And the first person to mention something involving dildos gets a raspberry;)
You seem to be hung up on the fact that the vendor hasn’t physically transferred any possession from them to you. But this is also the case if you’ve legally purchased and downloaded the software. But what’s happened is that you have denied them revenue, while gaining a commensurate benefit from having and using or selling the software. They have a legal right to that revenue, you don’t have a legal right to own the product. So indirectly, you have stolen from that company. It is theft in both the legal and moral sense when you think about the value that is lost by the company and gained by you.
Besides revenue, there are other moral offenses such as theft of intellectual property where there is gray area and more room for argument. But financially speaking, it is unambiguously theft. Some people console themselves by thinking that Bill Gates can afford to lose the money, but you are also unquestionably taking bread off of a working programmer’s table.
No, you don’t get it. Copyright infringement most definitely is theft and stealing. It is (or can be depending upon circumstances) both a civil crime and a criminal offense.
I know that certain Dopers here (in the various threads on the subject, not necessarily this one) do argue that it is not theft, but not the ones who understand anything about the law.
Wrong again. The magnitude of the offense may result in different penalties, and different portions of the statutes may apply (again, civil vs. criminal) so in that sense there may be different answers, but the basic act is always the theft of intellectual property. You can have first class or second class or other types of murders, but they are all crimes of murder nevertheless.
Copyright infringement is theft. One is a subset of the other.
Arguing any other position can be a political statement or ignorance or simple self-interest, but it is not current law.
All right. Let’s say I discover a diamond mine in my back yard, and I give away all the diamonds for free simply because I hate diamonds and anyone who tries to sell them. Does that make me a thief for devaluing everyone else’s diamonds? I don’t think so.
Of course not, but that’s because the definition of “stolen” doesn’t rest on whether you have rights to the stolen item.
Adult citizens who are not felons have the right to vote. If I go to vote, but an evil party operative stops me at the door, does that mean I’ve lost the right? If a file a complaint, will the judge say “Sorry, you clearly don’t have the right to vote, because this thug is preventing you from voting”? Again, I don’t think so. I still have the right whether someone is violating it or not; it just isn’t doing anything for me if they are.
Lying about the quality of goods someone is offering for sale.
Furthermore, even if there were no immoral acts in relation to physical property that don’t involve depriving the owner, it doesn’t follow that there’d be no such acts in relation to intangible property, which as we know is pretty hard to deprive anyone of anyway.
I think you have that backwards. Care to cite any law that defines copyright infringement as theft? Any example of someone being found guilty of theft when he had only violated copyright? And if those who “understand anything about the law” think it’s theft, why don’t the laws covering stolen property apply to unauthorized copies (as in Dowling v. United States, in which the Supreme Court found that infringement does not “easily equate” to theft and therefore transporting bootleg records is not trafficking in stolen property)?
Nonsense. Current law in the United States does not define copyright infringement as theft. They are disjoint sets.
Er… maybe this is a nitpick, but no value is lost by the company. In theft, the thief gains what the victim loses. In infringement, the copier gains the value that is created by his act of copying, and the victim simply fails to gain along with him.
The largest single organized religious denomination has a different take on THAT. According to the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, part 3, Section 2, Article 7, “Thou shalt not steal” covers not only direct subtraction of wealth (“theft”), but ALSO passive deprivation of wealth such as fraud, failure to deliver the just returns on the labor of others, not giving back to society your fair share, and even abusively rendering common resources unusable.
Notice, in the case of actual physical goods there is a requirement of restitution of the actual goods or their value; in other cases, “reparations”.
errata: in my above post, insert “or indirect/nonimmediate” after “passive”.
However, to be fair, it IS true that in the strictly legal (civil/criminal) sense, the crime identified in Penal Codes with the word “theft” has been usually defined as that modality of misappropriation which involves actual subtraction of another person’s material wealth. Other modalities get qualifiers tacked on to it.
In some jurisdictions, such as where I live, the statutes do not define a crime of “theft”, but rather one of “illegal appropriation” which includes the modalities of traditional grand/petty “theft” as well as others and both tangible and intangible goods.
I know you keep debating the morality of copyright infringement in GD. This is GQ, however, and we should not be debating it here. Infringement is a crime.
If you go to the Copyright Law, you’ll find reference to the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, Pub. L. No. 105-147, 111 Stat. 2678, enacted December 16, 1997.
There is also the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, Pub. L. No. 106-160, 113 Stat 1774, (amending chapter 5 of title 17 of the United States Code to increase statutory damages for copyright infringement), enacted December 9, 1999.
You may also want to examine
Appendix VII
Selected Provisions of the U.S. Code Relating to Copyright
Title 18 — Crimes and Criminal Procedure
Part I — Crimes
Chapter 113 — Stolen Property
No morality need be debated here. It’s a crime.
No, and no one is suggesting to the contrary. You’re a programmer. You understand formal logic.
The proposition under discussion is:
-
Devaluing another's property + other circumstances = immorality
No matter how many examples you give that show conclusively that:
-
Devaluing another's property (simpliciter) does not = immorality
you will not disprove the proposition.
Yes it does. Theft is taking of another’s property. If what you take isn’t another’s property, it’s not theft.
If you do take another’s property, you have committed theft, no matter what rights the owner may still have.
