I agree it's sloppy to think that theft and intellectual property violation are interchangeable but the point has been made on here about a million times so it doesn't really add much to the debate.
A lot of the time the copyright debate is fought between people these world views.
1) Copyright opponents define propert as being like a car - something which one person has by denying it to another person.
2) Copyright advocates think of property as a "bundle of rights" enforced by the state. i.e. property is whatever a judge says it to be.
People who insist on calling it theft are steering the debate towards the second definition - that theft is whatever a judge or politician says it is. It's crucial to knock back attempts to do that. That worldview believes the whim of the state is the root of philosophy, and fundamentally correct in its judgement of right and wrong.
Property predates the state. It exists even in states that try to outlaw it. It's a strong algorithm that is useful for the efficient allocation of resources. Intellectual propert is neither a strong algorithm, nor a mechanism that leads to an efficient allocation of resources. It is not property. Intellectual property violations are not theft.
Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again?
(And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods.
If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
My experience tends to be that if I've not won someone over with one particular argument then my best tack is to try something else they might be more responsive to rather than just keep repeating myself.
But maybe the real issue is that I hope that HN might be a source of intelligent discussion on the subject with an attempt to find interesting and / or practical solutions to the problems raised rather than a more straight forward continual reassertion of views that could frankly be carried out by a series of Python scripts.
Then again, it is quite refreshing to see so many people defend the purity of the English language.
Semantic argument can become tedious and repetitive, but it's necessary for any more substantive argument to proceed. If there's no mutual agreement on what the terminology represents, then the participants of the discussion are effectively speaking separate languages, and they will be unable to 'access' each other's reasoning.
Sometimes, the semantic dispute is caused by an intentional attempt to confound terminology in order to make two things seem more similar than they otherwise are. Calling this out is appropriate and necessary every time it happens.
The US courts, by and large, have been fairly sensible on this so far, thank God.
So I'll say it again: Digital copying is not theft.
Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
And every other western country (and pretty much every other developed nation full stop.
Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. Whether that should be the case or not is a matter for debate, whether it is or not isn't.
In which jurisdiction?
Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain.
If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents) copyright law in UK allows for criminal prosecution where there is deliberate intent or passing-off in a commercial context. Section 107 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107) outlines both the detail of the criminal liability (and it is expressly criminal liability) and the punishments that can result, including prison and fines.
The reason it's more commonly treated as a civil matter is that for the injured party to recover damages they'd need to pursue a civil case as well as the criminal case so they don't normally bother.
Someone else has pasted a link supporting that this is the same in the USA and, as it was a condition of the WTOs Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that laws be passed making copyright infringement a criminal offence, this is almost certainly true for any signatory (153 member states including the UK, USA, India, most (if not all) of Western Europe and anyone who is anyone except, for some reason, Russia.
In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.
> So if someone hires me to do some work for them,
> and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what
> is that?
> Piracy is similar.
With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?
If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.
As the ability to acquire the software for free increases for average consumers, the more expensive the software will become, with the singularity being that there's one copy, the original, for sale for thousands or millions of dollars. The cost of developing software must always be amortized across all future sales. It's disingenuous to imply that once the software is made, there are no further costs to the developer. The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.
So when software I make is copied without my consent, I lose that right. If the infringement is large enough, I utterly lose it. (See also Trumpet Winsock).
Property doesn't need to be physical objects. You can steal an idea just as much as you can steal lunch money. And you can steal my rights.
If I take your pen, you no longer have it; thats theft.
The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation. That is what copyright protects.
It is deprivation of exclusivity though, I agree.
If we do, what if someone has exclusive knowledge of some algorithm, and then someone else discovers it too? Is he a thief?
Other than that, you don't lose your right to exploit your work. Someone else is exploiting your work in addition to you. They are infringing on your copyright, not stealing it.
You could sue for everyone for copyright infringement. (This didn't work so well for the RIAA.)
Or you can figure out a way to capitalize off the reason why everyone likes your work.
In any instance you don't lose your copyright.
The two are close, but not synonymous. Take photographs: the exclusive first-use of a photograph is a big thing. If you publish my picture without my permission, my right of control is gone.
I can use copyright laws and the courts to try and get economic redress for that, but nonetheless I no longer have the ability to decide where and when that picture is first published; the ability was stolen from me.
Copyright doesn't prevent copying, it just gives you a way of redress.