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TheOtherHobbes

"Very little of this existed prior to around 1700."

That's because books were hand-made items, the industrial revolution hadn't begun, and there was no concept of IP.

>If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits

Well, yes. Ease of copying is a non-issue, because the real cost is in creation.

Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

And I make that point as someone who has seen multiple developers quit one particular space (music software) because piracy made it impossible for them to earn a living.

Pretending this is about what you want is simply narcissistic selfishness. There are two parties in these transactions, sometimes they're small independent developers and not giant corporates, and piracy has very real effects on their livelihood.

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There are many things one can do which lead you to have less profit.

One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on.

No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft.

Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse.

It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either.

As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.

> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it.

This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.

Some of this was pretty explicit and pretty well documented. In the late nineties, Microsoft strategically encouraged piracy in many developing countries, to develop lock-in. This wasn't just comfort; once a country has infrastructure built around Windows, from scripts, to data formats, to workforce skills, to everything else, it's almost impossible to switch off. At the time, the plan was to crack down once countries developed a little bit and could afford to pay.

Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.

> Speaking at University of Washington, Bill Gates said: “Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Not just vendor lock but also stifling competition by letting the "free" version set a price ceiling for alternatives.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket

Err, nope. If I steal a bicycle from the shop around the corner there is one less bicycle the owner can sell.

If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.

This condition is simply not true in the majority of cases of piracy of digital items.

I worked in third world countries, I have a friend who is a single mother on a low wage job.

These are just /some/ examples where a sale of many digital items, software, media, etc. would provably not happen. There is no 'theft' because there was no income withheld from the creator. [1]

Proof: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/09/21/eu-buried-own-400000-stu...

[1] Whether they should be allowed to do that is a different matter – one detached from theft/economy. It's a philosophical/ethical issue and I agree with parent that the view we hold on these things is recent and shaped by conditions that frequently no longer apply (physical item vs digital one resp. cost of making a copy).

Property is about the boundaries of what one can control, not about physical stuff and land. What makes property property is not physical boundaries and the tangible nature of a thing, but the fact that you can control who gets to use what you possess and under what conditions, backed by the power of the state. In states with copyright laws, this applies equally to land and widgets as it does things you write.

Property being about land and geographical boundaries is one of the most common misconceptions that gets shattered in the first few weeks of a first-year course on the subject in law school.

Yeah, I think you're kinda hitting the nail on the head here. The idea that people should be allowed to control ideas or concepts is wrong. We need to move past this as a species, so much of what is relevant to the day to day lives of people on this planet exists in a world where scarcity is artificial. That's not okay. Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.

Copyright law does not protect abstract ideas or concepts. It protects specific artistic expressions of them. See https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf; there's also a whole body of law around this.

> Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.

Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity so that people can produce things that are valuable but not physically scarce so that they can buy those things that actually are scarce.

You're making a huge logical leap assuming that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods, and that's easily contradicted by the existence of FOSS. There are plenty of creators who create things for all sorts of reasons besides profit. And in many cases, there are people who want to create free things and can't because of things like patents and IP trolls preventing them from doing it.

> that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods

(Emphasis mine.) Who said that? Certainly not me.

Acts of charity happen all the time, and we are doubtless better off for them. But those are a choice. It doesn't mean it should be the only choice.

Here:

> Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity

You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.

Charity isn't somehow the only other choice, not that this would be my ideal solution but I think we could still have some working version of capitalism where intellectual property was greatly undermined and everyone was better off for it.

> If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.

This argument never held up. By taking it, you admit it has value to you. Whether or not you agree with the asking price is incidental: you have to acknowledge you are taking something with some value and not paying for it.

I've pirated my fair share of software and media, and had my own software pirated. I'm not judging anybody for pirating software, but I am calling out specious self-justifications about doing so. You pirate it because it's cheaper and easier than paying for it.

If I copy a digital object, I'm not taking anything at all: I'm making a brand new instance, identical to the original. I pay for the computer hardware and electrical power necessary to make the copy, and for the storage space it lives in.

