I was just thinking about what a seemingly unfitting term “piracy” is when applied to copyright violations regarding DVDs, music, games, or other electronic media. A small-time, white-collar crime involving the illegal copying of something is being equated with the forcible, armed hijacking and/or siezure of a vehicle at the threat of death to its occupants. The two concepts seem to be pretty different from each other.
How did this come about? Was there a specific point at which the label “piracy” began to be applied to copyright violations? It seems like it would have to have started around the 70s or whenever videos and tapes became widespread - or were people talking about “book piracy” even before then?
Also, remember the term piracy didn’t really start with people making one-off copies for themselves. It started with the factories in China & elsewhere making hundreds of thousands of illegal copies. From the content providers’ POV that is/was truly hijacking their products’ sales potential in the areas the pirates operated in.
Then once digital content and high speed internet came together in a Napster-like format, 100,000 individuals each copying & sharing one song suddenly had the same effect as an organized ring of traditional pirates.
Meanwhile, the content owners had a real incentive to try to put the “innocent copy for self-use” genie back in the bottle. So they turned their PR effors into calling every copy everywhere an act of piracy. And the viral internet quickly spread the usage.
I think it has more to do with non-legit, like a pirate radio station, and back to the pirates who did not acknowledge a country’s flag and flew under their own.
It seems hyperbolic, but one of the connotations of piracy is theft. Pirates also murdered, threatened, etc., but they were quite famous for robbery and plunder.
And the OED antedates the use of the ‘pirate’ and ‘piracy’ in those senses back into the seventeenth century. Moreover, although it did then have the connotation of actual plagiarism, there are examples from the seventeenth century onwards in which it was used explicitly to refer to printers who reprinted other printers’ publications without permission. It later got applied to the copying of inventions. Examples of the word being used in that sense in nineteenth-century booktitles can be found here, here and here.
So, yes, there was indeed piracy of books and other forms of intellectual property long, long before the 1970s and, what is more, it was being described as such. More recent uses are just another adaptation of a well-established term.
I do not mind copyright violations being referred to as “piracy”, but they are certainly not theft. I am sure the PR machines are behind equating making copies with theft. They totally ignore fair use and the many situations in which copying and downloading is legal.
Even if copyright violation is illegal, it is not theft. Theft is a real word with a real meaning. It implies depriving the owner of property, or the use of property.
As others have pointed out in other threads, that is not true. If I come to your house when you are asleep, hotwire your car, drive to the store, and return it before you wake up, I’ve stolen it, even though you’ve been deprived of nothing. Stealing is taking without authorization, not depriving another of use.
I don’t agree with this. Theft is taking property or services from someone, not depriving them of it. If I take something and give it back before they miss it, but am caught on security cameras, I’m pretty sure I’m still guilty of theft, even though they never missed it. On the other hand, I don’t think that blocking someone’s driveway with your car would be considered theft in most places, even though I deprived you of the ability to park in it, but I guess that is a bit more of a grey area. Perhaps a district attorney could weasel in a “theft of services” charge, although it would be pretty hard to assign a value to that. Perhaps a lawyer will come along shortly to give the skinny.
I agree with you completely, but linguistic evolution is more complicated than that. I at no time made the assumption that software piracy=theft. The word pirate is based in a word that implying risk, and the current word is based in an older word implying theft. Etymology is never very simple or formulaic, and I’m sorry for helping spur this thread in an unrelated direction. For example, photo means light, and photograph means light picture. If you’re holding a camera and I ask you to take a photo, I’m not referencing the original etymological meaning; I’m using a term that has developed from the original and has been abbreviated and taken on a new meaning.
Mind you that software pirates did not declare themselves pirates - software companies did.