Theft is theft, not free speech.
How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?
Copyright prevents the free speech of others. There's some justification for it doing so. But it's not a natural, or absolute, right.
Edit: copyright should be more limited than physical property rights, so I'm in agreement. But neither can be absolute when the government only has a piece of paper to abide by that prevents them from being revoked.
Also, satire isn't protected, but parody is.
Copyright is only a government-granted, temporary monopoly on that idea to incentivize you to live from creating them in the first place and to create more.
Once you have given your idea to someone else, where does your natural right come from to control what they do with it?
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
This is a much broader question about the rationale behind copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. It is really beyond the scope of the question posed (is copyright violation theft?).
You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.
What if you spend a year making a beautiful cabinet? You didn't invent the tree, or the saw, so it's okay if I come by and cart the cabinet over to my house, right?
It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.
In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.
Note that I agree that you should (or, rather, that as a society we should make sure that it's possible under reasonable conditions), but my reason for agreement is not able to justify perpetual copyright.
My reasoning happens to be similar to what the U.S. Constitution says, but I can imagine others having different reasoning for the same idea.
I believe that this is a very interesting entry point to a discussion, because the immediate reply to this is - that library books don't generate any extra income to the author. And that is also true. But I feel like even without calling it theft it is not entirely fair.
That's a strange assumption. Many authors fail, or only produce works in their spare time and work other jobs. I mean there's no fundamental right to be a successful author who can live off selling books.
Of course as a society we find it desirable to create an environment where artists can make a living from their works and create more art. That's why copyright exists. It's a tradeoff, all citizens are required to respect the creations of others in exchange for the opportunity for everyone to dedicate their lives to it and make an income with it. (Note: It's just an opportunity to make profit, not a right to profit)
But that societal contract gets perverted by commercial interests to the point where people stop seeing copyright as something positive and instead will refuse to adhere to it.
The internet making copying so much easier than ever before also skews that tradeoff by making it much more difficult for everyone to respect copyright. Breaking copyright is even easier than jaywalking and I don't think private citizens will stop anytime soon.
So ultimately that scheme to incentivize people to be creative used to be "fair", but now that view has somewhat shifted. And the system needs an overhaul.
Becoming a writer to make money off literature is pretty much like playing the lottery - the odds are badly stacked against you; if you have "success" most of the time you'll make a pittance, and only a tiny proportion of the people who are successful make it big.
If anything, current incentive structures created by current copyright are bad for most people in the creative fields, as the "hit culture" means they're heavily geared towards disproportionally rewarding a very small subset of people. While the hope of striking it big may lure some people to create, I'm more concerned that the bad odds of being able to make ends meet puts a lot of very creative people off those career choices.
I think it is interesting that you use a hypothetical author as an example since even before technology showed up and wrecked the party, copyright law arguably failed (or at least was never very good) at its supposed purpose.
Absolutely not. If anything, I would be flattered to meet somebody actually reading my book, and I'd probably be eager to have a chat with him, maybe ask for opinions and perhaps tell him about other books I'm working on, if it looks like he could be interested. That'd be an event that could make me very happy.
The reality is that nobody seems to be interested in what I do. Should I feel I'm being treated unfair by all the people in the train who never bought and never used my stuff? Never even heard of me?
So if I'm starving, it's not the fault of the people who aren't interested in buying my stuff. Calling them thieves solves nothing.
Free speech or theft?
But if nothing happened then there should be no reason to make your exclamation illegal.
Of course you could still be thrown out of the theater for disrupting the performance, providing further disincentive for doing something like that, but that's separate from the legality of your speech.
Not really, anyone who knows the basic structure of a magnet link can go...
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:529C39CC24553DFE030119BD35E19884F34A65E0
And it's perfectly useful. Paste it into any BT client, wind up with a copy of... Windows 7 it looks like. Practically the same as finding the link on TPB.
So, is this another's property or not? Did I just make it by appending a short string to turn it into a URL?