When is it stealing? | Hacker News Reader

When is it stealing?

hanselman.com

71 pointsfekberg83 comments

Never. It's never stealing. It may be infringing, douchey, objectively wrong, illegal, despicable, plagiarism but, unless it deprives you of your copy, it's not stealing.

While I understand the rhetorical usefulness of calling copyright infringement stealing, it's simply not accurate and nitpickers will be right. Again, they may also be annoying, myopic, or outright stupid, but they will be correct.

However, the article is much better than the title would imply so if you were just irked by the headline, don't skip it.

We need to hear this more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ

Copying is not theft!

In an economy where attention is the currency, someone takes your work and uses it to gather attention to themselves -- attention that would otherwise have been yours.

How is that not stealing?

This argument is the same as the one MPAA makes about lost revenue due to piracy, which in general is bullshit, because there is no guarantee that those people pirating stuff would have ever paid for it if pirating wasn't possible.

So the answer is easy - you can't talk about stealing "attention", when the "attention" you're talking about never existed in the first place.

And you can't sue someone for lost wages when those wages have yet to be earned.

By definition it is not.

Agreed.

We can call copying a DVD copyright infringement, after all a viewer would not necessarily have bought the DVD so calling it theft is incorrect.

However, cloning a Youtube video is closer to theft. Removing a viewer is directly decreasing the value of the video for Google.

It is also key to various legal actions that have happened recently against Google news: some Belgian Companies wanted a cut of Google revenue for showing part of their articles. As much as it hurt my feeling as a older gen internet user, they have a point in this new world where traffic is revenue.

If I legally purchase something that is the last of a finite resource, a resource that otherwise could have been yours, am I stealing? I did, after all, take away the opportunity for you to purchase said resource.

Your analogy is flawed because in this case nobody purchased or requested anything. If your analogy was accurate it would be better stated:

If I go into your garage and take your snowblower, and rent it out while you're not using it, without asking you, or giving you any money, how is that stealing?

If we lived in some magical world where you could make an exact copy my snowblower and rent out that copy when I wasn't using mine, I don't see any problem and would not consider it stealing. Otherwise, your analogy appears to be theft by the letter of the law.

Perhaps a better analogy is when you rent/loan out your snowblower, are you stealing from the manufacturer who otherwise could have made additional sales to your rental customers? That would cover your demand component.

Copyright infringement (purportedly) hurts the content creators, not the legitimate purchasers. You can't be denied revenue unless you seek profit.

So to stretch this analogy: the snowblower is the Snow Master 1.0, your own unique design, the pinnacle of years of research. Someone else comes along, magically copies it without your permission, and, having no costs to recoup, undercuts you in the market.

I don't know if that's stealing, but I do know you'll think very hard before starting work on Snow Master 2.0.

That's weird, because I can't buy gas for my car with attention. Or a sandwich. Or a cup of coffee.

So, erm, we don't live in that economy.

As a thought experiment, though, let's assume we have a magical attention-based currency. Attention is not quantifiable, it is not fungible, and it is not storable. So, erm, why the fuck would you use it as a currency?

Sure, intellectual property "theft" is not actually theft of content.

However, it deprives its victim of the ability to monetize and get credit for his/her creation. It's "theft" of revenue.

You can say that competition does the same thing. We tend to be okay with this because if you can figure out how to write better software or manufacture a better widget and offer it at a lower price, you deserve to win.

Writing, producing, and distributing a better movie is completely fair. Beating the studio at distributing the movie it paid to create deprives it of the position in the market which it earned and you didn't. That sounds an awful lot like theft to me.

Don't redefine theft to mean "unethical" or "creating a inefficient market" or something.

The whole point is, don't redefine words. So no, it's still not "theft" of revenue, not even in quotes.

If I break into the movie studio's bank account and steal their money, THAT's theft of revenue.

Like you say, by your logic, competition has the same effect of reducing a company's revenue, but only a crazy person would call that theft.

So STOP calling it theft. Call it unfair competition, call it copyright infringement, call it illegal copying, call it intellectual property violation.

There are plenty of correct names for it. Theft is NOT one of them.

Why can't we redefine words? Words are created, generalized and redefined all the time in English. Is it incorrect to say "he stole my idea" because I still have the idea? Maybe at one point this wording was incorrect, but not anymore.

