Whether or not copyright infringement is theft is a stupid semantic debate. It depends on how you define your terms. Whether or not you define it as technically being “theft”, it’s still illegal and immoral.
Either way, it goes against the argument that theft requries something being physically moved.
Question: when someone is convicted under that act, what would you say they’ve been convicted of?
Nothing new there, I’m afraid. She brings up the example of identity theft, ignoring the fact that something actually is lost when your identity is used without permission: your reputation, credit rating, etc. She conflates loss of actual value (stealing a 5 cent stick of gum) with loss of potential value (choosing not to buy something that you otherwise might’ve bought). She pouts about artists’ need to earn a living, ignoring the fact that the model of writing something on speculation, making copies, and selling the copies is a relatively new business model, and other possibilities still exist.
Finally, she justifies the existence of libraries by saying that every book in the library represents a sale, contradicting her earlier arguments about lost sales by ignoring that potential sales are still lost when people are able to read the book for free instead of buying their own copies.
Criminal copyright infringement.
Illegal, yes. Immoral, not so much.
So you believe authors, singers, actors, and programmers, among others, should be reduced to beggars in our society? That I should depend on the goodwill of people to make a living, just because what I produce isn’t material?
Nope. (I’m a programmer myself.)
I believe they should earn their living the same way as everyone else who performs a service: by finding someone who’ll pay them to do what they do. A barber doesn’t just make a box of haircuts and then try to sell them to customers; someone comes in, pays him to cut hair, and then leaves when the job is done. The barber doesn’t perform any work until someone comes in and pays him to work.
You should stop thinking of it as a product. Writing a book is a lot like performing research: your effort results in information that will be valuable to other people, but once it’s done, it’s done, and you don’t have to keep performing the same experiments or writing the same theories in order for people to continue benefitting from your work. You’re discovering/designing something, not manufacturing a product.
And no, you don’t have to depend on anyone’s goodwill. You just have to charge them for the work you do.
I didn’t respond to them because I thought they were a sideshow. It doesn’t matter what someone means when they shout “Stop, thief!” out their window. As for how I would interpret “something of mine was stolen today,” I regret to inform you that, being in academics, I would assume that the something was an idea. The thing is, it doesn’t matter what I would think. You have created a context which backs up your narrow definition of theft. In your world theft means “take something physical away from somebody”. You have not supplied any evidence to support this worldview aside from a new definition of “to steal” which is at odds with the definition of the word in English since… forever.
In addition, you quoted Washington legislation as backing you up, pointing out their specific mentions of “property” in their definition of theft. You completely ignored the rest of the phrase. That is, the WA legislation refers to “property or services”. Every time one is mentioned, the other is too. Fine, property definately gets a nod. What is property, in the legal sense? It includes both real and intellectual properties. Services is mentioned in the law you cited. If the situation is as you claim, then the Washington law is asinine because you can’t steal services, since you can’t fit them into your hand.
And here is where we’re talking past each other. You have decided that the reason that stealing is wrong is because you’re taking something away from somebody else and they don’t have it anymore. You have even gone so far as to say that sneaking into theaters is fine, because you didn’t deprive the studio of the price of your ticket, you simply didn’t give it to them. I suppose that if you buy a CD at the store, go home and copy it, and then return the CD that this is fine, too. I shall henceforth think of this as the Marshal McLuhan school of ownership. (“The medium is the message.”) Forgive me if I don’t see this catching on in the populace at large.
Now, back to the theater owner. They provide a service. The service isn’t keeping you inside of an air-conditioned box for 2 hours while you eat popcorn. The service they provide is to make available the latest and greatest in moving picture experience. That is, they play movies. When you go to the ticket office and put down your money, they give you a ticket which is good for one showing of the movie of your choice. The service they provide is the moviegoing experience.
Similarly, the service Amtrak provides is trains and busses from point A to point B. There are many costs associated with this service, some of which are miniscule when applied per capita. Regardless, if you sneak onto the Coast Starlight and ride to San Diego and don’t pay, you have obtained a service from Amtrak. In fact, the service which they provide. It doesn’t matter that the conductor can’t tell that there is an extra passenger on the train on account of your small stature and the large size of the train. It also doesn’t matter that the cost of operating the train is essentially the same whether you ride it or not. You availed yourself of the services of the train, but you did not pay for them. It looks to me like this falls under clause 1a of the law you cited.
