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I do not advocate piracy, and do believe that people should be paid for their work. However, you are wrong. Theft means that the original owner no longer has the item stolen from them. Copying something from them most definitely leaves them with the original. That is one way in which piracy is not like theft. I would much rather someone download a copy of my code, than grab all my drives, make a copy, erase them, then return the drives. What you said is "theft is wrong" && "piracy is wrong" => "Piracy must be theft". The trouble is, you cannot apply the same concepts to physical and digital world. Once again, not arguing that pirating software or other content is good, just that it is not theft.

Secondly, and this is a point that I don't think is discussed much, piracy to me is an effect of market value. For example big music labels will argue that if I distribute a Britney Spears MP3 on a file sharing network, that they lose $0.99 * # of potential buyers. This is false. The market value of this piece of content is much lower. People would not pay for it if the only way to get it was through, say, iTunes. Basically, someone might want it for free, might consider if for cheap ($0.10/song), but not want it for the price set by the market.

The problem is the price is not set by the market, it is set by the record label and significant arm twisting. Support your favorite bands by sending them cheques if you obtain their album. The RIAA is the problem.

Also check out Band Camp for new unsigned artists. Great service and IMHO the future of the "record" industry.

Band Camp is great! I don't care enough about music per se to use it for its intended purpose, but I do get pointed from time to time to some groups who remix video game music. There's some pretty talented musicians on there even in esoteric genres.

Honest question: how would you set the market value of a digital good? I have a very limited understanding of economics, but it seems to be that balancing the supply/demand equations when supply is infinite (for, say, a song, movie, music video, etc.) becomes rather difficult.

How would you set the market value of a physical copy of a digital good?

Music CDs are sold for roughly $10-$20 USD. The actual cost of making the physical CD is around $1. People seem much more agreeable to accept a $9-$19 markup on a physical CD than on a digital album, which costs $0 to copy but ostensibly has the same cost to produce otherwise.

Well, if there is scarcity (i.e.: supply is somehow limited), then the market value is where supply and demand curves cross. In other words, I'd throw a bunch of CD's into the market and let the price stabilize. That has nothing to do with how much it cost me to make it (the same way that the salary a doctor makes has nothing to do with how expensive the education was), but everything to do with opportunity cost: would I rather buy this CD or another. At least for spherical songs in vacuum.

I cannot do the same thing with digital goods since the supply is unlimited. I don't see how the market can settle using the old supply/demand paradigm. I can try to get a stable price by offering a "pay what you think it's worth" model, but that' no fun either.

Are CDs really priced based on supply of the CD?

In my experience, the market appears to have established an approximate range of fair prices for CDs in general, that does not appear to be based on how many copies have been pressed.

Obviously there are some major variations if too few copies were made and the publisher refuses to make more to meet demand (putting the CD "out of print"), or if many more were made than people want to buy and retailers need to clear out inventory.

But in general, if an artist produces a new CD, they could press 5 copies or 50,000 copies, and I would expect the selling price to be somewhere in that $10-$20 range or so, not because of the number of copies of that particular CD, but because of what the market expects CDs to cost.

We perhaps need a different term altogether because really it's not just copyright infringement either.

If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.

With copyright infringement, it used to mean selling cheap knock-offs of your work, including your work illegally into someone else's dime novel, etc. With digital copyright infringement people are literally selling or giving away the authentic item (i.e. the data). This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.

You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.

> We perhaps need a different term altogether because really it's not just copyright infringement either.

Why does copyright infringement not work?

> If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.

That still does not make it equivalent to theft. If I somehow started distributing copies of your digital goods and made it impossible for you to distribute the originals, would you say that's worse than me only doing the former and not the latter?

> This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.

No, it is not. From WikiPedia [1]: In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it

In no way is pirating something fitting that definition. The only thing that piracy might deny you is potential profits, which are not property by any definition.

> You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.

I agree! Piracy is wrong. Does not matter how little or how much you do it, it ends up hurting someone.

Well, it's more complicated. For example, I currently have a song in my iTunes library that I bought from iTunes when they sold DRM encumbered audio. I bought it with an Apple ID I no longer have access to. iTunes refuses to recognize it in any way and I cannot decrypt it, but I did pay for it fair and square. Would it be amoral for me to download that song on a file sharing network? What if I had an LP that I bought in 1979 instead of an m4p file?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

Having read threads on this subject for 20 years, the same old tired points get brought up as if they matter whatsoever. Nobody cares about the semantic arguments. People are arguing that you should not pirate software and that if you do you should be viewed by your peers as someone on par with a thief since you have the same moral code as a thief does, you just choose to perform immoral acts in a medium that is most beneficial for you (and in many ways, less risky.) Nobody is arguing about the economic harm or the philosophical difference between theft and copyright infringement with regards to their effect on scarcity of goods.

The point is if you pirate software you are committing a moral act that, while economically may not be comparable to theft, reveals the same integrity and character as that of a common thief. Just like you can not "copyright infringe" a widget from to someone who built it, you cannot "steal" software, by definition. The only reason software pirates do not "steal" software is not because they are good-hearted citizens who simply draw the line between theft and copyright infringement in terms of immoral things they permit themselves to do. The reason software pirates do not "steal" software is because it is impossible to do so. I think if there were a way to copy software that deprived others of it, yet still had the same likelihood of getting caught as piracy does today, piracy would still occur as much as it does now. And the reason software pirates do not steal physical goods on top of software is because the risk/reward equation is completely different, not because they somehow have a deep philosophical aversion to affecting the scarcity of goods. People want shit and they do not want to pay for it. Some people who have this feeling decide they are going to take actions they shouldn't. We should hold opinions of these these people equally (though not necessarily treat them the same under the law.)

