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Comment by rwl | Hacker News Reader

This illustrates perfectly why sharing software shouldn't be called "piracy" or "stealing." These terms are simply inappropriate for software, movies, music, and other works that can be copied for almost zero cost.

When real pirates steal real goods, their owner doesn't have them anymore, and can't benefit from them anymore. They don't double their sales, because there's fewer things left to sell. Software isn't like that: you just make another copy for the next paying user. This is true whether your software is proprietary or free.

Comparing people who share your software with others to pirates means you are criminalizing the folks who are doing your marketing for you.

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Calling it marketing doesn't make it so. Depriving the owner of their revenue is theft just as much as deciding to occupy a seat on a train without paying is depriving the train operator of revenue and is theft, claiming that the seat is unused or that you doing marketing is bogus. You are depriving them of revenue and are committing theft. If the term of usage is pay to use then not paying is stealing, if you don't like it then don't use it.

Oh please! Copying something is not theft or stealing, either legally, ethically, or physically.

You can argue about the economic effects, but at least stop using misleading terms -- it does not help anyone understand anything.

Unless the creator has explictly granted you the right to copy, copying is certainly theft in the legal sense and often in the ethical sense.

Whether or not you agree with the legality of it is irrelevant, the fact is that it's illegal for you to make copies of software that you are not authorized to copy.

Ethically, it's not fair to the people who build these apps to be deprived of the revenue they would earn from your usage of it.

They don't have a right to your money, but then, you don't have a right to their software either.

Your second, third, and fourth sentences do not support your first. Copying software without paying for it (when the author has not licensed you to do so) is arguably immoral, often unethical, and nearly always illegal...

...but the claim of the gp was that it is not "theft" as such. Copying something from someone and taking something away from someone are not the same.

Drawing a definitional distinction there helps us to have a meaningful debate about the moral, ethical, and legal dimensions; the only benefit to muddying the distinction is as a rhetorical tactic to confuse the issues.

The law recognizes unauthorized copying as stealing of intellectual property. This is not difficult to understand.

Don't be so simplistic, that's like saying that stealing a car isn't theft because it is just driving and anyway you are just moving it somewhere else. The economic consequences of copying are a deprival of revenue, that is tantamount to theft and 'theft' is a good word to describe it.

What really ticks me off about thieves is how they try to quibble over definitions as though that changed the consequences. Making an unauthorised copy of something that is supplied for money IS theft.

That is sheer propagandist nonsense. You do recognise the basic unassailable physical difference between copying something and removing it, don't you? The differences of economics follow from the differences in physical fact.

Consider this quote from Landes and Posner -- one of the primary orthodox authorities on the matter:

"Copyright protection -- the right of the copyright's owner to prevent others from making copies -- trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law."

Is that how physical goods, and theft, are understood? No. To say there is a tradeoff is to say both are good: that is, copying is good.

Read it: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html -- and learn something.

I think the people who act like copyright infringement of whole works are deluding themselves as to it's harmless nature, but people overwrought about the issue and trying to map it onto the real world crime of theft are not helping the situation.

Coming up with a new name that's not theft is probably a good idea, then we can mete the appropriate opprobrium upon that word instead of the too much of theft and the not enough of copyright infringement. This is definitely a goldilocks issue.

"Coming up with a new name that's not theft is probably a good idea, then we can mete the appropriate opprobrium upon that word instead of the too much of theft and the not enough of copyright infringement. This is definitely a goldilocks issue."

I don't think it has anything to do with theft, it has to do with painting piracy in a bad light.

Piracy is again reusing a word. Piracy is the act of taking over a seagoing vessel.

By overloading it, you get past connotations of the old word

Really? I think it is a case of mapping onto the most obvious existing word. When you end up with something you did not pay for, most people would assume you had "stolen" it.

The fact the metaphor doesn't line up perfectly is a problem, but it is the closest word I can think of that most people would understand.

The issue is that there should likely be different amounts of "bad" meted out to the two instances, and using the same word for both confuses that issue a great deal.

I mean, by what you're saying, you can call killing a pig for meat murder as that's what we kill it what Damer did it.

I'm contending we should have two words similar to how for killing we have "Slaughter" (Implies animals and farming for food), and "Murder" (Implies purposeful taking of a human life except for certain animal rights/vegan groups trying to use the overloaded meaning).

Perhaps "Fringing"? "Freeping"? "Warezing"? etc.

> Depriving the owner of their revenue is theft

That doesn't make any sense. You can't deprive someone of revenue, because (at least given a few assumptions of non-totalitarianism) nothing guarantees that a thing will produce revenue. Owners don't have a "right" to revenue, especially in a capitalist economy.