A good illustration of why you are wrong. If you get to the court before the election is over, the court will recognise your right to vote and make orders to ensure you can exercise it. Just as if you knew someone was going to infringe your copyright you could get an order stopping them from doing so.
But after the fact, after the election is all over, the judge would precisely say you have lost your right to vote because the election is all over. He might provide you with some other remedy as recompense, but the right to vote would by then be gone, gone, gone. Just the same, if someone had already infringed your copyright, the judge would not affirm your exclusive right to make copies of the relevant work (an affirmation as useful as tits on a bull) because he would recognise that your rights in this respect were now only good in name. He would instead give you an alternate remedy to recompense for the loss of your right.
Which has the effect of permanently depriving someone of the price they will pay for the goods.
So, to recap and get back to the OP, we see that the immorality is dependant upon deprivation. There is therefore no real need for a term that describes the form of immorality that might occur if there was immorality but no deprivation.
Actually, I think I’ve missed your point in one respect. Let’s try again:
So whether we are talking about a car or copyright, when it’s been taken you no longer have it. You may have rights to get it back, you may have rights to recompense, but you don’t have it. You don’t “have” your car after it’s been stolen just because you have a right to criminal compensation. You don’t “have” an exclusive right to copy something after it’s been copied by others willy nilly just because you have a right to civil damages.
Then perhaps you can explain why causing “loss of value due to property right infringement” is immoral, but simply causing loss of value is not, if the property right infringement itself is not enough to make the act immoral (since if it were, the loss of value would be irrelevant to the question of morality).
Not necessarily: the lie itself is immoral whether it’s positive or negative, and whether or not anyone actually falls for it. And furthermore, if your lie convinces someone not to buy a product, the seller still isn’t deprived of anything he ever had a right to in the first place.
It’s a shame that the same word refers to both taking a copy and taking something away from its owner, and the same word refers to both depriving someone of their property and depriving them of something they hoped to receive, because I think those key distinctions are getting lost here.
It reminds me of a book I read years ago about the independance movement in India. Apparently, colonial Britain had “salt laws,” which basically said you had to buy salt from the British government. It was illegal to go down to the ocean and just make your own salt.
So in colonial India, some people may have considered it stealing to take salt from the ocean. After all, you are breaking the law and arguably depriving the British government of some kind of expentancy of revenue.
It’s immoral because the means of causing the loss of value to me is by your exercise of my exclusive legal property right.
I suppose so. But nonetheless, the OP is puzzled by the lack of any suitable word to describe the type of minor immorality you describe. The reason there isn’t such a word in the context of copyright infringement is that where there is copyright infringement, there is property deprivation. As there is property deprivation, copyright infringement falls into the same basket of immorality as theft, and so there is no need to have a separate word for it.
Why? Have a look at the definition of “stealing” from Wikipedia, link above.
So then by that logic, isn’t it immoral whether or not there’s a loss of value? Why are we talking about the loss of value at all, if that isn’t the reason why it’s immoral?
I don’t understand your point. Do you believe that copyright infringement is stealing?
If someone writes a book or makes a movie or draws a picture, it’s theirs.
If someone else takes it and sells it, it’s theft. It didn’t belong to them, they didn’t create it. They stole it from the person who did.
You think theft is one dimensional, as in an object, not an idea. If it isn’t here, it must be there. If it’s stolen it must be somewhere else. It can only be theft if it is a physical entity that is moved from one place to another. That’s too limited a scope. One can steal an idea, an intellectual property just as much as one can steal an object. A copyright gives the idea physical substance. If one breaches the copyright, one has taken the idea from the originator and moved it to where it doesn’t belong.
If it’s replicated without permission, it’s somewhere it isn’t supposed to be. And if it’s being sold by someone other than the rightful owner, the thief is pocketing the proceeds, not the creator. How can you not see this is theft?
I do. Copyright infringement is stealing, is theft, is a crime. As I said earlier, though certain Dopers argue against this, there is no true debate here, merely sophistry.
And why are we debating this in GQ?
No one is claiming it isn’t.
So your evidence is the titles of these acts?
I’m afraid that doesn’t work; violating the USA Patriot Act doesn’t make you unpatriotic. The title is for convenience and marketing.
I assume you’re referring to this section, “Criminal infringement of a copyright”. Despite the chapter’s title, the fact remains that the term “stolen” in law does not apply to unauthorized copies. Again, see Dowling v. United States.
I don’t know much about law, but it seems to me that those who are arguing that copyright infringement is theft in this thread do so mostly for the reason jackdavinci mentioned in post 5, to impress on us all that it is immoral and illegal, and that we shouldn’t do it. Well, I know it’s immoral and illegal. And I don’t think anyone here claims otherwise. But I don’t think that, for example, if I download a song from the Internet without permission from the copyright holder, I can be legally charged with “theft”. What I would be charged with would probably sound like “copyright infringement”. (Like Mr2001, I also don’t believe names of laws mean anything; there are people who are trying to equate copyright infringement with theft but it doesn’t mean they are equal legally or even morally.)
Just to help us brainstorm, what would be the “traditional” moral categories? Maybe we can look at them and then try to figure out if copyright infringement fits in one of them, or if it just doesn’t translate easily to traditional moral offenses.