There is no IP in a hummed tune.
**Miller ** quite specifically refers to IP violations. Clearly, if there is no illegality ie no violation, then no. Why on earth do you ask?
Get back to me when you have a real issue to discuss.
No, that’s a duet.
Do any other crimes need to be the same as theft in order for them to be legitimately crimes?
For chrissake, copyright law is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as one of the powers granted to Congress.
Sure, the concept of copyright violation as a crime is younger than theft as a crime, but that’s only because high volume copying is a relatively new concept.
I’m baffled at how someone can consider copyright violation NOT a crime just because it’s not “this” crime or “that” crime. It’s been over 200 years since the first copyright laws were written in this country, isn’t that long enough for violating that law to be considered a crime, without some dopey analogy to some other crime?
Humming a tune isn’t theft, even though in my example a person has made an audio copy of intellectual property and distributed it (by humming in public) without consent. What if he tape records himself humming it? Of course the example is absurd. Thats my point. Making a copy of a copy of a digital signal using my own equipment and proprerty is not theft. The author will never be aware of the copy and is not deprived of property nor income. Nothing was stolen, in fact something new was created.
It may be a copyright violation because copyright is defined by law. Theft is also defined by law and by common useage. Copyright has been a valid concept for at least hundreds of years, and the definition of theft does not include copyright violation. See this article discussing the legal definition of theft in various countries.
I agree that we are arguing semantics, but I think words are important, that copyright law has swung way to far in the favor of publishing corporations, and that I do not want to help them redefine the meaining of the word “theft.”
I liken it to taping a Major League Baseball game- you’re not allowed to do it because you don’t own the rights, but no one is legitimately harmed if you do.
Or taping a song off the radio. Or a stand-up comic telling a joke another comic wrote.
Actually, that’s a good example. Legally, it wouldn’t, because the hummed tune has no appreciable value. In the vernacular, however, it would be. Common usage is littered with examples of the word “theft” or “stealing” being employed in this way. Look around this board, and see how often people ask other posters if they can “steal” a line for their sig. Robin Williams is often accused of stealing other comedian’s material. But he hasn’t deprived them of the joke. They can still tell it on stage. Vanilla Ice was widely criticized for stealing the bass line from Queen’s “Under Pressure,” and yet the bass is still there in all the copies of the song I’ve heard. Nothing’s been lost. And yet the term still applies, and has been used in that context for years and years.
Yes, I would. If a country declares that it’s legal to kill a certain class of people, I would still consider anyone who kills a member of that class to be a murderer, even though the law in their country does not recognize it as such.
Absolutely wrong. A word is only being used “incorrectly” if it does not communicate the meaning you want it to communicate. Is anyone genuinely uncertain what is meant when illegally downloading music from the internet is called “theft?” No? Then the usage is correct. Further, this particular usage has been common for several years now. Despite your protests, it’s already widely accepted, so even if your claim that it’s incorrect until everyone starts using it had any merit, that ship has already long since sailed.
Copyright violation can be compared to theft. So can trespassing, assault, rape, murder, and so on. Murder can be compared to stealing someone’s life, rape can be compared to stealing someone’s sexual autonomy, battery could be considered stealing someone’s uninjured body. But copyright violation is really a different thing than theft, and it has to be treated differently.
500 years ago, before the invention of the printing press, the notion of “copyright” would have been absurd. Yes, you could steal a physical book, but the idea that you wouldn’t be allowed to make another copy of that book would be nonsensical. Of COURSE you had the right to make copies of books, the notion wouldn’t even come up. Because otherwise, after a couple generations, there would be no books left as the last physical copies disintegrated. No one could make money authoring books. Producing books, maybe. But since every book had to be written by hand it would take months of skilled labor to produce ONE book.
Now introduce the printing press. Books are cheap. People start authoring new books, with the intent of selling them…for profit! But then other people start making and selling copies of these new books. Well, what’s to stop them, why not? So we invent a new idea, the idea that the author of the book is the one who as the right to make and sell copies of the book, and no one else. And we grant the author this right because we want more books! If we don’t allow authors the ability to profit from authorship we won’t see many authors.
And the key is, this right is for the most part ENFORCEABLE. It’s still a large undertaking to print books. No one would print books unless they thought they would make money doing so, so the threat of taking that money from unauthorized copiers is enough to keep copyright violations low. Publishers have too many seizable assets, not the least their OWN copyrights that they want to protect from other publishers. And happily the law can be easily adapted to recorded music and movies without much trouble, because you still have centralized production of copies under expensive industrial processes for the expectation of profit.
Aaaaaand along come computers, and digital media. And suddenly the above regime no longer works. Copies can be made for free. Copiers don’t need a large industrial plant to make thousands of copies of a work. And since copies can be made for free, copiers have an incentive other than profit to make copies. It’s FREE. And EASY. And small scale copyright violations are now unenforceable.
Continuing our previous legal framework makes no sense any more, just like enforcing copyright in a world where all books were written by hand would make no sense. Our current copyright scheme is fitted for an era of industrial production, not hand production or digital production. And so the arguments over whether copyright violations are stealing are beside the point, calling it stealing doesn’t change the facts on the ground that copying is so cheap, easy, painless and risk-free that the old regulatory schemes won’t work any more, no matter how hard we try to force them to work, no matter how much we wish they would work, no matter how much propaganda/education we engage in that copyright violation is theft.
It’s just too easy, too quick, too painless, and the harm caused is too far removed for most people to feel in their guts that copyright violation is theft. A new regulatory scheme is needed. No one has a clear idea what this might be, but an obvious alternative is to decouple “copying” with “use”. Who cares if I make 1,000,000 copies of Brittany Spear’s latest single and then delete them all? Did I really do something 1,000,000 times worse than making one copy that I listened to for weeks?
