Should copyright violations be considered "stealing" or "theft"?

Great Debates
1

If there’s one meme on Slashdot that comes up constantly, it’s that copyright infringement (in many of their minds) is not considered stealing. A couple of the more common arguments: if depriving a company of profit they otherwise would have gotten is stealing, how is that different from gathering a large group of people for a Pay-Per-View (as opposed to making everyone buy their own), or borrowing books from a library, or taping a movie on TV? In the case of corporations, especially entertainment, what was stolen and who was it stolen from (asked as a question that the asker evidently believes is unclear at best, at worst with an answer that proves the asker’s point)? The movie or song in question (when discussing P2P downloading) is still present and ready to be purchased, so how has the company been deprived of any real dollars, and even if they were, is that theft? And since when is information real property, anyway? (Some example arguments here.)

Anyway, a lot of Slashdot readers are convinced that copyright and IP laws are hopelessly outdated, entangled, and not even Constitutionally guarenteed in copyright’s case, but that’s not my main question. What do you think of the seriousness of copyright infringement as a crime? Is it theft? No one’s arguing, AFAIK, that it’s a crime (since it’s hard to argue with passed laws), but it’s often said in the context of the rightness of these laws that copyright infringement, absent those laws, is theft, which always gets pounced on with the above arguments and more. In their eyes, copyright infringement and theft are two unrelated acts/crimes.

Whaddya all think?

2

Doesn’t the answer depend on they type of copyright infringement? Your examples all seem to be about downloading or purchasing an illegal copy of an existing work (such as a song, or a movie). That might be considered theft, if you accept the reasoning that if the illegal copy wasn’t available, the downloader would have purchased a legal one. But what about other types of copyright violation? What if I draw a cartoon featuring a character found in a copyrighted work, such as Mickey Mouse, or write a piece of Star Wars fanfiction? I’ve used someone else’s intellectual property to create something unique; I haven’t impaired (at least not directly) their ability to continue using their characters to create other unique works that they can sell too. It’s a copyright violation, yes, but is such an action theft? After all, the cartoon or the fanfic wouldn’t exist at all if I hadn’t created it, so the copyright owner isn’t being deprived of income in any direct fashion.

3

Okay, before the rabid “It’s stealing!” crowd start whining, let’s get this straight: copyrights, trademarks, and all such things are created by the government and society arbitrarily for a particular social or economic purpose (to foster creativity, etc.). Hence, I don’t think that violations of same can automatically be considered an organic type of theft, such as stealing someone’s car.

Outright plagiarism is always wrong, as it involves lying. Using someone’s “intellectual property” (I hate that term) without attribution is also dishonest in most cases. These are matters of natural human ethics, independent of the law.

Ripping MP3s may or may not be immoral, depending on the overall social effect. When we were kids, we ate apples from the neighbor’s tree, knowing that the man did not harvest them. I would not call that “stealing.” Of course, the US music industry tries to harvest every penny it can, but whether it should have all the rights given to it by Congress (retroactive copyright extensions, thank you very much!) is a matter of opinion. And my opinion is that ripping a Britney MP3 harms only the listener, not society.

4

I’ve always thought used CD stores are “stealing” from artists if anyone was. But this is why I don’t own a big record company, dontcha know.

5

We had a fruit tree in our back yard and sometimes neighbor kids would take from it. The shocked and guilty look on their faces when they were caught gave me the impression that they knew they were “stealing.” I always thought they were stealing. I would have felt like I was stealing from someone else if I ate the fruit from their trees.

How is that not stealing? They bought the property, which included a fruit tree. They paid for that fruit tree. Or, they paid for and then planted the tree and had to take care of it so it would grow. How could you consider taking something from their tree to not be stealing? :confused:

6

So… if I have a picture of Micky Mouse I bought, and I photocopy it and give it to my friends (All great Mouseketeers, I assure you), is it theft, or stealing? From who? The artist who drew the picture? Disney? The magazine I copied it from?

What if I cut out a comic and put it on the wall in my (theoretical) cubicle for my (theoretical) office buddies to see? Am I stealing, and from who?

7

What about the situation where certain works aren’t legally available? One might luck up and find a used copy of a legal copy on eBay, but then again, they might not. And there’s items which have never been legally available as a videotape/DVD/CD/album or whatever, so if you’d like to simply watch/listen/read them, you must find an illegal copy.

