There is a legitimate moral difference between me stealing your homework and me copying your homework. The difference is that in one case you still have a copy of your homework. Even if you don’t want me to copy your homework, it’s not the same thing. There are moral differences here. Piracy is wrong, but it’s not stealing. It’s piracy.
Just to take the extreme case, let’s say I want to download a fan-translated ROM of Mother 3, a game that was never released outside of Japan. This is piracy. I would be illegally downloading, or “stealing”, intellectual property that is not mine. But who, exactly, is harmed? Nintendo? They were never planning to release that outside of Japan, and it’s over a decade old - I couldn’t buy it from them if I wanted to. In fact, by all accounts, the “pirates” did Nintendo a huge service, localizing their game for free. How is anyone harmed by this?
I’m not interested in arguing the definition–it is clear that in current usage one meaning of steal is “copy without consent”. I’m looking for how early that usage can be documented.
For example, if a scribe in AD1000 copied text without the owner’s permission, was that referred to as “stealing”? I don’t know. If it was, then surely there will be a definition and cite.
Or what’s an early example of using “take” in reference to obtaining an abstract entity? When someone “takes a book”, they are not making a copy, they are acquiring the physical object. When was “take” first used to mean “copy”?
Or what’s an early example of using “steal” (or “pirate”) to mean “violate another’s copyright”?
For the record, I am on the side that copying without the owner’s permission is illegal and immoral. But the history of word usage in the English language is independent of the morality of what the word is describing. Even if the usage of “steal” to mean “copy without consent” was invented in this thread, it’d still be wrong to copy without consent.
A factual claim was made about the word “steal” and I’d like to see support for that claim.
And, as noted in the thread from 2006, jurisdictions have been expanding the legal definition of “theft” to the point where the notion that “depriving someone of a thing” no longer applies.
Unless you know of a time when “steal” didn’t mean “to take without permission” and “take” didn’t mean “to gain possession of”, the answer would be “When did steal NOT include copying without permission?” Because, under those definitions, copying something (without permission) has always been to gain possession of something without permission.
If you’re not happy with that, so be it.
Why? What’s being discussed really is people pirating games being sold in the here and now and people complaining about the DRM being used to (attempt to) prevent this from happening. Why do we need some edge case where people try really hard to say “Well, it wasn’t REALLY stealing/wrong THIS time so…”?
You see, you start off with a perfectly reasonable point. It has never been easier to get loads of games for low cost or even free, that is true. The Steam model is pretty good, I use it myself and it gives me very little grief and very little hassle. However, I still think that the pirates act as something of a check to poor business model practices and though it is morally and ethically dubious on many levels it also has a beneficial effect. I’m capable of holding those two thoughts in my head at the same time without my ears smoking.
But then…the bit I’ve boldened is you getting hysterical and hyperbolic again, it just diminishes the power of your argument.
And to answer another of your questions…no, very far from a kid. I’ve been gaming since the first consoles and home computers. I’ve had purchasing power and been a consumer of electronic media throughout. I’ve seen it all and the struggle of pirates vs media producers is nothing new and after the initial kicking and struggling of those desperate to fight against the demands and preferences of the consumers and the technology arms race with the pirates it only ever ends up one way in the long run. The provider offers a product that is good enough, user-friendly enough and at the right price point so as to tempt people to part with their money.
I think, at this point, you just don’t actually know what “hysterical” means. Is it a word you heard somewhere along the way and just pepper into conversations now?
I was making a point that maybe stealing something could be justified at times in extraordinary cases (such as a scenario involving medicine for a sick person, etc) but none of you are Jean Valjean and none of those video games you feel so entitled to are loaves of bread for your starving family.
In Old English and earlier Germanic cognates, “take” was only used in the sense of grasping a physical object. The sense of “steal” to mean “take without consent” also had the same physical connotation. Since then they have acquired many more meanings.
