merchandise such as band t-shirts... all thanks to the wonders of illegal file sharing (although downloading didn't become illegal in Sweden until 2005).

And you know the band that kick-started my voyage into music nerdery? It's a Canadian group called "Godspeed You! Black Emperor". My cousin told me to check them out back in 2003, so I looked them up on a torrent site, through which I found a certain music sharing site, joined, and started widening my horizons.

Now, I've never bought a single record by this band; but I have, on the other hand, traveled to London and Japan just to see them, and bought some of their merchandise, and talked to them, and dragged along friends who also paid to see them, etc. "Thief"? Get real. Copyright infringement, sure. Morally wrong? When it comes to downloading music for personal use, no, I don't feel it's morally wrong at all. (Unauthorized commercial distribution or use is, of course, a totally different matter.)

Oh, and regarding my pictures, everything on http://minorshadows.net/ is available in ~1905x1270. (The page loads a different version depending on your screen resolution, so that the image is always as big as possible, but if you look at the source you'll see them all.) And they are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial.
 
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