As content gets more digitized wouldn't it make sense that to steal be generalized to mean copy/take something without permission instead of just take, especially considering it has already evolved to mean "take credit for something without permission" along with "take without permission"?

In this case, redefining the word isn't just language evolving. It's a deliberately political act which many disagree with.

Jesus fucking christ: theft is not causing somebody else to fail to realize a profit.

That same logic means that I could be sued for giving away tapwater from my house by anyone selling bottled water.

Not really. You own (and paid for) that tap water free and clear.

Piracy is closer to someone running a bottling plant off your house's tap and leaving you to pay the utility bill. You still have your water, but that money's pretty clearly been stolen.

No, that's a bad analogy, because they haven't caused me to fail to realize a revenue.

It's also a bad analogy because I have to pay for the water--in file sharing, others are paying the power, bandwidth, and storage costs.

Appealing to the power/bandwidth/storage costs is a cheap trick and always has been. They are irrelevant. The issue is the cost of creating content.

Granted, it's not a continuous scale like water, but rather a massive one-time investment that gets paid off over time. Water is a poor analogy, but this scenario at least captures the fact that party A is incurring a cost and party B is reaping the benefit without compensating A.

Now, one wonders, why is it this massive one-time investment? And does it really make the world a better place that we are catering legally to people with an inefficient business model?

(the usual arguments about authorship, creation, and reward ignored for the sake of brevity)

If one competes unethically, is that stealing? It deprives victim of revenue, and it's unethical, so?

If a place of business is vandalized...

If bodily harm is caused, depriving victim of wages...

If undue emotional distress is caused, depriving victim of wages...

Pretty much every single crime causes financial harm to someone, should we just throw away all words and use "stealing" for every offense? Theft of IP. Theft of competitive image. Theft of income-generating properties of equipment, theft of wage-making bodily properties, theft of wage-making mental facility. Theft of life?

I say let's keep the proper name for each kind of those things. Libel. Vandalism. Assault. Bullying. Murder. There, much clearer now.

If I run a social engineering attack on your credit card processor so that charges made at your store get paid to my merchant account instead of yours, is that not theft of revenue?

It's a similar scenario - you buy the inventory and do the work, I take the revenue.

Or, to take my benefit out of the scenario - if I place your CC processor account in sandbox mode so that none of the charges are actually captured?

Stealing exists at a culturally-defined threshold. One must be brought up (or assimilated) with an understanding of what is 'property' and what is not. Then, one has to also understand what is 'ownership'. Most of us learn this stuff implicitly, from the people around us, but in a globally connected world, this is much more difficult.

I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now. Even though we were under the jurisdiction of local, state, and national laws regarding such things, we followed the norms of the people around us. But, as I became assimilated into the urban 'middle-class', I had to re-learn these things.

I think this is why file sharing in the US became so popular in the 90s/2000s. Kids (and adults) who were otherwise raised with an understanding of US 'property rights' were nonetheless stealing media. The media that was being shared just didn't have a cultural foundation as property, to them.

Anyway, there are a lot of people on the internet that don't necessarily have the same understanding of property and rights and ownership than us. Some people just don't know that what they're doing is bad and/or illegal.

>I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now

This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate on some of these differences? Both from a real property (land) and object property (trinkets, devices, food, etc) perspective?

It was more of a shared, collective kind of property model. People generally knew which things that people had and who currently had it. Generally, one would 'borrow' a thing indefinitely, until someone else 'borrowed' it. It wasn't uncommon for someone to 'borrow' a car, for example. You would just take it, if you needed it.

It worked well, in that small culture of people. But, it certainly presented a lot of challenges for me as I left that area. It took me a long time to learn that that wasn't accepted behavior for middle-class urban people.

For example, in college, people would come to my dorm, and I'd give them my stuff, not expecting that I'd get it back. Tensions would flare up when I'd 'borrow' other kids' stuff and then lend their stuff out to others. It took me awhile to understand that that was frowned upon. I also had to learn that I couldn't just take stuff. I was used to going to other people's houses and just eating their food, taking video games, music, etc. - Yeah, the middle-class urbanites didn't like that very much.