Finally, people are not prosecuted for theft when they violate copyright, they are prosecuted for violating intellectual property law. This is, as Rysto says, a stupid semantic debate, which you have tried to “win” by defining theft so narrowly that it does not apply to things you apparently feel comfortable taking. More power to you, but don’t pat yourself on the back about converting me to your cause. So far all of your arguments have been unconvincing to me as they all flow from your (I find bizarre) definitions of words to meet your terms.
sinjin
Except for the fact that, if we were to make copyright infringement legal, there would be no reason for people to pay you for your program if they can copy it for free.
Fascinating. You realize you’re in the minority there, right?
No, actually, that’s just the most common definition.
I’m going to ignore this last sentence of yours because I have no idea what it’s referring to. I haven’t mentioned fitting anything into anyone’s hand.
But, interestingly enough, I found that “deprived” is defined nearby:
So perhaps someone did intend for that definition to apply to copyright infringement. If that’s the case, I have to wonder why it’s never been used - or at least why no one can cite an example of it.
Er, actually, I said sneaking into theaters isn’t fine. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that exchange already! I simply object to it on different grounds than you seem to.
Too late. I believe the populace at large already agrees with me that the reason stealing is wrong is that it deprives the owner of his property.
If so, then it must be because you’ve deprived (or at least intended to deprive) Amtrak of the service they provide. That is, they’ve lost something, thanks to your actions. Depriving them of the service they provide, which is what the law mentions, is not the same as depriving them of the potential money you might have given them.
Yes, it is a stupid semantic debate, but I don’t think my position is the stupid one. There’s a perfectly good, uncontroversial term for copyright infringement. I’m not the one insisting on using an emotionally loaded phrase to describe the act of copying, and insisting that such use is correct in a context where it isn’t.
Well, considering that those arguments have been about terminology, not morality, you shouldn’t be surprised.
Correct, but it’s not a problem. Did you skip over my entire response to you except for that last line?
The work I do, as a programmer, is writing code. My work is not making copies; I can just put the file on a web site and let people make their own copies, or I can train a monkey to work a CD duplicator.
If someone wants to pay me for my work, they might call me up and say “Hey Mr2001, I have a program here and I want you to make these changes to it.” I’d respond by giving them a quote. If they’re happy with that quote, I’d start coding and get paid according to whatever terms we work out. If not, they’d go somewhere else and I’d spend my time on something else. This is a model that’s already in common use.
For projects so big that one customer couldn’t afford to pay me by himself, he (or I) would have to find a bigger audience who could pool their money to pay me. Say you’ve got some great new idea for a program. You’re only willing to pay $200 for it, but I’d need at least $20,000 for all the time it’d take me to write it. Solution: find 100 people who are each willing to pay $200, or 1000 people who are each willing to pay $20, or whatever. Once I know I’m going to get paid a fair value for my time, I start work, and once I’m done, I collect the money and move on to something else. I don’t care who makes their own copies at that point, because I’ve already been paid for the work I did, and I’m not in the business of making copies.
Now, you might ask, why would anyone pay the $20 if they know they can just get a copy for free once it’s done? Because they know that if no one pays, it’ll never get written, and they’ll never have a copy. Their payment is basically insurance against the possibility that the software won’t be written, and their willingness to make that payment depends on how much they value the ability to use that software someday.
If there aren’t enough people who care strongly enough about the project that they’re willing to pay for it, then it won’t get done, but I won’t have to do the work either - I’ve lost nothing and wasted hardly any time. Compare that to today’s music industry, for example, where an artist records an album without knowing how well it’ll sell. He gets an advance against royalties that may never materialize, and if he underestimates his audience, he ends up owing money, so he would’ve been better off not recording it in the first place.
Ok, I give up. You should copy music. It’s not really stealing because you don’t take anything physical. Have fun with that.
This runs into the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. Generally, people will act selfishly even if cooperation will improve the condition of society, because for each individual person, acting selfishly leads to a better outcome for them, in the short run. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma writ large.
An interesting objection in theory, but in the real world, this model works. Political candidates are able to raise millions of dollars through small contributions - and the contributors don’t even get their money back if their guy doesn’t win! Certainly, everyone’s short term outcome would be better if they held on to their money, and an individual $20 isn’t really going to have much effect on the outcome of the election… but people donate anyway. (I half-seriously chalk it up to the thermometer graph’s motivating effect. Everyone wants to be the person who pushes it over the finish line.)
I believe those who agree with you have a vested interest in defending P2P filesharing. You have a tenous argument and it’s only going to get more so as the authorities–the state of Ohio, for exampe–expand their legal definition of theft.
Which has nothing to do with the subject at hand. You are talking about a situation where people donate money in the hope that it will produce a positive outcome for themselves. Everyone else is talking about a situation where people withhold money in order to better themselves at the expense of society. The two situations are by no means analogous.
