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Comment by ffsm8 | Hacker News Reader

copyright infringement is not theft, even if right holders often claim it is.

part of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.

You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

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So having tons of AIs quoting various literary works and reproducing knock-offs of them has a positive effect on those books' sales?

I think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.

? I literally said that, how am I wrong?

> You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.

Damages are not deprival of ownership. They're conceptually related but orthogonal

Also there was no moral judgement from my end, I just pointed out that an incorrect word is being applied. It's just not theft - by definition. But language is a fluid concept and definitions change over time. As people keep misusing it, it will eventually lose its original meaning. Which may have already happened for you, but this change hasn't been settled yet as can be seen from looking at the official definitions of the term, which as of today still mention the criteria

If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.

Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?

The first case is theft as legally and traditionally defined. It has low impact, since the item would have likely ended up in the garbage, but it's still theft as we understand it and as law defines it.

The barber example is not theft. You cannot steal a haircut. You may be harming the barber, but it's not theft.

Words matter!

> The barber example is not theft. You cannot steal a haircut. You may be harming the barber, but it's not theft. [...] Words matter!

Then why is it legally considered "theft of services", which is a crime that directly includes the word "theft" in the name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that, I stand corrected.

I think it's a bit silly to consider it theft, but I have to eat my words in this case :)

This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.

So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?

Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.

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