Is piracy the same as stealing?

Great Debates
81

It is ludicrous to assert that if your replicate a Porsche, you’ve stolen a Porsche from the person you copied it from. Of course you haven’t stolen from the Porche’s owner, the only possible person you could have stolen from is the Porsche corporation. And then you didn’t steal the value of a Porshe, you only stole the design of the Porsche.

Look, the argument that getting something for nothing is theft–because otherwise you would have had to pay for it–is nonsense. If I give you a bag of chips for free, and you eat it, have you stolen from the store by taking that free bag of chips? After all, eating that free bag of chips means one less sale for the grocery store. You’ve stolen money out of the mouths of starving grocery store owners! You bastard!

Just because someone is accustomed to making a living providing a service, it does not make it stealing if someone finds a method of providing that same service for free. It used to be if you had to hire a stenographer if you wanted a clean typewritten copy of anything. Now you can compose it yourself on the computer. You’ve stolen from a stenographer! You deprived them of the cost of one typewritten document! If I buy a car have I stolen from buggy-whip manufacturers?

If I had a magic replicator that produced copies of cars as easily as my computer can produce copies of digital music, how would I be stealing? People would be complaining about how my replicator was the most horrible invention ever, since it stole from so many. Is it really so horrible, or is it rather the best invention ever created? Yeah, I’ll put General Motors out of business, but who the fuck cares if everyone gets a car? General Motors doesn’t have a right to keep on charging money for cars, they simply create cars that people today are willing to pay for.

Digital media distribution and copying is the biggest boon to artists and musicians ever invented, and yet some people are convinced it’s the Devil’s Work. Nonsense.

82

Several people have talked about how copyright infringement is theft because it reduces the enrichment of people to whom we’ve granted a copyright. The function of copyright is not to enrich rights holders. This might be a secondary result, but not a necessary one.

The problem with copyright as it stands today is that it has drifted so far towards promoting the quarterly earnings statements of BMG, Disney, et al. that it’s hindering the progress of science and the useful arts.

83

So, you still admit to having stolen something, eh? And as we’re arguing about whether theft has occured at all, and not the magnitude of the actual theft, I’d say you just conceded. :slight_smile:

Bad analogy. It is not a problem for you to write a book entierly on your own, and then give it away, even if the gift of your book hurts the sales of their book. It is theft if you steal the book from the store and give it away. The problem is not fair competition, it’s when you appropriate the exclusive right to copy a protected work from it’s rightful owner. The fact that these bootlegs hurt the original creator is the reason the law was made–but it’s not when the theft occurs. It occurs when you rip off the material in the first place.

Competition is fine, ripping off copyrighted material is not (and selling that ripped off copy is a good way to attract enough attention to get prosecuted). This is not hard.

It’s the best invention ever created. (Well, assuming that it’s as simple as you imply; as yet your “magic replicator” could be “a factory full of underpaid wage slaves in china”). It’s the best invention ever created, and if you use it to rip off somebody else’s protected work, that use of it is stealing. This is not an inherent contradiction; A cucumber is a fine thing, but it’s still bad to beat somebody to death with it.

And putting GM out of business is fine. No really, I’m perfectly fine with it. (If you do it by ripping them off that’s not fine, though.) Now, do you deny that if everyone had your machine and used it as cavalierly as you seem inclined to, then all occupations involving creating of new things would cease, due to lack of people willing to pay for them? You would be reduced to hobbyists, and admirable as they are, how much of the stuff you’re ripping off is designed and created by hobbyists? I assume you’re okay with the near total conclusion of progress as we know it.

(It would be interesting to see how society would react once you had eliminated all occupations other than prostitute, though. Might make a good sci-fi short story. Of course it’d probably end with the entire planet covered a hundred feet thick with replicated junk.)

It’s only the Devil’s Work if you use it for the Devil’s work, m’boy.

84

People want to call it stealing because it is the closest thing you can use to describe copyright infringement that wouldn’t require 5 minutes to describe. Its not like every instance of copyright violation results in lost profit.

The closest analogy I can think of is sneaking in to an empty theatre and watching a movie. Its illegal and you are getting something you didn’t pay for but even that is not a perfect analogy. Copyright infringement is wrong and if you asked Moses, he would call it stealing in the “thou shalt not steal” sense of the word.

85

Isn’t it called “theft of intellectual property” or something like that in some jurisdictions?

I’m fairly certain that sneaking into a movie without paying is considered “theft of services.” In this case, the service being the presentation of the movie in that particular theater.