Sure, but that's semantics. You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for. You can't pretend the thing you have acquired is without value if you wanted it. Piracy is really about "do I want to pay, and can you stop me from getting it without paying?" and this business about "I'm not really stealing because it's digital and the marginal cost of production is zero" is just self-justification.

I'm mostly not in favor of software or media piracy (though if it has been sufficiently long (not sure how long) since it has been commercially available, or a handful of other cases that don't come to mind right now, I think probably fine), but I do think it makes sense to distinguish it from theft, and indeed, distinguish it on the basis that you are not depriving the person of a thing which they have.

If Joe is selling cherries he grew on his cherry tree, and I start selling some cherries from my cherry tree for cheaper (or just giving away cherries), this does deprive Joe from some of the profit he would get from selling his cherries, because some people who would have bought some cherries from Joe instead of from me, but I am by no means stealing profits from Joe. I'm not taking his cherries. He still has his cherries. That's not to say that he isn't worse off. He is, of course, worse off. But (except if some other conditions hold) I haven't wronged him, and I certainly haven't stolen from him.

(Ftr, I don't actually have a cherry tree, and do not grow any food.)

Now, if Joe is selling copies of a file, and I am giving away copies of the same file, well, it seems like a similar situation. One difference is that in the case of the cherry tree, both Joe and I are putting in the work to create the product, namely, by raising and maintaining our respective cherry trees, and harvesting the cherries,

while in the case of the computer file, it may be that Joe put in a lot of work into creating that file in the first place, and I did not, and so if I were to sell copies of the file, that would seem quite questionable.

Now, if I were to distribute the file Joe made and is selling, the reason this would be bad is probably a combination of "This makes Joe worse off, and he should be rewarded for the benefit he provided others, and also society decided on that basis that I shouldn't do that, and unless there is an overriding moral obligation to do otherwise, I morally ought to follow the ethical rules that society has established."

This is, I'll admit, somewhat similar to at least some of the reason it would be bad for me to steal some of Joe's cherries and give them away (though with less of the reason being "because of the ethics society decided" part than in the case with distributing the file.)

Though, one difference in this case is, Joe could do other things with the cherries other than sell them, and by stealing them, I am depriving him also of that option. This doesn't happen in the case of distributing the file. Nor would it happen if I had a magical duplication beam which I used to make duplicates of his cherries.

I think this difference is an important part of the concept of theft.

The concept of theft, I expect, arose substantially before money, and I imagine also before significant trade.

The concept of "Hey, that's mine! I need that!" is fairly basic, and is based on "If another person takes it from you, you don't have it anymore." .

Now, of course, socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should. I think it is best to use different words for them, because I think it makes sense to keep the concepts separate (though related).

> socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should

Do you personally feel that wage theft isn't theft?

Same hypothetical, except the cherries Joe picks aren't actually Joe's—they're Jill's. Jill owns some farmland where cherries grow, and she lets people pick them. They do so on the premise that cherry pickers get paid by Jill on Tuesdays. Joe moves to town and picks cherries there all week and then hands them over. Jill says "thanks" and then slams the door in Joe's face. Does this fail to meet the threshold for the appropriate use of the word "theft"? Joe has not had anything taken from him[1]—certainly not any physical property[2] he could do anything else with or ever plausibly argue "That's mine" to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear—because the cherries were never his.[3]

1. 30e7f23b81e476dd7afc8f4e23401aed004567526f8dc58ca97fc3339fe5d2bf

2. d38b2ef315ebb47a44a28abf7884c7fecf05b11f0d34a875fffc89ce4f955e81

3. 188e9eee6f835b8a6bd2f927de75006cd87215d10dee9a0225e320f3ee6d4b65

Indeed, calling the fact not paying an employee's a type of theft seems to be an originally English idiom¹. In other languages it's more akin to an unpaid debt or a breach contract rather than stolen property. Intuitively, to have something stolen one needs to have gained ownership of it in the first place. (And being owed something is not the same as owning it.)

P.S.: What's with the hashes?

