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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Minor nitpick, but he was not stealing, he was infringing copyrights.

To "steal" is to take another's rivalrous property without permission, such that you now possess it, but they no longer have it.

To "infringe a copyright" is to make and distribute a copy of another person's work without their permission.

Both illegal, but very different things. What targets of copyright infringement are losing is not their property, but the potential extra profit they could have made if they'd retained their monopoly on the ability to copy and distribute their work.

Stealing is illegal because it deprives people of their property. Copyright infringement is illegal because (theoretically) it leads to a world where people are less incentivized to create things because they won't be able to profit as much.

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This. The phrase "intellectual property" is an attempt to confuse a censorship strategy that's a few hundred years old with an entirely separate tradition that's been with us for millennia. They're very different, whatever words you use for them.

Reminds of a recent discussion seen here about 'identity theft'. Another blame-shifting concept ...

And then you have the people who say that language changes based on usage. Get enough people calling it property, theft, stealing, irregardless, etc. and then you can change the dictionary.

Which is why it's necessary to point out the mistake. If we don't act now, it'll eventually cease to be a mistake.

If someone happily says "they stole my heart" do you go:

  a. Go and correct them about using language wrongly
  b. Find the heart and return it to its owner
  c. Understand the meaning correctly

C, because in this case it's a figure of speech, not an attempt to characterize an act as something that it is not for economic reasons.

It this case revenue or profit was stolen just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.

Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?

IP theft is a form of stealing fruits of labor.

> It this case revenue or profit was stolen

The definition of theft is:

    a : the act of stealing
    specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to 
    deprive the rightful owner of it
    b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property

Revenue or profit where not stolen because they weren't there in the first place to take. There's potential revenue, but it's not there to be stolen yet.

> [...] just like in wage theft. But you are not debating that for political reasons as wage theft won’t be theft going by your definition.

Please assume good faith when discussing here. I personally don't think that the concept called "wage theft" is actual theft, for the same reasons I don't think copyright violations are theft. In fact, I don't think I ever used that term anywhere, in this thread or in the past. So please don't attribute to me thoughts that I didn't express.

> You really think there is nothing immoral here?

Why does the fact that something is or isn't theft imply whether or not it is immoral? A lot of things are immoral but aren't theft.

There was no revenue or profit stolen. The copyright holder had an exclusive license (a legal monopoly) to copy/sell/distribute their work, which is essentially a legal contract we've all agreed to as a society. The copyright infringer is guilty of violating the terms of that agreement. But violating terms and theft are not the same thing.

> Let’s say you write a book. I copy its pdf and sell it without your permission. You really think there is nothing immoral here?

Sure, that offends my moral sensibilities. But it's still not theft.

That said, I think it's a gray area.

Let's say you develop a recipe and start cooking it for people. Perhaps you're the first person to ever make chicken parmigiana. Then I copy that recipe and start my own restaurant that sells chicken parmigiana. Does that feel immoral to you? Probably not, because we've grown up in a world where (due to arbitrary cultural traditions) we're okay with "stealing" creative food recipes but not creative musical or story elements.

My personal moral intuition is that, the more complex a creation gets, the more I feel it's immoral to copy it. For example I'm less upset at someone who copies a riff from a song, or at someone who writes fan fiction, than I am at someone who copies a book wholesale and tries to pass it off as their own.

I agree. It was a simplified version of things.

The word for stealing has been applied more broadly than your definition for millenia.

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