Even now, I have strange understandings of property. I'm very likely to just give my stuff away, to even people that I don't know very well. Most people who witness this think it is very, very odd.

Are you sure you didn't come from a family of thieves? Have you discussed this with other members of your community, especially law enforcement?

It's quite common in rural areas. I grew up in west TN, and the exact same sort of situation exists there. I've lived in Alaska for a bit, and it's ubiquitous there. (e.g. you _never_ lock a cabin, as someone might need to get in)

A good example is chainsaws. Where I'm from, you heat with wood. Therefore, having a functioning chainsaw is a necessity. New chainsaws (or good ones, anyway) are fairly expensive, so you invariably have several ancient ones around that you're coaxing into functional shape. When you don't have anything working, you just go to a neighbor and borrow one. If someone asks for one, you loan them one that's working, even if it's the one you borrowed from your neighbor. The point being, you owe someone "a functioning chainsaw", not "that particular saw". It's effectively a communal pool of tools.

To this day my parents usually don't pay when they buy groceries. They just write their name on the back of the receipt and pay the accumulated bill whenever they get around to it. Just a few years ago, nowhere took credit cards, so the stores all extended credit that way. People need to eat, and often don't have cash until the end/start of the month. Similarly, it's changed now, but growing up, the gas station left its pumps on at night. If you needed gas after the station was closed, you just pumped it and dropped in the next day to pay the bill.

At any rate, you're very aware that you're a part of a community, even if your nearest neighbor is several miles away. People are fiercely independent and individualistic, but resources are treated somewhat communally.

Of course, a lot of that is changing, but it's more true the more you move towards the "fringes" of society, in my experience.

I knew folks who kept someone posted on the ridge to shoot at any car they didn't recognize (the sheriff literally called first when they had to respond to something or serve a warrant). At lot of methheads and a lot of folks on the run, but you'd never think twice about loaning them your truck or saw.

That sounds really nice, actually.

So, where does it fall over?

It falls over as soon as people stop trusting each other.

As soon as you get to the point where you don't know everyone, folks get less trusting. People function very well in "village-sized" groups, in my experience, and there's a big change in behavior as soon as you get to the point where you don't "know" everyone. (Behavior doesn't necessarily change in a bad way, but there is a big change.)

Or that's my $0.02, at any rate.

From what I can work out from David Graeber's book "Debt," that approach is the way the economy used to function before money was invented - a trail of mutual help and obligation.

Lets talk about government actions like if they were property.

Copyright is an deal for which my property (tax money) is used in a deal between authors. My property (tax money) in order to create and defend a monopoly, and in exchange I get to use the work after a limited time.

However, the deal was changed over and over again, and now I will never, ever, see the other side of the deal. The written word evolve faster than copyright expires. Physical medium of movies and music deteriorate to dust, and the technology in programs will be obsolete and dead beyond recreation.

Taking my money for this deal is stealing. The only way government can make me support copyright is by force, which is the current way it is supported. I consider this much more unethical than a person who ignores the copyright deal.

I like that artistic people can live on their work. However, ask me to choose between that and respecting the copyright deal, and I will pick the lesser evil.

The problem with defining copyright infringement as stealing is one of reality. At its essence, the market works by supply and demand. Copyright is basically the government imposing a monopoly on a piece of work to limit the supply.

That goes against the principles of a free market on so many levels and the only reasonable argument for it would be ... for the flourishing of the public domain. Can you make that argument right now? Of course you can't.

Otherwise, if something is so cheap to copy, to build upon, why should it be illegal to do so? Technological advances happen leading to the destruction of business models like all the time. Copyright is basically legislature that protects the incumbents.

Let me put it another way - if a machine was invented that basically materialized food out of thin air and poor people from Africa would copy the design, built it and produced food with it to feed themselves, would that be considered stealing from the inventor? What if they stole the food in question? What if the food they stole was produced by a machine out of thin air?

Maybe the real problem is that our current economic and business models don't really work anymore ;-)

What if the inventor couldn't get funding to do the research, because nobody was willing to pay for the product?

We could either:

1. accept that fact, supply and demand remember?

2. pay it out of taxpayer's money, I mean, what are taxes for? War?