¹. It seems to also be used in Spanish, but mostly in an American context as a calque from English.

Not a native speaker and NAL, but why would anyone call this "theft"? If anything (assuming that the premise was agreed upon by both parties, of course), I'd call that defalcation, embezzlement, or simply fraud. But as you laid out yourself, this doesn't fit any definition of theft.

> Sure, but that's semantics.

I hate it when people say that to dismiss things. Semantics is all about meaning. Without it we can't have a discussion. It's what's important about the words we say.

> You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for.

Right, which means it had enough value for you to copy it, but says nothing about whether or not it was valuable enough to pay money for it. And if it wasn't valuable enough to pay money for it, the author loses nothing in that particular instance of piracy.

Of course, that doesn't mean all piracy falls under this case, but it does seem important to distinguish between these things.

> I hate it when people say that to dismiss things.

I always avoid ever saying anything like "that's [just] semantics", and I try to discourage others to, too, but in many of the situations where it shows up (including this one), there's nothing wrong with the complaint itself. When you hear someone swipe, "I'm not going to argue semantics with you", it generally carries an implicit accusation of an attempted change in subject. Consider:

Sara: "Nathan ate the clementines I bought from Oliver this morning!"

Oliver, Nate's friend: "I didn't sell her any clementines. The only fruit I've even touched today are these. They're not clementines. They're small mandarin oranges."

Does it matter that Sara can't distinguish clementines from ordinary mandarins? If there's a law that punishes you differently depending on whether you stole true clementines or not, then sure, what they actually are is materially relevant. Absent that, though, does Sara care what the definition is right now? No, and neither should anyone else. To even bring it up just distracts from Sara's actual complaint.

That is to say: if the argument starts as a semantic one, then semantic quibbles are relevant. ("The law says this about subcategory Y. Does what's at issue satisfy the definition of Y, or is it merely Z?") If it's not, though, then it's appropriate to call someone out on DOSing the conversation with a semantic rabbit hole (instead of being able to concede, "You say 'photocopier', while I say 'Xerox'", and then moving the fuck on).

> Sure, but that's semantics.

Of course it's semantics - we're discussing the meaning of the word "theft", and deciding whether it applies to this situation! By denying the relevance of semantics you beg the question, assuming that the words must mean to everyone precisely what they mean to you.

"Owner", for example: your statement presumes the idea of software copyright, that someone who is neither party to the copying scenario can "own" the pattern of bits being copied, and have a right to demand payment for it. Well, that is the question, and the Russians clearly have a different point of view than yours.

Of course I share their skepticism: the idea of intellectual property seems to have brought about rather more harm than benefit, and I generally follow Proudhon's view on the subject of property.

I don't know why you keep confusing theft with copyright infringement. There is no logical reason to do that other than to do some subconscious moral framing.

It's similar to arguing ice cream is not fresh because it is made of frozen milk. You're trying to form a bad association that is completely illogical.

It's not that simple; there are places where your asset has value for a user but the user _cannot_ (and I really mean cannot here) pay that value.

It's not a matter of convenience, and it's not just because it's cheaper either -- piracy is the only way to actually get access to it for some people. Otherwise, it's just prohibitively expensive for them.

Sure, you could argue that that still falls under "because it's cheaper", but there's a difference between someone pirating because they just want to save money and someone pirating because they literally can't afford to get it legally no matter what.

And this doesn't cover stuff like software just being plain unavailable in some regions; I literally cannot get some software I use in university legally.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise? A realistic example I've lived, is that purchasing the software/movie or whatever copyrighted material is impossible due to its unavailability in the local market, the absence of payment methods to purchase it online and/or the heavy cost compared to the cost of living in most parts of the world.

> Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise?