Take Ulysses by James Joyce as an example. When it was first published, it was banned in the US, yet there were “bootleg” editions available. I don’t have a cite handy, but Joyce himself was upset that legal copies of his work were prohibited from being sold in the US, yet one could find an illegal copy if one so chose.

Seems to me that if a person doesn’t make a legal copy of his/her work available, (in some manner), then they’ve got no right to bitch about bootlegs.

8

How far do you want that to go? What if someone composes a symphony, and then decides it’s awful so they never want to release it, because they fear it will embarass them. If someone found a way to swipe a copy of the unreleased symphony and release bootlegs, would the composer have no reason to bitch?

9

I don’t think Aeschines was trying to draw an analogy between taking apples that were not going to be harvested from someone’s tree without permission and copyright violation. Such an analogy has several problems, mainly that taking apples deprives the tree’s owner of the apples, regardless of whether he planned to do anything with them. I hope this very interesting topic will not be derailed by the apple tree example.

I do not think copyright violation is theft. Violating a copyright does not deprive the copyright holder of the use of the work in question. For centuries, “theft” has meant that somebody was unlawfully deprived of a material object. Calling copyright violation “theft” is like calling abortion “child murder”. If I post a Xerox copy of a Dilbert comic on my office door, Scott Adams can still look at the original - I have not deprived him of the comic. Also, the law (for now) does not equate copyright violation with theft. Theft is a criminal offense, while copyright violation is generally a civil one (exceptions are willful violation of copyright for profit and some other things related to reproduction technologies).

As Aeschines says, copyright and other forms of “intellectual property” are artificial, temporary restraints on trade designed to foster the production of creative works. There is no natural right to control the reproduction, distribution, or revision of an intellectual work. Some people think copyright should be forever, as if a person’s human rights are being violated when their works pass into the public domain. Nonsense. Then you have extremists who say that copyright laws must be defended and augmented even beyond their current oppressive level, or else people will stop publishing creative works. Again, nonsense. You might as well argue that society has an obligation to guarantee jobs for a certain number of years to all who graduate from college, or else nobody will go to college.

Copyright is out of control. Congress keeps extending the copyright period and applying it retroactively to works whose authors are long dead. This does nothing to foster the production of creative works and simply serves to protect the economic interests of a few big corporations like Disney at the expense of the public interest

10

One of the laments that people have about the computer is that enables writers to make tons of revisions of their works before it ever sees publication, thus denying future scholars the ability to study how the writer went from a rough idea to the polished work. Kafka and Joyce both destroyed a number of their writings before their death because they were ashamed of them. One could argue that this was their right, but then isn’t it also the right of someone who buys a painting by a master painter (say a Van Gogh or a Da Vinci) to then destroy the painting?

At some point, art ceases to be the property of any single individual and becomes a property of the whole human race. What that point is, I can’t say, but then again, I don’t think that anyone else can say, either. History is replete with artists who weren’t acknowledged as being great in their own time, and only after their death did they gain acclaim.

I certainly support the idea of an artist profiting off of his/her labors, but at the same time, shouldn’t I, as someone who appreciates that artist’s work have the right to enjoy it? And if I happen to think that a work the artist isn’t proud of is, in fact, their greatest work, who is to say which one of is correct?

11

It not his back yard; it was a huge property in the country of Indiana, this part of which he rarely even visited. The apples would fall off the tree by the hundreds and just rot on the ground. No need for guilt there. We also picked blackberries on his property.

The example was given to establish the difference between organic theft (my term something any human would recognizes as theft/wrong), and de jure theft. Althought the concept of private property is just that–a concept–it is a natural one for the species to have. It is also a concept with a basis in concrete reality (if I bake a cake, it is recognized by all as mine). One should not conflate a violation of this concept with something abstract like ripping an N-SYNC MP3.

12

Of course not. It’s as inane as pondering whether brandishing a knife at somebody, violating the speed limit, illegally dumping used motor oil, or any other offense should be considered “stealing” or “theft”.

Stealing and theft are stealing and theft. Other crimes and torts are not stealing and theft. Duh.

13

Nope; the artists got paid when the CD was first sold (or so I presume – if not, that’s a separate issue that is not in any way affected by the later second-hand sale).

