Comment by bee_rider

3 days ago

It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.

Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.

This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.

If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).

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bee_rider

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firesteelrain  3 days ago

If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed.

Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

  • echoangle  3 days ago

    > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

    Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff.

    > Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

    No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.

  • eesmith  3 days ago

    > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym ..

    Theft of services and copyright infringement are two very different bodies of law and cannot be compared this way.

    For example, at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve this year, if I sell you a copy of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", that violates copyright law unless I have an agreement with the copyright holder. However, if I wait 1 minute, it will enter the public domain, and I am free to do so.

    There is no equivalent to the public domain for using a gym.

    > Creator of the thing sets the terms.

    The copyright holder sets the terms that end users agree to, which is rarely the creator.

    For example, the copyright for commercial software is often held by the company, and not the software developers who created it. The work product of an employee is considered "work-for-hire", which means the employer is treated as the legal author.

    Companies don't create. Unlike people, companies don't exist except as a shared consensus.

    This means the people who make unauthorized copies of software are almost never breaking terms set by the creator, they are breaking terms set by the copyright holder.

    The distribution oligarchy for fields like music and books puts the creator in a Faustian situation where technically the creator does set the original terms, but there's no real chance of distribution without transferring copyright ownership and control of terms over to the distributor, with little say on the end-user terms.

    We can see a glimpse of what a "creator sets the terms" world looks like with copyright termination, where a creator can regain copyright after 35 years, as with Victor Willis and the YMCA song.

    > But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

    The legally correct ending is "via copyright infringement", because copyright infringement isn't stealing.

    I mean, wage theft is much closer to stealing, and yet wage theft is usually (but not always) under civil law while stealing is usually under criminal law, so clearly the legal distinctions are important.

    There's been hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising over the last 50 or so years to try to convince everyone that copyright infringement is equivalent to criminal theft or privacy. It's apparently worked on you.

    Yet even though wage theft is massive, with dollar amounts which exceed actual theft, there's an almost complete lack of advertising equating the two. Almost as if the people who profit from copyright transfers from creators, and the people who profit from wage theft, have more control over advertising, and thus our perceptions of how things work.