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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The mistake in this analogy is that the stars in boxes represent things one already has, while the dollar signs represent things one might get in the future.

Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft. If it were, giving someone bad financial advice would also be theft.

Because taking something someone already has is so much more serious than causing them not to get something they hoped to get in the future, we have a specially bad word just for this situation: theft. And the RIAA and MPAA deliberately misuse this word in order to make file sharing seem worse than it actually is.

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I would say "A mistake" rather than "The mistake."

Another mistake in this analogy is that between criminal and civil law. Theft, in most if not all countries, is a criminal offense.

Piracy, formally known as copyright infringement (or copyright violation), is a criminal offense when done for financial gain, civil offense otherwise in countries which recognize software copyright. The vast majority of occurrences of copyright violation we see in the media are for personal use, not financial gain, thereby a largely civil legal matter, than a criminal one. Hence theft as a comparison is inaccurate.

That's what annoys me about this endless argument. The entire reason it's endless is because it confuses and mingles legal and moral aspects:

- Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not, but somehow it still keeps popping up as an argument to support that it's theft.

- Legally, as far as I know, theft and copyright infringement have very different meanings. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to bet that neither are any of the people arguing piracy=theft. Anyway, I don't really see how arguing and personal opinions can come into this. The law is what it is.

- Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right, but at least this is the only part where you CAN actually have any kind of debate.

People arguing about different things without realizing it = recipe for endless, unproductive argument.

> Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not

It depends on where you are. In Spain it's not illegal to make private copies of music and movies, and share it with friends. P2P is slightly different, and a legal void here because, although maybe not completely legal, its prohibition would be unenforceable due to privacy laws.

In fact, the right to make these copies justifies the "canon", a compensation that goes to "spanish RIAA" charging recording media, formerly CD/DVD and recently expanded to hard disks, memory sticks and even phones.

>- Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right

Not so hard, I've seen very convincent reasons. Excuse me if I don't share them, but, as you say, this is often an endless and unproductive argument.

I totally agree. This stupid argument comes about for one reason, and one reason only: the law has not yet caught up with technology.

No, it's not stealing. Yes it is wrong - if you don't pay for creative content, content creators won't create, which is a bad outcome for society (and no, don't give me any crap about people creating for free - sure, some might, but I certainly wouldn't be spending my weekends and nights writing an application if I didn't think I'd get some money for it, and I doubt that I'm rare!).

This is where governments are supposed to do their jobs - create laws to encourage desirable behaviour. For example, they could start passing laws to make it illegal to publicly share copyright-protected works. They could also make it illegal to facilitate the sharing of copyright-protected works, putting operations such as TPB under pressure.

Better than just making it a law, make it one of the conditions of membership in the WTO - it's a logical activity for the WTO anyhow, seeing as an increasing percentage of world trade is IP. That way, there is a powerful tool available to force compliance at an international level.

>I certainly wouldn't be spending my weekends and nights writing an application if I didn't think I'd get some money for it, and I doubt that I'm rare

http://www.gnu.org/

http://www.linux.org/

http://www.freebsd.org/

http://www.apache.org/

http://www.mysql.com/

http://www.mozilla.org/

And Python, Perl and PHP...

I think enough people who spend their lives working for free to make it worthwhile!

Indeed, money is but one potential reward. Social recognition is another.

Though I think most of free software is written for the 'finally this thing does what I want it to do' reward.

I'm curious - do you actually think that there are people reading Hacker news that don't know about these projects?

Obviously I, and everyone else here, is aware of them, which should have clued you in that you had misread me. I didn't say that no-one will develop software for free, I said that I don't do it, and that I suspect that I'm far from unique.

Besides, if you look, you'll discover that many of the developers on those projects are getting paid for it, one way or another.

I don't disagree that copyright infringement is bad for those in our business who rely on sales of software or media licenses. And sure there are negative residuals like trickle down economics of the media and software publishers. But it is not cut and dried/black and white. What about fair use? What about abandonware? The law is what it is only now. We (as a society) change the law as we use it. The new round of IP laws, such as the DMCA, are new and the full effects not yet known.

Arguing about this is good because it fosters thinking and may prompt people to actually DO something to improve our current situation.

I think the problem was with bad arguing.

One person arguing the legality. Another, the morality. A third steps in with semantics. Since they all use the same words they think hey are talking about the same thing. But they are not. If you replaced the words they used with the words they mean they'd sound like a pack of hyenas.

Welcome to humanity.

nice to meet you

Likewise.

To take it one step further the problem is that everyone keeps talking around the fact that the entire argument is centered on "money" not "piracy". Before the internet and before personal computers artists had mechanical control of who had access to their products. That just isn't true anymore and what it means is that artists need to find some new business models. Once they do that the whole issue is going to go away. And that's a good thing, because I've been debating it since the internet was born and that's more than 15 years and I'm getting tired of going round and round and round on the same old arguments. Time to move on.

Exactly. I always get frustrated that gets left out of the debate. The issue is not money. The issue is control. Control is ownership (or a close cousin).

That's why internet music taxes & whatnot are ridiculous. That doesn't restore ownership. Just money.

If I hire a financial planner and he gave me bad advice, he could be liable (depending on the laws of the state, exclusions on the contract and so on). So bad analogy there.

No good analogy. Giving bad advice professionally can be illegal (so is piracy). But it's still not theft.

"Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft."

If it were, Blizzard would lose the biggest class-action lawsuit in the world! I mean, if all the time I spent playing Starcraft were spent doing something productive...

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