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Comment by Mindwipe | Hacker News Reader

> In other words, let's say you're my friend. You come in to my room, I leave my journal entries open and you surreptitiously copy them while I'm getting coffee for us. You leave the journal undamaged and make your duplicates public. The only harm you did was cause me to not trust you personally and no longer allow you in my home.

That's not even remotely true (incidentally this would be illegal in the UK and a court would grant an injunction on publication under breach of confidence, precisely because it's such a shitty thing to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_confidence_in_Englis...).

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> That's not even remotely true (incidentally this would be illegal in the UK and a court would grant an injunction on publication under breach of confidence, precisely because it's such a shitty thing to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_confidence_in_Englis...).

Yes but they would not charge you with theft. Which includes "the intention to permanently deprive"...

Copying someone's private data is not theft. That doesn't mean that it is morally or legally OK (it's not - it's another crime). It just means that theft is a specific crime based on taking fungible chattel with the intent to not give it back.

So you narrowly redefine theft to not include intellectual property or any non-physical good.

IANAL - but I don't think this would fly in any jurisdiction anywhere. Is this definition specific to a country whose laws I'm not familiar with?

> So you narrowly redefine theft to not include intellectual property or any non-physical good.

Theft in law generally only applies to tangible personal property, not intangible personally property and not real property. That's not a redefinition, just the long-existigng definition.

Did you plug "intellectual property theft" into Google before you came to this conclusion?

Try it and look at laws vs non-laws.

No I apply the actual definition of theft....

I never said that copyright infringement or copying and publishing personal data is OK morally or legally. I just said that they are different crimes.

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