14

I believe that there are new laws that make it illegal (in some cases) to alter original work. This is something that many people cite as “copyright gone too far.” Do you think so too, or do you think that when someone buys an original work, they should not be “allowed” to do certain things to it?

Uh, no, not if it means that someone had to find a way to swipe the artist’s unpublished work from them (against their wishes) and make bootleg copies. No. The artist is entitled to some privacy, are they not?

I really don’t understand why you’d think you’d have any rights to see someone else’s unpublished works.

Does the public have a right to see every photograph you’ve taken, or every picture you’ve doodled, or every essay you’ve written, but have never chosen to publish?

I don’t know. It could be their best. Or it could be really embarassing and it could damage their reputation. Who knows? It still doesn’t mean you have a right to see it, if they’ve decided never to publish it. I don’t see how you think you have any rights over someone else’s private property.

I’m still pissed to hear that Jean Sibelius supposedly destroyed Symphony #8. But what can any of us do? Not have allowed him the choice over what to do with his work? Confiscated it from him and told him that he’s not allowed to do (or not do) with it what he sees fit? Would that be preferable?

15

I understand that you felt you did no harm and that the guy probably didn’t give a damn. But you still should have asked. That would have been the morally right thing to do. The trees were on his property. What you did was take something that did not belong to you, without permission. You should have asked for permission. If nothing else, it’s the polite and respectful thing to do—shows respect for other people’s private property.

16

IANAL, but I don’t think that the laws you’re talking about apply to someone buying a Van Gogh and torching it just for the hell of it. I certainly don’t think that artwork by the various masters (in any field) should be destroyed. We’ve lost too much art due to things like war as it is.

Well, the courts have ruled that celebrities are allowed to be subjected to greater indignaties that the rest of the population simply because they are celebrities and choose to put themselves in the public eye.

It depends upon who that person is. I learned the hard way, at the age of sixteen, that if you don’t want someone to know something, don’t commit it to paper.

But what about instances where the artist has published his/her work and then decided that they weren’t happy with it and pulled it from circulation? An example of this is the Star Wars holiday Special. Granted, it’s an unmitigated piece of crap, but considering George Lucas’s influence on pop culture, do you think that it’s right that we should be denied to see it in all it’s hideousness?

That, of course, is a dilemma. Kafka left orders in his will for certain writings of his to be destroyed, the executor of his estate had no intentions of doing that, but discovered that Kafka had already destroyed many of his writings before his death. We look upon the scraps that are left and can only wonder at the beauties which have been denied us.

17

Well, yeah. The artist is already long dead, and the buyer of the work probably knows that their name would be mud if they destroyed it. But do they “own” it, really, if they have limits on what they can do with it? (The original item, I mean.)

And like I said, there’s a law (I think it’s defined as “moral rights”) which indicates that even when an artist sells an original work, they still retain “moral rights” over it, and they can prohibit the buyer from doing certain things to the work. Do you think this law has gone too far, or do you think it’s just about right?

That’s not an answer to my question. If a public figure has created some unpublished work, like, say, a book or a painting, and it’s tucked away somewhere, because it’s like, unpublished, does that mean that it’s still okay for someone to go swipe it and make bootleg copies of it? (Even if they return the original?) Do celebrities have a right to privacy, a right to not publish something they’ve created, or not?

Another non-answer.

Yes or no: do you think that the public has a right to see every photo you’ve taken, every essay you’ve written, every picture you’ve drawn? Yes or no? It’s a really simple question.

Dodging the question. I asked you about unpublished works. UNPUBLISHED. Does the public have a right to see an artists’ unpublished works?

And it’s one you’ve avoided answering.

When Sibelius was alive, and was sitting on his unpublished 8th Symphony, did the public have a right to see it (or hear it, as the case may be)? Yes or no? And if you think that they had a right to see it, how do you think that they could have, or should have, taken it away from him? Told him that he wasn’t capable of making a logical decision about what works of his should or should not be published? Told him to fork over the symphony, or else? What?

And that sucks. Just like it sucks that Sibelius trashed Symphony #8. But what else can be done? Not allow him to possess his own works? Hover over him, to make sure he doesn’t destroy anything?

Once the artist is dead, it become a little different, because they are past caring. But I’m talking about while they’re still alive.

