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Comment by MiroslavPokorny | Hacker News Reader

We live in confusing times.

Steal one mp3 and you might get fined thousands, steal a book from your local shoppe and the police would come visit you. Forge a signature and you would also be in trouble. Hack a government website and you will have to answer some questions.

Steal all the books in the world, forge millions and this story begins to tell and nothing happens.

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After all that has been said and written on this topic, people still manage to conflate theft with intellectual property violation, real or imagined.

They are selling a product created from mass violation of IP. This isn't some kid downloading a pirated song for personal use.

It's been 160 years since the publication of Das Kapital and people still don't understand the concept of stealing the surplus value.

People understand it just fine. Civilized people just reject it because Marx was a fool, and only followed by other fools and adult children.

You could say just the same about Jesus, and yet

Nothing got stolen as everything is still in its original place. You mean copied. It got copied.

And yet when it's downloading on PirateBay it's stealing

That lingo is always only used if you are on the side of being copied from, then you call it stealing as it benefits your narrative.

That one isn't stealing either.

Like the saying goes, if you steal one of the world's books, you have a problem. If you steal a million of the world's books, the world has a problem.

might makes right. this will never change..and is technologically agnostic.

Reminds me of the Stalin quote about killing a million vs being a murderer

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic"

Exactly steal a few mp3s and you are criminal, steal them all and sell them to everyone in the world, and thats a statistic.

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