Or, since we are on the hypothetical subject of food materializing out of thin air ...

3. recognize that once food can be materialized out of thin air, we wouldn't need money at all to live and hence, many of us would be free to invent, compose or just to enjoy life ;-)

When you use the word "stealing" to describe anything other than shoplifting or burglary it instantly starts endless conflicts with each party with it's own definition of what is stealing based on their own definition of what is property and so on.

I would like to describe the situation as cheating in the game without trying to going down into the rabbit hole that the digital goods opened(or expanded, since before the digital era we already had goods that are valuable other than it's material and building value. Books, Paintings, Designs, Blueprints and more).

So, you are producing something with intention to gain money or maybe just reputation but often you already use other peoples work to do that - nothing is made out out of thin air.

Then somebody is building some other product with some intention like making money, gaining reputation or something else and his product is using your product and maybe many other people's products. Let's say a website with AI that awesomely curates the content of other people.

In this situation everybody produced a valuable product but the other guys product's success is on your expense.

Ideally you would have an arrangement where everybody wins. I will give an example from the movies and music industries:

a)When you have the arraignment it's iTunes store. b)When you don't have one, it's the Prate Bay.

or Defense industries:

a) When you have a contract it's joint venture and you exchange some information to build some product. b) When you don't have one and you spy on each other to create similar product its espionage.

or personal relationships:

a) When a couple are also seeing other people with the consent of the other one, it's open relationship b) If there is no consent, it's called cheating.

It's not about stealing, it's about managing the resources in coordination with other parties so that everybody wins. Otherwise often one party wins in expense of the other, many time everybody loses in the long run.

> What are your thoughts, Dear Reader?

Honestly? Like you wrote, everything's going to be copied anyway, better don't let it cause frustration. It's just information, something we've never controlled successfully before the digital age and haven't given up trying to control on the web yet.

If we didn't try to (pointlessly really) fight over attention from search engines and revenue from annoying ads where we ought to put our content, it wouldn't be such a big issue and the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue.

the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue

1: How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers)

2: How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? (like Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow)

My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.

I have no idea how much of the content I read is paid for (and how). A large part of it is certainly summaries written by people who aren't paid to do so (copied, digested and filtered for me).

> My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.

It's funny that you named FB, Twitter and SO as important sources of content you "rely on every day". Who actually writes the content and who gets paid for it? Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)

Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)

Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not answer: Are there any such communities today? Your question seems to imply that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created by universities without profit.

However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where it's likely "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today.

To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes anyone's mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to replace her use of Facebook today?

> Are there any such communities today?

Yes, there's Wikipedia and there are IRC channels (and to some extent still, Usenet).

> [...]the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today.

Why would the world have to change? Did it have to change for FB to exist and siphon users off of myspace? We just need the product / the infrastructure / the volunteer work to get some stuff done. It hasn't been done yet, but it's not an otherworldly idea.

> do you think my mother [...] would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow

Which part of it would make her unhappy? Would she miss the corporate entity behind it? The decentralization? Or do you assume that FB's (highly complex by the way) UI is something that cannot be replicated in a sufficiently recognizable manner?

The bits of the internet I care about would stay largely the same, mostly because I'm lucky that the content I consume is stuff I pay a yearly subscription for.

(They also have some ads and so some of their ad revenue would disappear, I'm assuming that evens out by more people paying for a subscription when there are no free, ad-based alternatives :)

> How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers)

It's funny, I try to actively avoid such content. I.e. most of the time, I don't trust text written for money, because of the misaligned incentives. Even on HN, I focus mostly on the comments.

> How much of the content you rely on every day that isn't paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive?

This is, unfortunately, a good point.

Since we live in a world that has copyright, it is reasonable to expect that a lot of works will be created with the expectation of copyright, so we are surrounded by copyright-incentivized works.

Obviously if we changed the rules, behaviours would change. Perhaps for you it's hard to imagine how bloggers/journalists could do good work without advertising revenue, but for many of us we would much prefer that. There are alternate business models, but they are obviously secondary since copyright/ads is the social norm.

There is no copyright in fashion, yet we're not going around wearing beige sacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act#...