18

All the people gathered would not have a copy of the thing viewed. If you recorded the PPV and handed out a copy to everyone who came, then you would be in trouble.

You can’t keep the books.

This was allowed because the signal coming to your TV used to lose quality, copying to a tape caused another loss of quality, and then over time the tape itself would degrade. In the fully digital age, this ability is now problematic.

Essentially the idea on copyrights was to give the buyer a limited lease to freely enjoy movies/music that he purchased and to reasonably share (as in show, not give) with your friends…just so long as you don’t start printing off mass copies and shipping everything around for free. Which wasn’t too much of an issue due to quality loss and the fact that you would need to buy a thousand blank tapes and hand record onto them all. But had you done such, and started going around handing them out on street corners, you would have been in trouble. Converting this to a digital medium and posting it on the internet instead of standing at the corner of 1st and Jefferson handing out your dubbings doesn’t make any difference.

Revenue was stolen. And it was stolen from the company who put the DON’T DUB AND GIVE AWAY OR YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL text on the product.
While not every one of the people who received the copy might have bought the product, having received a free copy, they now have significantly less reason to (<-theoretically. But definitely less true in the analog age, where the dub might look like doodoo.)
The current counter-argument to this theory is that people who download free copies of stuff are more likely to go out and buy the product–since now they know whether or not they like it. But, regardless of whether it is wisest or not for distributors to allow unhindered dubbing, the instant they put “DON’T DUB AND GIVE AWAY OR YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL” on the cover and you buy it anyway, you are implicitly signing a contract that you should not break or else.
For a related example see the Straight Dope.

Theft.
If I open up shop selling movies, someone comes in, buys a copy of everything I sell on DVD, goes home and makes a digital copy of each one and makes a thousand copies, then stands in front of my shop handing out the copies for free before anyone come enter…well since I’m not the distributor, I can’t call copyright infringment, but I bet that I could get his ass on something and theft sounds pretty close.

But the main question for me is, why would anyone go through the hastle of doing such a thing? The only reasons I can think of are a.) communist ideals–which I think have fairly well been shown not to work, or b.) the dude is just a s***head messing around with my livelihood for a couple of laughs–not to mention playing on the weakness of the average person to always take a freebie.

So I mean, you can argue all you want that having copyrights is really more hinder than help in selling things. But until those copyrights are removed and you get the blessing to do whatever you will, so far as I can figure, if you’re posting this stuff on the internet then you’ve got no credibility so far as I am concerned.

19

In case I wasn’t clear, my point in asking in the OP was, if you told what you said above to any higher-up in the RIAA or MPAA, you’d get laughed or yelled at. Right now, they’re doing all they can to, at the very least, morally equate copyright infringement with theft, if not make them legally the same thing. And like Slashdot’s meme, I have no doubt that theirs is spreading too, perhaps even more successfully.

Oh, and in my OP, I meant to say, of course, that “no one’s, AFAIK, arguing that it’s NOT a crime…”

20

I honestly think the buyer should have limits. I can’t remember the name of the painting or the owner, but there was a Japanese collector who asked that one of his Van Gogh paintings be cremeted with him. That, IMHO, is utterly wrong.

I am not familiar with the details of the law, so I really can’t comment. I have purchased artwork from someone who, IMHO, should be considered a master in his field (automotive design). Before I commissioned that artwork, I specifically asked the artist about the rights. He stated that the only right he retained was to put his signature upon it. I could do whatever I wanted to do with the artwork, so long as I didn’t claim it as my own. This was four years ago, so I don’t know if the laws have changed or not. I do know that he was much more knowledgeable in the area of copyright law than I could ever hope to be.

While they’re alive, I think that they have the right to withhold publication. However, if a copy of the work leaks out I think that the artist is merely entitled to the royalties which they could normally expect from the publication of such work.

Yeah, sure. They’d be bored by 99.9999999999% of them, but then again, future historians could potentially find them of value. I have, in all honesty, seriously considered burying things like love letters I’ve recieved in time capsules because I’ve thought that they might be valuable to future historians.

Well, I’ve answered it, I think. But to me, the more important issue is the works which are emphemerially published. Things like TV episodes which air only once, books which are allowed to fall out of print and folks such as myself who might find interest in them are denied access to them.

I don’t know.

I agree with you there, but there are many who would not. See here for an example of what I’m talking about.