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Comment by calvins | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that we should be more careful with the words we use. Saying that copyright infringement is theft is just sloppy thinking, and is likely to confuse the issue and lead to even more sloppy and confused thinking.

You might argue that both are wrong, that both are illegal, or whatever. Fine. Just don't say they're the same thing, because they're not.

Redefining words for purposes of brainwashing consumers is propaganda pure and simple, even if you believe that copyright infringement is wrong and should be illegal.

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Well put! I would have written much the same thing had you not beaten me to it, and will only add that sloppy thinking about this question isn't purely an academic concern: among other things, it leads to bad laws with difficult to foresee, but often undesirable, consequences.

It's equally bad to elevate a semantic argument so you can use it as a straw man, as you implicitly do with the word "even" in the sentence "even if you believe copyright infringement is wrong".

And face it, the Free Culture side of this debate uses that tactic a lot. "Copying isn't piracy! Pirates kill people! Abolish copyright!"

It's not a semantic argument. The syllogism Matt is using, implicitly, is:

He talks about stealing songs and says, more or less, "Well, you can argue all you want, but downloading a song is stealing and stealing is wrong."

No, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. The two are distinct along legal, historical, and moral dimensions.

Demonstrate how this isn't a semantic argument? People aren't "brainwashed" into thinking copyright infringement is wrong. Copyright infringement is intuitively wrong.

Thou shalt not copy this scroll without the author's permission? I don't buy it and it doesn't hold ground historically.

Did people not intuit it before the 18th century? It took over 300 years from the invention of the printing press for modern copyright law to form.

See Section I, Article 8 is the US Constitution, for example, where Congress gets its authority to establish copyright. Why do they have that authority? To promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Copyright law is a fundamentally different creature than the criminal law that governs theft and, IMO, this is just a reflection of their differing moral status in society.

You still haven't rescued this from semantics. What's intuitively wrong is freeloading. Tax evasion is a criminal offense, even though it too is simply an example of freeloading.

I'm not sure what there is to rescue. I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Matt's argument, however implicit, was that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft. It's not, nor has it ever been and therefore his argument is fallacious.

If that's a semantic argument then I guess I'll have to live with that.

What are these semantic arguments you're so worried about, exactly? The ones ones that use words?

Why is freeloading wrong? Or tax evasion, for that matter?

In any case, here is the argument. Theft is wrong because it violates the individual right of the property owner.

Copyright exists to provide a temporary incentive for content creators to continue producing. It's not a natural right, it's a collective bargain between the public and content producers. "You get a 14 year monopoly to make some money, please continue writing songs."

That bargain was broken a long time ago (roughly Mickey Mouse invention date + 14 years).

I don't know if I can agree that copyright infringement is intuitively wrong as my own intuition tells me the exact opposite: Legal enforcement of an artificial scarcity on our cultural and intellectual artifacts so that a minority of individuals can personally benefit is morally incorrect.

Even if there was broad consensus that copyright infringement is 'intuitively wrong', intuition has a rather spotty track record for producing sensible normative ethical guidelines. Consider slavery, for example. It used to be so 'intuitive' that owning other humans as property was not morally problematic.

I made no such syllogism. You did. Whether or not it's legally defined as theft is irrelevant to the overall article and not even worth mentioning.

You specifically equated the "theft" of a song with the theft of a car, but your definition of theft ignores the difference between theft and copyright infringement. These are distinct concepts, legally, historically, and philosophically.

Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying, but it sounded like you were arguing that there's a moral force behind copyright and that it rests in its similarity to theft.

I'll update my article accordingly.

I equated them only in the sense that they are both natural human behaviors. You could just as easily replace it with "piracy of a song", and the argument would have been the same.

The choice of words is very important and not trivial in the least. Notice how you just said "piracy of a song", when in fact the copying of a song is not "piracy" which equates to robbery aka theft.

The words we choose are very important when discussing ideas, just ask the republicans who have used this technique for years to sway the public to their side on various social and political matters (death tx vs. estate tax being one example).

If the people who engage in it call it theft or piracy, because they think they are stealing, then it's morally equivalent.

I agree with you about choosing words carefully, but either choice doesn't change the article. In context, the semantics were irrelevant.

The people who engage in it don't call it theft or piracy. At least not any of the ones I know.

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