> ...just as much as deciding to occupy a seat on a train without paying is depriving the train operator of revenue and is theft, claiming that the seat is unused or that you doing marketing is bogus

No, the problem with taking an unused seat on a train is not that you are "depriving the train operator of revenue." The problem is that the seat is a physical good, and once you take it, the train operator no longer has it. You have taken the seat from them (not the "potential revenue") -- and thus prevented them from selling it to a paying customer, or doing whatever else they wanted to do with it.

To see this more clearly, note that it would be wrong for you to take a physical good from someone regardless of whether they planned to sell it or not. The moral problem with theft does not lie in depriving someone of revenue.

Software isn't like that. By obtaining a copy of a program, you're not taking anything from anyone in a way that prevents them from using it. In particular, if the software has an "owner," you're not preventing them from selling it.

"Software isn't like that. By obtaining a copy of a program, you're not taking anything from anyone in a way that prevents them from using it. In particular, if the software has an "owner," you're not preventing them from selling it."

Piracy isn't theft. It's counterfeiting, which us much worse for the product creator. As an example, theft may deprive LG of a physical television, which isn't that bad. Counterfeiting can destroy the actual value of the product being passed out for free. Software, like any digital good for sale, is almost like proprietary currency. It's value is only in the minds of the consumers, because there isn't any physical cost involved. If it gets shared and anyone can get access to it through Google, torrent sites, etc, this value approaches $0 (and will eventually be $0).

We probably shouldn't be using terms like theft anymore, but counterfeiting. However, I have a feeling that those words will still be used because many people still want to justify piracy and want to make it seem like it's not really a bad thing.

Identity theft is not "theft" and we still call it that. A person's data is merely copied (the original is still there).

Counterfeiting is the wrong word, too, because the illegally copied good is (usually) just as good as a real one. Counterfeit physical goods are usually lower quality than the genuine article, and can damage its reputation.

No, a counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag that's made with better materials and craftsmanship is still counterfeit.

I think the difference with "counterfeiting" is that it suggests that you're intentionally misrepresenting the good as something it isn't. The underlying crime is when you trade such a good in bad faith (you sell a handbag to someone whom you allow to think it's from a famous designer, or you buy something in exchange for green pieces of paper which you pretend were issued by the US Mint).

By this definition, "brand-name" shrinkwrap software that you bought cheaply in SE Asia that has suspiciously poorly-reproduced covers and instructions might be counterfeit (because the purchaser might be misled into thinking they're getting an official edition), but most p2p piracy is not (because there's no discrepancy between what the recipient gets and what they think they're getting).

Well, I guess we could call it copyright infringement, but most people will come up with their own terms for it.

I feel that the only reason you don't like any of these words is because you don't want copyright infringement painted in a bad light. It's a bad thing and it does cause software developers to eventually lose business, the words we use to describe it aren't going to change that.

>I feel that the only reason you don't like any of these words is because you don't want copyright infringement painted in a bad light.

No, I'm just pedantic. I don't do copyright infringement; as a developer, depending on copyright for my living, I hold that it would be immoral.

Even excellent counterfeit money is still called counterfeit. Also, the majority of pirated apps tend to not support auto-updating, as you need to go and get a new hack and you can't get support or advice from the application's author. I would say that is an obvious way in which they are inferior.

This is actually a fantastic description. Very well put.

Theft = taking something that isn't yours, and yes you can take non-physical things.

If I copy your term paper and pass it in before you do, you still have your term paper right?

If you work and I don't pay you, you still have whatever you had before Right?

When I hear theft I think of guys in masks sneaking into someones home at night and depriving them of their belongings. Associating illegitimate use of software with theft is misleading. It's like telling kids that marijuana can kill them to dissuade them from using it. I'm not saying it isn't wrong... I'd just like to see a word that wasn't deliberately chosen for it's connotative baggage.

Personally I look at it like this. While I'm not physically 'stealing' their product, I am still profiting by not paying X amount for its use.

As an example, imagine if you are planning on purchasing a copy of Photoshop at $1000 but before you leave to go to the store you do a quick search on your favorite torrent site. Sure enough it's there and you download it, saving yourself $1000 while still benefiting from the use of the software and using the $1000 on something else.

So while software piracy might not harm the developer directly, it greatly benefits the person who downloads the software.

Meh, that argument is just a sideshow distraction. The real issue (as stated elsewhere) is that you are using something for which you are required to provide recompense. Avoid that recompense is depriving the distributor.

While the semantics of "is it theft" does have a slight relevance, the overhead of how this concept completely derails the legitimate debate is far worse. Theft or not, it's an issue that needs to be addressed, and the "it's not theft" folks always seem to want to avoid addressing it.

A bit like how those folks who always say "but information wants to be free / you can't stop it" never want to divulge their bank account details and passwords...

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