86

There are a number of “old favourite” fallacies being trotted out here that I will refute serially without dealing with specific posts, that being a task I have entered upon too many times before and it gets tedious.

1/ “The copyright owner still has a copy of his work after I copy it, so nothing’s been taken”. This argument proceeds from a fundamental misunderstanding of what copyright is. Copyright is the exclusive right to create copies of a work. It is not the right to a copy of a work. The number of people who parade their ignorance of on this point while simultaneously purporting to know sufficient about the topic to meaningfully participate in this debate is mind boggling.

2/ “There is no direct relationship between unauthorised copying and the loss of sales to the copyright owner, so nothing has been taken”. There is commercial value in a property right that provides a chance of sales. That there is no one to one relationship between unauthorised copies and lost sales does not mean there is no relationship, nor (correspondingly) that the property right is not effectively diminished to some extent by unauthorised copying, even if the extent in question is not easily determinable.

3/ “I am not ‘taking’ a sale from a copyright owner by making an unauthorised copy any more than I am ‘taking’ a sale from someone selling something I don’t want to buy when I don’t buy. Therefore I’m not ‘taking’ anything”. The analogy is not comparing like with like because you want one thing and get it but don’t want the other thing and don’t get it. Chalk and cheese. In the first case you are both confirming the value of the thing (by wanting it enough to copy it) and getting what you want by infringing someone’s property right (which takes away from the value of that right). In the second case you are both confirming the lack of value of the item (you don’t want it) and not taking it, which infringes nothing. There is no comparison.

4/ “Copying intellectual property can be done at zero cost so provision of copies by the copyright owner has no value, so infringing copyright takes no value”. Copyright ownership has value because it creates an exclusive avenue to access the value of the IP. The value does not lie in the replication of copies of IP, it lies in access to the IP at all.

5/ “The appropriate source of information concerning the value of infringing copies is the infringer” and " Copyright owners are all bastards." If you want copyright infringers to sound like thieves, by all means trot this one out. There hasn’t been a thief in history who hasn’t rationalised what they do by denying the value of what they took and/or pointing at the undeservedness of the victim.

There are any number of variations on the above themes, but they’re all crap.

87

If you invented this magic machine in 1981, we’d all be driving around in state of the art “K-Cars” for the next 100 years. No airbags, no anti-lock brakes, no cupholders, no hybrids, no improved emissions, no advances, just the same old crap-ass cars year after year.

This is the entire damn point about why copyright must be enforced, whether or not you want to create some tortured analogy to stealing. Take away the right to own intellectual property, like the design of a car, and we will stop creating new IP. They knew this more than 200 years ago, copyright (and patents) are important to promote the useful arts and sciences.

88

But my point is that we DO have such a magic replicator for digital information. And as you say, if we’re dumb about it, we’ll be driving around in K-cars forever, because no one will bother designing new vehicles.

We can’t stuff this magic replicator back in the box and forget it exists, that’s never going to happen. So the question is how do we use the properties of the computer to benefit both producers and consumers.

It might be that we really do have to rely on hobbyists, because anti-copying laws will prove unenforceable, and we find there’s absolutely no way to make money in music anymore. Or we’ll all be listening to 80 year old classic rock from the 70s in the future, because nothing new was produced after 2006. That’s a worst case scenario…and insisting that our current copyright scheme is the only possible one is what is most likely to bring this worst case scenario about.

I understand that copyright means the right to control copying of your work. But this is a ludicrous right to have in the digital age. What you want to control is USE of your work. Back a few years ago controlling copying was a rough proxy for controlling use. And what’s more, it used to be enforceable. Suppose an author 40 years ago wanted to charge people, not for copies of his book, but for reading his book. His idea was to charge you one dollar every time you read his book, but copies would be free, it wouldn’t matter if you read a friend’s copy, a library copy, or a copy in your home, every time anyone read the book they were obligated to mail him one dollar.

That’s a reasonable intellectual property arrangement, right? It compensates the author for his work, right? Except it wouldn’t work, because it would be totally unenforceable. This kind of arrangement would fail because there would be no way to track use, it would essentially operate on the honor system and most people wouldn’t bother. Insisting on such a scheme wouldn’t advance the useful arts and sciences.

Except right now we’re in exactly the opposite of such a scheme with digital media. Copying is free, copies of everything exist and untraceable new copies can be made for free. And yet, authors insist on being paid by the copy, not by use. And we now have the technology to easily track usage. Our current regime is as ludicrous as my imaginary regime would have been 40 years ago. We are insisting on controlling the fundamentally uncontrollable, simply because it used to be controllable.

