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Comment by kruczek | Hacker News Reader

This analogy is also wrong, exactly for the reason that IP is not a physical thing that can be taken - it can only be copied.

Yes, by leaving $0.40, I would be stealing $0.59 of foregone revenue, but that is because the shop doesn't have that candy bar anymore and can't sell it. In case of IP, even if I pirate it, you can still sell it to other people.

Of course you probably can't sell it to me anymore and that may be lost revenue, but it depends if I would be actually willing and able to buy that IP otherwise. And of course it may cause more competition to appear, which will negatively affect your business.

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> Of course you probably can't sell it to me anymore and that may be lost revenue

Yes, this is the point.

> but it depends if I would be actually willing and able to buy that IP otherwise

I'm not entitled to your money, of course, but in exactly the same way, you're not entitled to my IP (or my candy bar).

> In case of IP, even if I pirate it, you can still sell it to other people.

If everyone followed your logic, no I couldn't.

Your candybar arguement is absurd because you can't sell ip direct to consumers. You could manufacture a product that uses it or sell access via some supply limiting portal, but that is much different than actually selling ip.

Additionally it's not inventory because it is not finite. There is a distinction made by GAAP regarding valuation of tangible vs intangible assets because it is much more complex process to valuate intangible assets such as ip.

Physical inventory and IP are analogous in that they are both types of property that their owner intends to use to generate revenue (and hopefully profit).

> it is much more complex process to valuate intangible assets such as ip.

Please note that my argument above assigns a value of $0.00 to the IP itself.

Even at that valuation, you can still commit theft by robbing me of the opportunity to use that IP to generate revenue. By analogy: when you steal a TV, you are charged on the retail price of the TV (the amount you should have paid for it), not the wholesale price (the amount the store paid for it).

Your intention is irrelevant, limiting your opportunity is not theft. You're using that analogy as an emotional appeal to present the ip holder as a victim.

Any competitor could limit your opportunity by releasing a functionally similar non infringing product. Would you choose the word 'robbing' in that circumstance?

One would have to use your ip to create a competing product before it would even be copyright infringement, and it still wouldn't be theft since you cannot steal somthing intangible since by definition it only exists as an abstraction which is not the same as zero valued tangible inventory.

I think you need to go back up and carefully read from my first post. I'm not talking about competitive markets in general, I'm talking about a specific transaction where you end up with a product I'm selling, but I don't end up with the revenue I was asking for that product.

As an exercise: walk into Best Buy and pick up a $1,000 TV. On the way out, hand the cashier a check for the wholesale price of that TV. Have you just committed theft? And if so, what specifically have you stolen? You haven't deprived them of the TV itself, since you reimbursed them fully for that.

Allow me to present an intangible analogy to illustrate... If I see a chair at ikea and they own a patent on it and I go home and make a chair based on their ip, but don't commercially manufacture and distribute it then did I steal a chair? If it is stolen what have I stolen exactly?

I guess my point is that my point is that ip is a liscense to manufacture and/or distribute rather than a total monopoly on the idea or demand for the product.

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