Frankly it doesn't matter whether the person would have purchased the item or not if they couldn't make their own copy. Going down that path would outlaw all competition, or even just choosing to abstain from purchasing anything. There is nothing inherently wrong with making choices or taking actions which result in other people receiving less income than they might have in some other hypothetical scenario. What matters is that they still have all of their own property whether the copy is made or not—they are not made any worse off than they were before.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

I don't think this analogy works very well here. What if the alternative is that the potential buyer would just never have purchased the product in the first place? Then there is simply no exchange that would have occurred, and the seller's "money in their pocket" was never going to be any different in this case.

To think about this analogy some more...Is it theft if one walks into a store, sees something interesting that they remember for their own benefit later, but they choose not to make any purchases? Does that deprive the shopowner of income in some way that the potential buyer should be made responsible for?

This isn't to argue that copying software (or music, or movies, and so on) is universally good or bad here, just that the theft analogy really has some serious problems with it.

Potential buyers are not just in the "I will pay for it" / "I won't pay for it" categories. There is a middle who would be willing to pay for it, but if they can get it for free, will do that.

Quick counter point re music software.

I pirated Ableton Live until v5. I've paid for the full suite every release after that. If I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't be paying for it now. This is pretty much ubiquitous in Ableton users, and I'm pretty sure that it applies to many other high end software packages. Photoshop would probably be the best example, but Office, Autocad and many others would have a similar customer base.

I've seen thousands funneled to ableton this way.

If the creation is the part that matters why would they want to keep selling instead of taking a page out of indie game dev collectives or open source projects like Godot and Blender who earn salaries through Patreon-like monetisation strategies? Then piracy basically becomes a non-issue because it's the labour that matters, not paying for an artificially scarce digital copy. This seems like a pretty easy "best of both worlds" approach, no?

It is way easier to get funding through licensing fees than non-deductible donations.

Only because everyone else is paying for enforcing those licensing fees. That copyright makes things easy in a society built around copyright doesn't really say much.

> someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket

If I pirate something, how do I _very literally_ take money out of the pocket of the creator?

This is a fine example of the abuse of the word "literally". People excuse the abuse, saying that it also means something like "emphatically"; but in this case, it's clear why this abuse results in errors.

As far as "theft" is concerned: software, including recorded music and films, has zero marginal cost of production. The software industries therefore have the potential to generate extreme profits, unrelated to the risks and costs of development. Intellectual Property laws are needed to protect these extreme profits.

Incidentally, I'm not aware that the term "Intellectual Property" was in use before about 1985. Copyright infringement, in particular, wasn't a crime before about that date; enforcement was by civil suit, and if you didn't make any money from infringement, then the court's award couldn't be greater than zero.

While the 'Intellectual Property' terminology probably did start in the 1980's alongside personal computers, the concerns about wide scale infringement definitely existed prior to that via Xerox (i.e. copy) machines (paper), audio tape/cassettes (sound) and VCRs (video) which made widespread consumer duplication trivial. This was all a thing before 1980, it just exploded as the technology reached the masses in the 80's.

Copyright infringement was most definitely a thing before then and damages could be awarded even if you had no income from it. See statutory damages. Really the only thing that changed with computers was the ability to make perfect copies, thanks to the data being digital. Prior to that, the problem was somewhat mitigated by the analog nature of it and that by the time you got to the 3rd or 4th generation copy the quality had significantly degraded.

> This is a fine example of the abuse of the word "literally"

It's not. The problem lies with the way the respondent rephrased the original. The original, as written ("very literally ends up with less money"—not to "very literally take money out", as the respondent chose try to use in a bizarre and underhanded setup), is in perfectly reasonable accord with the correct use of the word "literally"...

I you want to get really pedantic with the use of "literally": you're misquoting him. He didn't say you're literally "taking" the money out of their pocket; he said they literally have less in their pocket. I guess we could argue most people don't use cash these days so it's not literally in their pocket, but that's a level of pedantry I don't think is really valuable in a public forum.

The strongest adverb I would support in that sentence is "hypothetically". "literally" is risible, and not because the poster meant "figuratively".

I'm not misquoting them. How do you propose I can cause someone to _literally_ have less money in their pocket, without me _literally_ taking it out of their pocket? Regardless of whether that pocket is a literal pocket, or a bank account? By definition I am "taking".