89

It’s not any more magic a replicator than the printing press was for printed text. The printing press was the invention that spurred the creation of copyright in the first place. Copies were now so easy to make, the government had to step in to control who could copy what. I fail to grasp how making them even easier suddenly means the government should stop attempting to regulate copying.

This is not to say that the RIAA shouldn’t be more forward thinking about their business model, but that has nothing to do with copyright law. I don’t see what changes to the law make sense, either the copyright owner has exclusive rights to copy, or they don’t. If they don’t, then who gets to make copies, and how does the artist ever get compensated?

I’d also like to hear about how one can control the mere playing of a song easier than copying the song. I have 10 devices in my house that can play music, none of them report back usage to anything.

90

Why is it that artists don’t set out their albums to be downloaded online for something like $3 then? I illegally download all my albums, but if I only had to pay $3 that went straight to the artist, I would buy them all instead.

91

I was going to call this a “pet peeve,” but it goes a lot further than that. When you mean illegal downloading, don’t just say “downloading.”

I download at least 90% of the music I buy, and I’m not breaking any laws, stealing any music, or violating any copyrights, but as soon as people hear that I “download music,” they assume I’m a scofflaw. That’s because of sloppy terminology like you’re using.

Every song you purchase from an online music store (e.g., Apple iTunes store) or obtain legally as a free download from the musician (e.g., Weird Al’s “Don’t Download This Song,” which he’s offering free on his Web site) or obtain from licensed free distribution sites (e.g., iRate Radio) is 100% legal and approved by the artist. Obviously that’s not stealing or copyright infringement.

92

I disagree with your analysis.

Before the invention of the printing press, the notion of copyright would be counterproductive, because there was absolutely no way to make money by authoring books. You could make money by MAKING books by hand and selling them, but there was no market for new books. Almost all authors were long dead, and the notion that you weren’t allowed to make a copy of a book you owned would be laughed at…because such a prohibition would obviously lead to the loss of the work as copies deteriorated. Free copying was the only way to preserve a work. In such a situation, copyright enforcement would be downright immoral.

The printing press made production of large numbers of books practical. The government didn’t step in because to enforce copyright, it CREATED copyright because now a new phenomenon existed…the living author who actually made a living authoring books. And everyone recognized that new books were good, and they eventually hit on a method of compensating new authors, because everyone realized that if you want new books you have to have some method of rewarding authors.

But remember, the social goal behind copyright is not to benefit authors, it’s to benefit the public. Benefiting authors is simply the method we have chosen, for various obvious reasons. And as I have said earlier, when copying was done by industrial means, regulation of copying was enforceable. Copying was much easier than copying by hand, but it was still an expensive and importantly a centralized process. It certainly was not free or nearly free to create books, it was expensive. Sure, the marginal cost of one more book wasn’t that great, but the cost of the printing press was, and the cost of getting set up to print a particular book was.

So importantly, no reasonable printer would create copies of books to distribute for free. Sure, some books were distributed for free, like Bibles in hotel rooms, but those weren’t free, they cost money to print, and were distributed for ideological reasons. Books would only be printed if the printer hoped to make money by selling the books. And that commercial motive made enforcing copyright extremely simple. There would only be a limited number of printing presses in a city, and if a store sold bootleg copies they would know where they got the copies, and it was child’s play to track down the copyright infringer, and most importantly, get monetary restitution. And the infringers had a large monetary investment in their physical plant that could be easily seized. And since the whole point of infringing copyright would be to make money, the mere knowledge that infringement was easy to enforce made infringement extremely rare.

Except nowadays none of that is true. Distribution of bootleg copies is not centralized, it costs nothing to produce copies, and people don’t produce copies with the hope of making money, the do it for free because it’s no skin off their nose. In the old days, it would be breaking the law to make a copy of a book, but perfectly legal to let someone else read that book. But nowadays the distinction between listening/reading a work and copying that work is not so clear. Suppose I buy a CD and I play it at my house and my friend listens to it. Perfectly legal, perfectly ethical, right? I can even lend him the CD or give him the CD or sell him the CD. And he can listen as many times as he likes.

Now imagine that I just run a really long speaker cable to my friend’s house, and whenever he wants to hear the CD he calls me up and I play the CD for him. Is that illegal or unethical? What about if I have the CD in my computer, and whenever he wants he connects to my computer and streams the CD. Wait, now he’s broken the law, because you can’t play music on a computer without creating a copy of the information locally. Yes, this breaks the law, but it’s a stupid and meaningless distinction.