No, I’m not happy, and I can hardly complain about your lack of cites, since I can’t find any either. But I’d rather people arguing against stealing software would not make unsupportable claims. It undercuts our argument.
Really? You couldn’t, say, take an idea in Old English? Take a song? Eh, I’ll take (there it is again) your word on it. Then again, the only one worrying about it is you.
I’m well aware of all the classical definitions as well as the modern common usage and you’ll note I’ve used in it conjunction with “hyperbolic” just to make sure you know what the implied context is. i.e. I don’t think you are being funny, I think you are being “over the top”.
That’s a fine point to make…but then no-one that I’ve read on this thread has been making a point to the contrary. Certainly I haven’t.
That’s cool. I felt the same about the nonsense prattle regarding watching football games and magazines and how software pirates may be the real heroes
I can appreciate your strong desire to move the conversation away from “Is game piracy stealing” to “Was Jophiel being hysterical?”, of course. Reversing our positions, I’d be strongly temped to try and change the conversation myself.
Because it helps establish that there’s some problem with saying, “Piracy is theft, theft is wrong, therefore piracy is wrong”. With theft, there’s always that element of harm. I take something from you, and you don’t have that thing any more. With piracy, the harm is not a given. I’d reckon it’s not even common. When I pirated Spore a decade ago, it was not an issue of stealing a sale of Spore from anyone, because I had no money and my parents had more important things to spend money on than video games. I don’t quite get what the harm is. They didn’t lose a copy of the game - copies are ephemeral and I got mine from elsewhere. They didn’t lose a sale - I never would have considered buying the game otherwise.
I think you might be using the worst argument in the world. Stealing is wrong. Piracy is “stealing”. But why is stealing wrong?
you can’t help it can you? no-one has claimed that the pirates are heroes.
As the “nonsense” regarding football games and magazines is intended to see if I can get you to admit that the “stealing” of content is a different level of wrong from physical theft. You don’t seem able to acknowledge the fact.
That’s a good lead for a cite. I wonder when that legend was first translated into English.
Stealing is wrong because it does not compensate the owner for what is theirs. It does not matter what the marginal cost of production of the last item is. It doesn’t matter what the value of the item is to another. It doesn’t matter what the long-term consequences are to the marketplace or a business model. It doesn’t matter how enforceable the laws are, or even what the laws are. (And it doesn’t matter when we first started using the term “steal” to describe copying without consent.) Stealing is still wrong because it is a coercive taking, which is anathema to a free and just society.
I didn’t say “theft”, I said it was stealing. Which it is. Why you people are happy to steal things and happy to come up with a thousand reasons why it’s okay but can’t just own that you stole it is beyond me.
You are hurting the rights holder by failing to respect their right to distribute their property, something we agree upon as a society based on our law. You don’t get to make the decision for them if they’re “hurt” or not or if it’s okay in your special case.
You are hurting the rights holder by denying them the potential for a later sale – you can still buy Spore now and it’s regularly on sale for five bucks.
You are hurting other people by promoting a need for DRM which gives us the catalyst to threads like this one.
You are hurting other people because creators are less inclined to create if they know their work will just be stolen anyway by entitled children who think that, since Mommy & Daddy won’t buy them something, they should just steal it to fulfill the demands their undeveloped ids.
A couple days ago we were at a Stevie Nicks concert where she said that she largely stopped creating albums after the mid 90s because music piracy made it not worth the effort (she has one from 2001 and one from 2011 and a 2014 compilation album). Even if you don’t care about Nicks or think she could afford it or you’d never buy it anyway, etc the actions of those pirates still hurt the legitimate audience by costing them the chance to purchase and hear new music.
I assume you’ll continue to find ways to rationalize how none of these are really “harm” and how you’re still fine for stealing people’s work (or maybe “it’s not really stealing because reasons”, etc). Whatever. At the end of the day I guess it just comes down to the childish entitlement attitude that a lot of people never mature out of.
