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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> which exists solely to facilitate piracy.

Let's not use the words the big majors wants people to use. The right wording is copyright infringement and that's it.

If you are a plaintiff writing a complaint, an interested party writing an amicus brief, a legal scholar writing a law review article, and so on, then indeed the right wording is copyright infringement and arguably "that's it".

If you are speaking outside of a formal legal context, than it most certainly is not the case that "that's it". In ordinary English, we overload and generalize many criminal terms, such as "piracy", "theft", and "stealing" to apply to things that do not meet the precise legal definition of those words.

For example, consider "steal" and its variants. Here are some common examples of usage that are not literally the crime of stealing. Many are not even crimes or torts.

• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.

• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.

• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.

• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".

• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.

• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.

I could go on [1].

[1] I believe I once posted a longer list, but HN crashed shortly afterward and had to be restored from backup. My post was lost.

He's making a point to raise awareness of a propaganda term that's made it into the common lexicon, and saying its use should be discontinued when discussing copyright infringement. He's expressing a prescriptive statement, and you're replying with a descriptive statement.

Piracy is a well known synonym for copyright infringement. I would agree with you that something like "theft" would not be a good term to use, but Piracy is spot-on.

"Piracy" is a term used specifically to attach the implication of theft to copyright infringement, because actual pirates steal things.

The root of calling it "piracy" is no better than calling it "theft", even if it has become common to refer to it as such.

It's completely reasonable to make an appeal to talk about it accurately.

Piracy still exists and kills people. Using that word for downloading a movie just seems wrong.

Nope, Piracy can be used to mean a lot of things, including stealing physical goods IRL. It's certainly not the right expression to use if you ONLY mean copyright infringement.

And people who do copyright infringment have adopted the label. Just look at the Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay.

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