Just a quick response from someone very much committed to intellectual property rights.
I written four novels (haven’t published a one yet, but maybe someday …) and nothing would enrage me more than to have a novel published, and see some jerkoff photocopying the thing onto the internet for everyone to read for free. I worked hard on that novel, damnit – I’ve put years of work into them. If you enjoy reading my novel, that’s great! Now it’s payday for me.
Yep, copying CDs, DVDs, tapes … anything. It’s theft. Period. The wealth of the publisher or the artist or the studio are irrelevant. They do their work for the express purpose of getting paid for it. You take that work and don’t pay for it, that’s theft. There’s no moral reletavism involved here. And that’s no a moral absolute, that’s a self-evident truth.
Just as I believe those who agree with you have a vested interest in opposing it.
As far as I can tell, they are. The two groups of people you mention can, and do, coexist in the same situation.
People who care strongly about the outcome, whether it’s an album getting released or a candidate getting elected, will pay for it. People who don’t care strongly enough won’t pay, even if they hope that the outcome will eventually happen and lead to a benefit for themselves. Someone who chooses not to send $50 to the Rosie O’Donnell campaign (but still wants Rosie to win) is in the same boat as someone who chooses not to send $50 to fund production of the new Britney Spears album (but still wants to hear it when it’s done), right?
I’m not seeing the difference. Can you explain further?
Sorry, but just because you do something in the hopes of getting paid for it doesn’t obligate anyone else to pay you. Startup businesses fail every day because the work they do for the express purpose of getting paid doesn’t result in their getting paid.
Doing all the work up front, before you know whether you’ll have enough of a paying audience to compensate you for that work, is just a form of gambling. When you lose the bet, that’s not theft, it’s an expected outcome.
So, then, Mr. 2001, would it be fair to say that you believe the business model involved in remuneration of all creators of “intellectual property” (artists, authors, inventors, etc.) should not one based on royalties, but more along the lines of so-called *“work-for-hire”, * wherein an up-front fee-for-service is paid to create Piece-of-Information X, and then once PoI X is “sold” the author retains no right whatsoever as to what is done with it? Only, that to be consistent, this would go on all the way down the chain of distribution – as it stands now, if you write something as work-for-hire, it in turn DOES become “owned” by whoever you wrote it for and they defend their “right” to use it and distribute it.
You write code, and it’s sold and they pay you and you don’t care what happens next:
You got yours. Now, the folks who commissioned that program from you – are they just a spontaneous anarcho-coop collective of 999 folks who sent guy #1 $20 a piece just as an act of faith in a still-unwritten piece of software, or rather is it guy #1 determining he has the potential to make 1000 $20 sales to cover your fee, if the program delivers the right performance?
…and would he be interested in having the next 9,000 folks who use the program ALSO send him $20 a pop? Because in the absence of enforceable IP rights to resell your work, he will absolutely have to depend on those first 999 committing and upfronting the $19,980 before he bothers to disturb you.
That’s right, you don’t care about* that* as long as you get your $20K – but they have to come from somewhere.
But doesn’t that make ANY start-up business a form of gambling, considering that a lot of the work and expenditure HAS to be done up-front before a single sale is made? For instance:
And a business owner makes investments in capital, labor and inventory, against sales that may never materialize, and if he underestimates his market, ends up broke, too – only instead of debt to a publisher he has debt to the banks. The A&R people at the record company or the editors at the publishing house are expected to do for the author/performer with a sample chapter or demo tape, what the bank does for the start-up owner with a business plan: evaluate if this has any chance for ROI before anyone sinks a million dollars and a year’s work into it. (Unless, that is, start-up businesses should only be started with “crazy money” capital that you can afford to burn.) I am pretty damn certain that NOBODY in their right mind is to offer me a million-dollar advance on anything I write or draw any time in the near future, or loan me a million for a small business, unless they figure I may have a hit in my hands.
(OTOH, where do I send $50 to PREVENT the release of another Britney Spears album?)
An all-work-for-hire model would transfer all the rights and all the risks (and of course, all the potential for a big payoff if the program/album/book becomes the next Big Hit) from the creator to the distributor/financer, but just how would it be worth *THEIR * while if they cannot have at least some level of control of distribution for a time, in order to recover investment and make their profit?
Correct; it’d be more like work-for-hire than working for royalties, but not quite the same. In my model, there’d be no transfer of ownership or other rights, because there’d be no exclusive distribution rights in the first place - the public would be able to redistribute Britney’s new CD just as they can already redistribute Beethoven’s sheet music.