Except that it's not purely semantics. The fact that the physical analogy breaks down pretty severely should lend intuition to the fact that our judgments about pirates should differ from those about thieves. Are all of the following equivalent moral wrongs?

1. Copying software, changing attribution, and selling it as your own.

2. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being able to afford it (or using it for economic gain).

3. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being unable to afford it.

4. Using a cracked copy of software that you have paid for, in order to circumvent a restriction that impairs your use of it and which the vendor is unwilling to address.

I think few of us would consider #3 a heinous crime if it was done by someone in order to train himself on industry-standard software (e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.), which he would then be able to apply at a job where the software was paid for.

That's not to deny there are plenty of people who pirate just because they want free stuff without paying for it. But that doesn't mean we should all take our lessons from Inspector Javert.

Do you then think that these people of disreputable character regularly steal from their local grocery stores? Or at least, that they have no moral qualms about doing that, as it's the same as copyright infringement, and the only reason they don't is the increased risk?

Copyright infringement is very different from theft.

First, if you copy one of my books, say from someone who bought it in pdf format from the O'Reilly site, you have not denied the owner access to his paid copy. You have not robbed anyone of a physical artifact with a measurable cost.

Second, such as act doesn't even rise to the status of "theft of service." It isn't like sneaking into another movie theater after watching the show you paid for. You are not taking up a physical seat.

At most you have committed a tort. The problem is these tiny torts have been criminalized. But that doesn't make them any more significant than they really are. How insignificant are they? So insignificant that simply by telling me you will write a review, I would give you a copy for free.

Quantify it: how was I damaged? If you lie to me just to get a free copy, how do I distinguish moral crime comitters from well-intentioned potential reviewers who never got around to it? How many of them should I pursue as thieves? What effect would that have on attracting reviewers?

Stamping "MORAL CRIME DOER" on the forehead of people who have taken something weightless, incrementally cost-less, and that is marketed by giving it away to people is like turning jaywalking into a felony.

The irony is that if copying my works was economically significant - if, say, I made an ERP system and a customer failed to pay maintenance fees - my recourse would be to sue them for the tort of not meeting a contractual obligation. The law already has a measure in place to prevent stupid cases: Is it worth suing over? If not, just move on.

I am not a legal expert but I do believe that "theft of service" can apply to the likes of, say, "stealing" cable service, even if it doesn't reduce the capacity of others to enjoy their cable service. FWIW.

How insignificant are they? So insignificant that simply by telling me you will write a review, I would give you a copy for free.

I would agree with that.

But if someone tells me, "I want a copy, but even though you are asking $5 per copy, I don't think it's worth anything at all. Give one to me for free." ... I would not be so quick to hand over a copy in that case, and, based on anecdotal conversations with others, I suspect that is closer to the mentality of a lot of folks who are committing the trivial crime of copyright infringement.

Where shall I send it? I'll even inscribe a hard copy for you. That's a $44.99 retail value.

More seriously, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. You could buy, or ask for a promotional copy of Guy Kawasaki's book about making books. It's about self-publishing, but his experiences with promoting and marketing books apply to any book where the publisher's marketing budget is very limited.

There are some other effects I can count on: That readers of HN are fairly likely to not bother to take something they won't use, because they value their own time. You are only a hypothetical pirate, and your question is hypothetical, too. In the real world, piracy behaves much like promotion.

But, you may be thinking, what about entertainment products?

It's been shown over and over that "pirates" are also top-ranked among paying customers. Is there a real-world case that piracy reduces revenue? If you get past the hypothetical cases, it's much harder to say so.

I don't disagree at all. I've given away copies of my own work, both in digital and physical formats.

I guess my question is, where do you draw the line? You said, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell? (Assuming that you want to sell any at all.)

"Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell?"

The anecdotal evidence Guy Kawasaki bases his advice for self-publishers on is that giving away books is always good. My publishers have signing events at conferences and give away case-loads of my current book at these events. Amazon sales always spike afterward.

In practical terms, that tipping point seems to be very far out there.

"...as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours" - Bill Gates [1]

Yep, that's exactly what victims of theft feel. When my car was stolen last year, I thought "Well it could be worse, they could have stolen someone else's car". Because the more people steal my stuff, the more money I make, right?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5162686

Theft is too strong a word, because nothing is taken away from the company who makes the product. The moral imperative here doesn't come from actual harm to an individual, it comes from the notion that someone should be rewarded for their hard work if others benefit from it. Which is much weaker. If someone copies something they would never have paid for otherwise, then there is very little harm done indeed.

Don't get me wrong, I like the notion that it is morally right for people to be rewarded for their hard work if it benefits others. However, if we're going to enforce it, shouldn't we start by trying to stop the exploitation of poor people before we go all nuts over sob stories from software giants, record companies and movie studios?

Equating a lesser crime (copyright infringement) with a greater crime (theft) diminishes the weight of the greater crime[1].

To use a ridiculous example, if you say that taking a picture of a statue is the same as stealing the statue, any accusations you make of theft will not be taken very seriously.

[1] My basis for this claim is that taking $40 that I already have is worse than not giving me $40 for a license to software that I wrote.

I'm against piracy, but I can none-the-less see a clear distinction between copyright infringement and theft.

> For the developer/distributor/publisher/artist or whomever is expecting a cut from sales the result is the same: they lost a part of their wage.

I take issue with this particular argument. By that logic, not consuming is morally equivalent to theft.

I'm sure some people would love that to be a common belief.