I think there is not much of an argument to be made in favour of copyright. I do think there's a strong argument to be made that artists should be paid. For which, we need a different business model. Maybe the fashion industry, advertising or Patreon would be worth exploring for that.

the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue.

Replace "published stuff" with whatever you do in your job every day to make a living and replace "ad revenue" with "compensation".

Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it? [edit, added the question]

> Doesn't sound quite so nice, does it?

If I'd had issues with working without compensation, I'd never have built a website in late 1996 (for free!) that eventually got VC-funded in 2000 and led to a situation where I can retire for good any time I wish to. And even though I don't need the compensation, I am still doing this job.

Does that answer the question?

I'm confused. You don't have issues with compensation because you were compensated such that you no longer need compensation. Therefore other people shouldn't expect compensation?

Yes, you are.

People can expect compensation and not get anywhere (see OP), especially if they publish content (they absurdly think it can be made accessible to everyone but not be copied - heck, we still copy content today that was published thousands of years ago!). Or they can build something that is useful with no such expectations and sometimes they will be rewarded anyway.

If I had stuck to expecting compensation for every hour of work, I'd now be very likely stuck in a dull job somewhere ...

We're confused because you appeared to contradict yourself.

Besides... the point you're not getting is that the content is copied because people value it. No one is digging and filling holes pointlessly and expecting compensation for useless "work". We're talking about content that is created that other people like and use.

The difference between what you did and kept your compensation for vs what content creators do that they don't get compensated for is a matter of the proper protection via laws and technologies.

While I would agree that maybe technology-wise it's a losing battle - legally and ethically, saying that the world would be better off if these people would produce what others want for free is problematic.

Only for you, specifically, because you're in the enviable position of being financially independent. Despite this, you must surely be aware that a great many people must continually earn money at something like a "job" in order to survive.

> Despite this, you must surely be aware that a great many people must continually earn money at something like a "job" in order to survive.

Last time I checked, there were plenty of jobs out there that didn't involve expectations of monopolizing publicly accessible information.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? The point wasn't that earning money requires controlling the flow of information, since that is absurd. The point is that despite your views, a great many people not only desire, but actually need compensation for their work.

I never argued against compensation (or expectations thereof) in general, just in the context of making information publicly accessible, because it simply cannot work in the general case.

I recommend not spending time exclusively on projects driven by expectations of compensation.

This is exactly why I came up with the idea of the Pirate License. http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html

Not everything makes sense to put out as Creative Commons. Sometimes you want to actually sell something like software or an ebook, but you don't think it makes sense to go after people torrenting your stuff and giving it away for free.

My philosophy is there can still be an exchange of value. So, with the Pirate License, you make a version of your product explicitly licensed under the Pirate License which calls those who steal your product pirates, and asks them to pass it along to other pirates or potential customers.

I think it makes the expectations for piracy much more clear and should lead to better outcomes.

For multiple reasons including those stated by mrtksn, "stealing" is an unsuitable term - it invites an ideological digression on copyright, property rights, law and justice.

However, the situation hanselman describes is certainly copyright infringement, and in my opinion he ought to look at the possibility of legal action. It might not be worthwhile, but might be satisfying and set a precedent for control of ripoff sites (modulo jurisdiction and other practical issues).

On the principles involved, IMHO copyright infringement can be justified and even admirable and virtuous in some contexts - but commercial exploitation of others' works, without the creators' permisssion, is not among them. In a just world Hanselman would get the all the profit the infringer realized plus the full cost of suing.

What's most egregious here is the relationship of economic power and enforcement of rights. Big, evil copyright-hoarding companies, that do not create anything but exploit the creations of others, are able to enforce their legal rights to an extreme and excessive degree, including interference with civil communications, taxes on blank media, false takedown orders and other abuses - while individuals subjected to exactly analogous, or even worse violations have no recourse. It's a two-tier system that deserves little respect.

'Scuze me for ranting.

It is never stealing, but unlicensed use or license violation!

Steeling would be taking away copyright ownership from author.

The whole problem comes down to definition of property. What is it, really?

People don't consider content to be proprietary. We treat a blog post in the same way we treat speech. Users ain't gonna pay for that. Period. Some of them may, but no the majority.

Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution (i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but that's all.

The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works. Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of his works.

Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know, link to it. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's work.