Closer to the former. (There’s nothing stopping guy #1 from funding the production out of his own pocket and selling copies later, of course, but he’d be a fool to do that.)
But it wouldn’t have to be a movement arising spontaneously out of nowhere. Guy #1 can organize the group himself by finding communities of people who use similar software or work in fields where the software would be useful. He can set up the payment systems to collect the money, and to issue refunds in case he never reaches the $20,000 total, and then take a cut for his effort.
It wouldn’t have to be led by individuals, reinventing the process for each project, either. Look at eBay, a company that gives sellers a way to list things they have for sale, buyers a way to bid on things they want, and both a framework for transferring money and resolving disputes, but doesn’t actually own the merchandise at any point. Something similar could be developed for connecting programmers (or other artists) with an audience, keeping track of payment, and making completed work available to the public. It could turn a profit from providing basically the same value to all parties that today’s record industry does, but without needing any control over distribution.
Yes. I would caution anyone looking to start a new business that if he wants guaranteed income, he should try something else. That’s doubly true if what the start-up intends to provide is something that its competitors–or its would-be customers–will be able to make less expensively by themselves, once the start-up has done the initial work.
They’re supposed to, yes, but a lot of artists still don’t ever see royalties.
It wouldn’t. The model of investing in production up front, then recouping the investment by selling copies, wouldn’t work no matter who paid for the investment (and only works today because it’s propped up by increasingly invasive laws which attempt to control distribution).
But, as you noted above, that’s not the model I’ve proposed. In my model, there are no rights to be transferred from the creator to the distributor/financer, because no one has control over distribution. There is no investment to be recovered later; there’s only direct payment for the creator’s services.
First of all, let me agree that piracy is a form of theft and morally wrong. The problem as I see it is: who is really being hurt?
The RIAA is the main force behind these laws and lawsuits. Why, because every song you pirate means less money their corporate members (not necessarily artists) get.
These are the same companies that have historically screwed their artist out of their fair share of royalties. Whether through gross vs. net numbers manipulation (we sold a million copies of your new album butony made $1.09 net) or the collusion to keep the “cost” high (it cost EVERY company exactly $8.66 to make a CD?) or outright stealing of their intellecual property (talk to Barry Gordie at Motown how he got so rich), the record companies have long shown that they do not have their artists’ best interests at heart (despite what their anti-piracy ads say).
So music piracy really hurts other thieves. Interesting.
Hmmm… so no “creative” work could ever be counted upon to provide a steady stream of residual income – the profit-driven creator would create exclusively on-demand whenever a sufficiently large “demand pool” arose, everyone else would create just “for the love of art”?
Couple of doubts I have about the “demand pool” model are, first, how likely is it that 1,000 people will themselves gamble upfront $20 sight-unseen sola fide for you to create a program/book/album (you may instead find you need to get 40,000 to front $1 apiece on condition of getting 50 cents back if they don’t like it); and secondly, the same problem as there is with classic capitalist or classic socialist models – it sort of presumes that everyone, or at least enough people, will act rationally with your premise as an axiom:
I suppose the big money in your economy will go to those who do tech support for the free software 
BTW, and touching on SaintCad’s latest, I am as much in favor of cutting out leeching middlemen as anyone else (Jack Valenti is more desperately deserving of a good reaming than anyone I can imagine), but then we’re back at a parallel to the thread subject: Middlemen who DO rip off creators’ rightful proceeds ARE either “cheating” or “stealing” or “defrauding” or “misappropriating” or whatever the term-of-art you want to use, the services of a creator who had a rightful claim to remuneration – the middlemen used legal trickery to usurp a right that did exist under that same law. (BTW, this is not the same thing as the example previously discussed, wherein the artist is produced/published legitimately, but the album/book/movie just bites the big one on the market and he’s left holding the bag.) I also feel the copyright term has been extended well beyond what makes it “useful for the promotion of creative work”.
However, unfair application of IP rights, including the hyperextension of copyright/intellectual property for corporate benefit (including not just the virtual closing of the Public Domain but also “patent-sitting” – e.g. Blackberry – and abusive DRM a-la Sony rootkits) are one part of the issue; the very existence of some forms of private intellectual property (not just patents and royalties but also the so-called “moral rights” i.e. right to deny use regardless of terms) are another part, pretty much unabolishable as long as there exists a capitalistic market model. Though related, they are not necessarily an all-or-nothing scheme.
Thus IMO what is in order is reasonable IP rights to be centered on securing the fair remuneration of the the work of the creators/innovators, which DOES retain some degree of exclusivity and the potential to incur market/price risks to seek greater returns.