So a flat monthly usage fee for unlimited access to everything ever created seems reasonable to me, along with some kind of tracking system to compensate creators, not on how many times a work is copied but on how many times it is read, or listened to. Add another $20 to your monthly ISP bill, and $19 of that gets distributed in some way to all artists/authors based on use.
Seems to me a system like this makes much more sense than arguing about copies. Making copies is a red herring, it makes no sense with today’s technology, what we should be arguing about is how to fairly compensate creative people so we can advance the useful arts and sciences and get more of them. If our current copyright laws don’t advance the useful arts and sciences–which they don’t anymore–then they should be scrapped.
Explain to the author of the joke who attempts to tell his own joke only to find the comic ahead of him told that joke, but had no permission to use it in the first place?
Excellent post, Lemur866. We actually have part of this plan in Canada as you may well be aware. The music industry lobbied for many years that there should be a tax on magnetic recording material (like tapes) which would be paid to them directly. This was to compensate them for potential lost income from activities like dubbing LPs to cassette. Many consumers had a problem with this extra tax, because they had to pay it regardless if they used their tapes for copying music, or something totally unrelated.
Nevertheless the legislation was passed and is now paying millions of dollars to the recording industry (nice work if you can get it). This levy has been expanded to include hard drives and recordable CDs and DVDs. Part of the legislation stated that since you were already paying for music when you bought blank media, it was not a crime to copy or download the music that you had paid for.
Guess who now hates this legislation and want to abolish it? They failed to see the impact of computers, and suddenly their golden goose looks tarnished. They are trying to keep alive a business model that does not work without coercion from the state.
What happens when the author of the joke finds out someone else told the same joke 50 years ago? 
Virtually all art is derivative.
…I took the trouble to consult the DICTIONARy. It plainly defines piracy as theft at sea, and …
“the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.”
THEFT
No wiggle room there! No question or doubt in my mind, it is theft pure and simple.
Quibbling to the contrary, it is wrong if either piracy or theft. Only if you have no moral authority or conscience can you even attempt to justify that which is wrong.
So all the kids who pirate music without a second thought, all the people in these threads that argue that piracy isn’t so bad…we’re all sociopaths? That must mean tens of millions of sociopaths in the United States. How can you feel safe leaving your house knowing so many morally depraved people with no consciences are wandering the streets?
Yes, the people who author creative works need to be compensated for those works, or very few of those works will be created. But copyright is a human created right. Violation of copyright is malum prohibitum, not malum in se. Calling for revision of copyright legal framework is hardly evidence that I lack a fucking conscience.
This amuses me no end. It’s not okay to use the word “theft,” because that refers to stealing, but it’s okay to use the word “piracy”? Pirates were thieves and murderers!
And most of them had really bad hygiene, too 
It’s theft in that if you download a complete album that is copyrighted without paying for it, that’s one copy of the CD that will collect dust on store shelves that would have been compensation for the artist. That is stealing, no matter how you fudge the definition. But on the otherhand, if you copy a CD you already bought to use on another medium without selling/giving to someone else, I don’t really see how that could be stealing in the slightest. You shouldn’t have to buy new mediums of the same shit over and over if you can help it. Sure, it cost money for companies to create the new mediums (LP >Tape>CD>MP3>MP3 server farms including bandwidth costs for onlines sales…) , but if you have the capability to convert/copy it for yourself, what’s the problem?
I read through your definitions of theft, they are similar to the definitions I pointed to. No where is the duplicating of intellectual property mentioned. As I said, copyright violations may be illegal, but they are not theft. I am surprised that this is such a hard concept for people to accept.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be stating that each downloaded album represents one less album purchased. So if one billion albums are downloaded, that represents a loss of sales of one billion albums.
This is the argument the record and software companies have been making from the start. That is why they have so little credibility. You only have to compare the number of downloads to number of current sales to know that this is statistically not possible. People’s spending on songs and entertainment has been increasing. It is just being split differently than before. More money is now being spent on computer games for example, and less on song cds. People have more choice than a decade ago.
I agree that downloading can have a negative influence on sales (in can also have a positive influence) and that the artist should be compensated for their work. As soon as record companies and artists provide their works in a way that the consumers wish to use them, this will happen.
Oh, and downloading is not theft.
So, you’re arguing that people are illegally downloading albums, then running out and buying the same album from the local record store? :dubious:
Can you expand on this? How is it “statistically impossible?” Can you provide a link to the numbers you’ve referenced, so that we can observe them ourselves?
Okay. And?
Exactly what sort of payment scheme do you think the consumers would prefer over “free”?
Just keep saying that. Sooner or later, you’ll convince someone.
If each downloaded album represents one full album that could have been purchased at the store, and you downloaded it without purchasing it, how is that not theft? That would be on average $12 dollars that would have gone to the artists, marketers, and music companies. If I download and consume the product for free, those people don’t get paid for their work. Even though technically it wasn’t a theft of physical property, and that something is actually added to the market via the copy.
If downloaded without ever having been purchased by the masses with the intent to use the data, then yes. I don’t think it gets clearer then that.
I don’t have a site, but I do have a ton of anecdotal evidence, if you know what I mean. 
You’re assuming here that the artists would have gotten that $12. Supply and demand tell us that people will consume more of a product at $0 each than at $12 each. Choosing to “buy” an album at $0 does not imply a similar choice would have been made at $12.
Many of these incidents represent no financial impact to the artist, the only effect is to give an unauthorized copy of the work to the pirate.