Question: Is a Napster user or a cable-descrambler user, in your mind, morally equivalent to someone who breaks into someone’s home and steals his property?
Here ya go. Ever want to tell people how morally superior you are? Do you enjoy reducing complex issues of copyright into emotionally charged and simplistic terms like “theft”? Here’s a great place to do it. Warm up your morality and fire away.
Your Quadell
No. First of all, if these oprtions were not available, many people would still not pay the people in question any money (they would just live without the product). Secondly, depriving someone of what is rightfully theirs is not quite the same as actually taking something from them.
Of course, none of this means that these activities are okay, but it does mean that they aren’t as bad as theft.
Here’s another question: suppose someone takes a movie out of Blockbuster without payting for it, watches it, and then returns it. Is this theft?
The Ryan:
Of course it is theft. They are stealing an asset the Blockbuster owns. If someone took your car out of your garage and drove it 1000 miles then put it back would that be theft?
As far as the cable descrambling I believe that is theft as well. You are taking something from the cable company without permission or compensation for them.
Beeto wrote:
If you recieve a benefit from someone, and they recieve no harm from your doing so, is that `theft?’
As far as the mp3 issue is concerned, I think you should be using the term ‘piracy’ instead of the word ‘theft’. I’m sure there is a legal distinction.
“Penises don’t belong in the mouth, girls and boys. You’ve got the wrong hole there. Just like you wouldn’t shove pizza up your nose.”
-From the Brother Jed flyer-
Johnny Angel and I have arm-wrestled about this exact topic in another thread that I don’t have the energy to track down. I’d like to put a new view on this:
Intellectual Property is a very recent invention in human history. It wasn’t that long ago that the dollar value of a song or a piece of software or a show on cable or a story in a book was zero or close to it.
But it’s a new world. If you look at all the assets in the world, intellectual property as a percentage of all assets is steadily climbing.
In my line of work (software development), 100% of the value of my work is intellectual property, i.e. anyone can make a copy without paying and if enough folks do, my business collapses. My business (and other businesses that sell IP, such as song writers, movie makers or book writers) spends a lot of money making the first copy, then makes money by selling in volume.
Pirating soft property is morally wrong and illegal with good reason.
I confess - I have an MP3 site. I have this big honking 300 MB web site with an FTP area where people can download MP3s.
Sounds terrible, but I don’t feel too bad about it. The reason? All the MP3s I have are of rare, obscure, and almost always out-of-print orchestral music. Not “hot” top 40 stuff, at all. I make it very clear on my MP3 site that I am not putting the MP3s up so that people can get around buying the CDs, I want them to buy the CDs, if they can find them (which they usually cannot.) And when I do put something up that is currently in print, I will tantalize them with one or two tracks, in hopes that they will want to buy the entire CD. (And these are the kind of recordings where you will want to have the entire recording.)
I do think there is a distinction between what I am doing (mostly sharing music that is out of print, NOT available for sale) and distributing music just so that people can avoid paying for the CD. (I don’t get why people would do that, anyway. If I like the music, I want the CD.)
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“A Cat Cannot Have Too Many Toes”
Is it stealing if we vote to make the richest 10% of the country give up 40% of their earnings and re-distribute them to the poor?
If they don’t agree then we will take it from them at the point of a gun. Or just confiscate all their proerty.
Sorry…
I had a Libertarian thread flashback for a second.
(am I the only one who misses Libertarian?)
The way I see it, it’s all about the gain vs. the risk.
Stealing cable has almost no risk involved. Just hide it when the cable guy comes in, and you’re scott free. Also, there is very little guilt associated with this form of theft. Who cares if some big company makes a little less profit?
That is why the laws on cable theft are so strict. IIRC, it’s considered a felony with a $250,000 fine and imprisonment.
The law is strict to offset the low risk of getting caught. It’s sort of like the lottery backwards: you take the million dollars first, and each day you buy a $1 ticket; if you “win”, then you pay the million back.
There’s always another beer.
Also, for the OP:
“Illegal” and “immoral” are not identical, as defined by society.
It is illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, but society does not consider this immoral.
It is legal to shout obscenities at your mother, or any stranger you meet, but society might deem this as immoral.
There’s always another beer.
Beeruser wrote:
Well, some of us do, ya lousy good-fer-nothin’ speed demon!