My act of piracy does not "very literally" cause any amount of money to be removed from the IP owner. And if the poster meant to invoke the more colloquial form of literally, they damn well shouldn't have qualified it with "very."

Books were hand-made items, but machines and production techniques were copied a lot too, and also knowledge of eg. medicine.

Patenting a "ground flower X and leaves of plant Y in alcohol with sugar added" was not a thing back then.

Back in those days, medicine recipe are held as secret.

Recipe as secret is not compatible with modern standards like peer-review / FDA approval, etc ...

Piracy is only “analogous to theft” if the “thief” is making a choice between paying vs. pirating.

I personally don’t know a single software pirate who would have actually bought the things they’ve pirated. Mostly they just would have gone without the software, probably using some free alternative instead. There’s no value lost by piracy here, because there was no potential to capture value from these users in the first place.

Pirates are often teenagers without a single dollar to their name to spend on software, but all the time in the world to explore shady websites for warez. Later, once they have money, they buy software!

There's no natural right to artificially ban copying something.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket

Thats a very slippery slope

Freeing slaves was theft

When Ghandy led subjects of India of the British Empire to the sea to mine salt, that was theft - mining salt was illegal for them

Using electromagnetic spectrum without a lisence is theft

Are you using the oxygen molecule I produced without paying? Is your house casting a shadow on my land, blocking sunlight i am entitled to?

What about ownership of airspace, 'ownership' of international waters and economic exclusive zones, ownership of orbits in space, ownership of the atmosphere and 'ownership' of pollution?

All ownership is a social construct - piracy is a symptom of the overall system being crap

>Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

I have less money than if you sent me some right now. You not sending me money is clearly not theft.

Very little of this existed before the 1700s because all the science and math knowledge was still being stolen from the rest of the world using the racist "Doctrine of Christian Discovery".

Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.

Remember, before the 15th century less than 5 people could do long division in Europe. Try solving middle/high school math equations without the number 0 and using only roman numerals, you will understand the problem very quickly. For this and many other reasons, most of the intellectual heavy lifting was done outside of Europe. It took 400 years or so to collect information and catch up to the rest of the world.

>Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.

Patents last 20 years. So no.

>Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.

>Patents last 20 years. So no.

That's a domestic choice that most countries had no say in, there is no global consensus on how long patents should last.

In the US, congress has the right to grant and extend patents for however long it wishes (and has done so many times in the past).

So yes, to my original point.

>there is no global consensus on how long patents should last.

Yes there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement

Also, you're confusing patents and copyrights. Patents have not been extended for very long lengths.

A few countries had an outsized role in deciding these terms like much of the other WTOs rules...through the use of pressure, coercion, and other carrot/stick approaches.

If it's not voluntary, I don't consider it global consensus.

Joseph Stiglitz makes a similar point...

"TRIPs imposed on the entire world the dominant intellectual property regime in the United States and Europe, as it is today. I believe that the way that intellectual property regime has evolved is not good for the United States and the EU; but even more, I believe it is not in the interest of the developing countries."

You're being deceitful here. Stigler does oppose TRIPS because of its effect on developing countries--because intellectual property protection keeps developing countries from using patented things. In other words, he wants patents to be less restrictive, not, as you're falsely implying, more restrictive.

At the point where something is copied the creation process has already occurred. The fundamental idea behind IP is that it will put incentives on people to create as they can guarantee big profits afterwards.

But is this incentive adequate in modern society? I would argue it is worth revisiting. A lot of the science that is done around the world is already funded by governments with no guarantees of patent success, so it is clearly possible. Open source software also shines a light on the willingness of people to create amazing things for everyone...

>That's because books were hand-made items,

The printing press was over 200 years old in 1700, like 99% of the nearly a billion books in Western Europe were printed.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

When I repair an iPhone instead of buying a new one, Apple ends up with less money in their pocket. Repairing an iPhone clearly isn't theft, so this argument is clearly fallacious.

"In music equipment your customers are always broke" Bob Moog IIRC

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