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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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We need to hear this more:

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

Copying is not theft!

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?

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?

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