My point is that this obsession with “copying” is meaningless in the digital age. Who cares how many copies of a work exist? A million copies on my hard drive of the latest hit single are worth no more than one. I can set up a trivial batch file that fills up my hard drive with copies of that hit single, erases them all, and copies them again, forever. I’ll be violating copyright millions and millions of times. Do I really ethically owe Brittany Spears $14 for each copy I make and erase? I know what the law says, but the law makes no sense in this case.

The whole point of the law is that if I listen to Brittany Spears she should somehow be compensated, otherwise she won’t bother creating new works. Copyright was a practical method of getting a rough proxy of that use, and compensating owners based on the number of copies purchased. And this worked because there was some imperfect but still workable correlation between copying and use, and control of copying was POSSIBLE. But that correlation has vanished. It doesn’t exist any more, and control of copying is impossible. Fighting to control copying is like fighting to keep airplanes and satelites from violating your property rights when they fly overhead.

93

I have stated in this thread that in Canada we pay a royalty on recordable media that gives us a right to download and copy music. The music industry fought for this royalty. Now they hate it. They disagree that downloading music is okay, but so far have lost case after case trying to prove their point.

my emphasis

Yes, Yes! That is exactly my point. I don’t like sloppy terminology. If I say “someone stole my car”, I am not implying that they took an unauthorized photograph of it. Copyright violation may be illegal and therefore breaking the law. But the definitions of theft given in this thread do not include the unauthorized duplication of digital signals.

94

On a somewhat related note I transferred a whack of songs onto my mp3 player last week that I had paid $1 each to download. None of them would play because of digital rights management. I am not sure what I did wrong, and don’t really feel like investigating. I will just make sure when I purchase music in the future, it does not have DRM.

95

I think copying software is definitely not morally right, but stealing…well if you wouldn’t have bought the software anyway you’re not depriving anyone of anything. Of course only you yourself can determine whether you would have bought the software.

This is going to be a much bigger problem when 3D copiers AKA Star Trek replicators become common. Then you’ll have people copying things like plastic forks and making their own repair parts for things, and I’m sure companies won’t like that.

96

Lemur, I’m not sure where you’re going with your arguments. What can you possibly replace copyright with that will provide compensation to artists?

As broken as copyright seems to be WRT digitized music, we still have artists, many many artists, making a living by creating music. We also have a growing online music scene, fully licensed and paying royalties. Throw copyright out and replace it with something else, are you improving the situation?

97

Actually, this is a factually incorrect statement. Copyright was, in fact, created specifically to allow for enrichment of rights holders as a result of their work.

The purpose of the exclusive rights bundle referred to as “copyright” is to allow the holder of the bundle of rights to effectively profit from his contribution to the realm of arts and sciences. It is one of the few provisions of the U.S. Constitution whose purpose is expressly spelled out in the language of the provision.

“to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

It’s a straight up incentive program. If you produce work which qualifies for protection under this Article (either as copyright or patent), then congratulations, your reward for promoting the progress of science and art is the right to absolute control over your work. In practical terms, this means the right to control its sale and distribution.

Your point about modern copyright law failing in its charge to live up to its original purpose is certainly at least arguably valid, though.

And since we’re all playing the definitions game, according to the nice folks at Webster’s, theft is the wrongful taking of another person’s property without that person’s consent. Sounds like illegal downloading to me.

You might not like the fact that illegal downloading of music is “wrongful taking”, but in the United States, according to the United States Code, it is. By definition.

98

Really?

I would argue that:

[ul][li]Illegal downloading hurts record sales.[*]Illegal downloading helps stimulate record sales.[/ul][/li]
It hurts sales if it replaces them with non-paid material. It stimulates sales if listeners hear what they like and buy some more or go to paid concerts. Can you understand that both may occur even to the same user, the same market, the same artist?

And stats of sales increases/declines vs. downloading quantity suffer from the maladies inherent in most statistics:
[ul][]The validity of such numbers is suspect (did they count the files I sent to my friend last night?).[]The correlation with the causation is weak. Did one cause the other, are they independent, or perhaps both subject to an external variable (global economy, for example)?[/ul]

99

You are correct Musicat, my list was incomplete. It should have read something like:

  1. Illegal downloading hurts record sales, by providing a means to download an album for free that would otherwise have been purchased legally.
    1a) Illegal downloading helps record sales by exposing artists that otherwise would not have been heard.
  2. The amount of dollars **gained/**lost to illegal downloads…
100

Aye, that’s the rub! What’s the balance? And we still have the causation to consider…

And of course neither of these address the OP, which is more of a legal and/or moral question.