Beeruser wrote
Au contraire, mi amigo. Laws are nothing but codified morals.
Now, it is true that laws only encompass the high-end moral restrictions. There is certainly a lower layer of morals that don’t make it into the law. But law is purely an enforcement of a society’s morals.
Actually, I believe the legal term is “unauthorized use”. I guess something that should be addressed is whether we’re talking about the legal or moral meaning of “theft”.
I take it you mean “sell a ticket”.
Sometimes, I stay on the train one stop past the end of the zone that I’ve paid for.
That’s illegal, or at least against the rules the train dudes have set up. But strictly speaking they aren’t losing out, no extra effort on their part is being abused by me, I’m merely taking advantage of an opportunity unfairly.
I have no idea if that’s even relevant, but I somehow got reminded of this after reading the thread.
Hey, get this! I found this place where you can take books that other people have paid for and read them for free! You don’t have to even download anything, you just walk in and take your fill of someone else’s intellectual property. That’s right, you can cheat authors out of their hard earned money and practically steal their words all for the price (FREE) of a library card. I predict this place will be the end of the literary industry as we know it. I mean who would buy a book when they can get one for free?!?!? The outrage!
Lemon Drop Martini: 2 Parts Absolute Citron, 1 Part Cointreau, juice of half lemon. Shake with ice and strain into chilled, sugared martini glass.
Oh, not again. Laws have no moral content. We did a whole bloody thread on this. Hungarian freedom fighters, speeders, drug users, pornography, Nazis, and all that. Check it out: <a href = “http://boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000481.html”>A lot of drug users here</a>
The previous thread on Napster was here, if anyone’s interested.
Voguevixen, the difference is that you do not get to take the books home, poke it into a replicator and get a free copy of the book. You can’t even photocopy the whole thing legally (if it’s copyrighted), IIRC; I think that’s beyond “fair use”. Nor can you rent a video at Blockbuster and legally copy it. I think the record companies would be willing to allow a sort of rental system for MP3s (I believe libraries sometimes have CDs for rent), but I do not think there is currently a way to cut down on copying the MP3 format, which would definitely hurt their business.
Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that She is pink; logically, we know She is invisible because we can’t see Her.
::sigh:: I address the indisputable fact that a copyright violation is theft in a long post in this thread on 04-08-2000 at 2:43 PM so I won’t repeat it here. But it is theft, the whining of a few thieves to the contrary notwithstanding. That is not a Great Debate or a debate at all. It is fact. Don’t like it? Run for office.
Now. Why am I such an evangelist on this? Well, if you must know, the entire future of global capitalism depends on a good understanding of and support for intellectual property laws. I am not exaggerating. (OK, maybe a little).
Developed economies are moving rapidly from a manufacturing base to a service base and then to an information base. You may have noticed this if you, for example, access this site. If people are willing blithely to steal information, one or both of two things will happen. The incentive to create new information goes away and/or the ability to protect the information to the point of near unusability increases ( DVD, anyone?).
There will always be some theft, just as there’s some theft of more traditional goods and services. But just as the price honest people pay for clothes includes the costs of theft from the department store, the price honest people will end up paying for intellectual property will come to include the costs of theft by those who have not made the fairly simple leap that taking things that don’t belong to them is wrong.
NYC IRL III
is on April 15th. Do you have what it takes?
Not quite. It’s a fact that you said it was, but that doesn’t change anything. It’s still an opinion of yours that you dredged up a little support for and named a fact.
The dictionary definition of the word completely rules out any chance of it actually being theft. And that is a fact. It’s written down in a dictionary which we should be able to accept as an authority on the English language. And unlike you, that dictionary has no ulterior motive in getting us to believe anything.
So, that justifies your lying about it?
If you think something is important, then explain that honestly. Convince people because of the validity of your opinions. Don’t snow them with a bunch of made up ‘facts’.
I never said that I didn’t value intellectual property at all, just that I don’t value it the same was as real property. I can see a difference and still respect that they are both somewhat important.
And you don’t think anyone can be made to understand that the ability to make money on something is an important incentive? You’re the only one who can understand abstract economics? Everyone else needs to be spoken to in short emotionally charged (and incorrect) words so they they at least behave properly, if not understand…?
Explain your concerns, like you are doing now, and why you think it’s important everyone believes as you do. You’ll get a lot more converts than by simply telling people an obvious untruth.