Comment by scosman
6 hours ago
If you steal my car, no who knows it's stolen would say it's "yours".
We're not talking abstract language concepts, this is a specific case. The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen. AA calling it "our data" is disingenuous. Legally it isn't theirs. While you could use "ours"/"theirs" loosely in English, they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this.
Taking someone else's car illicitly is theft, because theft means taking with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. Copying can never be theft, only moving can be theft, because only moving it could deprive the rightful owner of it. An illicit copy is merely copyright infringement or a breach of contract or various other concepts that are not theft despite people sometimes using that word as shorthand. It's YOUR illicit copy, not the rightful owner's illicit copy.
I didn't "steal" your passwords, I just "copied" them. I don't know what you're getting so upset about, you still have your list of passwords, and the fact that my changing all your accounts' passwords rendered that list worthless did nothing to move it.
Stealing has a much looser definition than theft; notably, it can include ideas unlike theft. You deprived me of my accounts, but not of my now-obsolete passwords, therefore it's a theft of my accounts, but not theft of my now-obsolete passwords; I suppose you stole both. I'd be upset despite lack of password theft because I'd be the victim of your CFAA violation for example.
It means whatever is convenient. If you are looking to monetize knowledge you would use it like "your car", half way your books are just books you've purchased a copy of, at the other end your car is now mine.
I found an abandoned bicycle 10 years ago. I have since replaced nearly all parts of it. I would give it back if you can prove it is yours but who owns the bicycle of theseus is more of an opinion.
I refer to it as my bicycle.
> If you steal my car, no who knows it's stolen would say it's "yours".
The chop shop well might.
Or, if I steal your car, and then go on to use it daily for the next 10 years, at some point everyone I know will refer to it as "my" car even if they're all entirely aware it was stolen.
> they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this
I'm not sure why you're expecting the operators of a pirate site to use legally rigorous terms to refer to themselves in a blog post. This is an error in your expectations, not their terminology.
> The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen.
That's incorrect. A license violation isn't theft. Theft deprives others of their property, that's not what's going on here. Intellectual property is a fictional "ownership" that provides value to society, but it is much newer and different than the actual ownership of property.
No one actually owns a collection of words or ideas or thoughts.
The tricky bit is that while it's impossible to deprive someone of their idea (i.e., commit theft of an idea), it's possible to steal someone's idea (i.e., copy it and use it illicitly), because only the word theft, but not the word steal, has that "deprive others" stipulation.
So with that in mind, circling back to whether possession occurs in such a way to make possessive language appropriate (being able to say "my data" after stealing data but not depriving the author of the data), my opinion is that the copy of the data that the author still controls is the author's data, and the copy of the data that the stealer controls is the stealer's data. It's the author's idea, but both parties separately possess the data (the data is a record of the idea).
Yet the main holders of this position were caught saying "our data". Don't you see the irony?