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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

Its pretty entrenched in US culture too. Example one, downloading "free" stuff off the Internet that used to have to pay for in a store. People make all kinds of rationalizations why this is not stealing. Example two is just about any US high school or college. The US Air Force Academy graduated a 20% smaller class than normal his year because so many were expelled in cheating scandals. A major sociology paper was just retracted in Science, on of the worlds leading journals, because a grad student faked the data.

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> People make all kinds of rationalizations why this is not stealing.

Arguments that it is stealing are also nothing more than rationalizations. That's what both sides wield: it's a war of rationalizations.

(I tend to be more convinced by the "it's not stealing" rationalizations myself, simply because stealing an object makes it unavailable. If someone stole my bicycle, I'd be upset. If they cloned it in a Star-Trek-style "replicator" and took the copy, I couldn't care less. If you lend a book or DVD or SD card or whatever to someone, upon it being returned, you have no way to test the hypothesis "a copy of this was retained by the borrower". Not testable is not real, for all practical purposes.)

No, one side is an author/content creator who has not been compensated.

The other side is a person who is capable of rationalizing theft because it is a minor theft.

The theft isn't of an object, it is theft of compensation due to a creator. Duplication isn't the issue.

It's not because you're saying it like it's a fact that it will become one :/

And now you are rationalizing. Welcome to the mess/party.

Without derailing this into yet another "copyright infringement isn't stealing" thread, as far as the creator is concerned, they don't get compensated under other circumstances which are not commonly seen as infringement or even morally wrong. Example: A roommate watching a movie or playing a game with you.

Spinning it as purely a compensation issue is being a bit reductive, IMO. And from there it leads directly into objectively unanswerable intent questions.

Just wait; I'm going to obtain an exclusive distribution license on DNA from the oldest bacterium in the world. All life will then have to compensate me every time any cell divides.

Also, since DNA controls what you look like, including your silhouette, you will have to pay me every time you allow a light source to cast a shadow of yourself onto a flat surface.

Also, when you take a bath, you displace a volume of water corresponding to your shape. That is an unlicensed copy.

Your footprints in the dirt or snow, ditto, not to mention the fingerprints you leave on everything you touch.

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Man, think about it. Millions of years of evolution (based on continuous unrestrained copying and alteration on a massive scale) lead to Man. What does man do? Put three guitar chords together with some puerile, hackneyed lyrics, and insist on compensation from everyone that hears the crap.

Absent piracy, the money in the pirate's pocket would not magically have been in the content producer's pocket, which is the assumption underlying your ostensibly factual statement.

> The theft isn't of an object, it is theft of compensation due to a creator. Duplication isn't the issue.

Based on my limited understanding of copyright law, it does in fact concern itself with actual duplication, and is rather mum about compensation.

You can infringe by, say, altering something that is freely distributed in a way that is not permitted by its license (for instance changing the copyright notice to say that you created that work, rather than the author). The author could be adamant that permission to do that is not granted at any price (so that it's not an issue of compensation, but purely about unlicensed duplicates with unauthorized alterations).

But I do have a way to test for it. I can break into their house and (properly) steal their computer, then analyze its contents. I'm just not supposed to. That hardly makes their copy "not real, for all practical purposes."

I don't think your analogy makes a lot of sense

Breaking into a house - we have a name for that - it's called "breaking and entering" and "trespass".

However, going along with your analogy, say you're in my house - from my perspective, I would care about what you did.

If you took something that was mine, and denied it to me, I'd be quite annoyed. (I've had a expensive road bike stolen, so yes, I know what it feels like).

However, say you took photographs of everything I owned, to copy my packing style and organisational techniques? Or took them so that you could re-buy everything I have for yourself off Amazon? I probably wouldn't be annoyed, so much as think you odd...

> That hardly makes their copy "not real, for all practical purposes."

Your example of how it's "practically" impacting your life is that if you happen to commit a felony against the person and then analyze their computer explicitly looking for it, you'd happen to find out?

I think that's the very definition of "not a practical difference in my life", given the distinctly low likelihood that series of events would ever happen.

Would you care to try again?

The parent claimed that it was impossible to test for the existence of a copy and that therefore its existence or lack thereof is not relevant. I claimed that it is possible to test for the existence of the copy. I would further claim that there absolutely is a practical difference as far as a renter is concerned, whether or not they test for the existence: The person who copied the rented DVD is very unlikely to rent it again when the want to watch it later. Which I presume they intend to do given that they went to the (admittedly minimal) trouble of copying the movie in the first place. I suppose that in the scenario where it is a lent item, the argument of lost revenue is slightly less strong.

It's disingenuous to equate fraud -- cheating in a zero sum game -- with violating a purely manufactured right like copyright.

Unlike fraud, the ethics of violating copyright are highly situational and quite complex. A recent example of mine:

I purchased a very expensive publication; my purchase included a PDF copy that was (unbeknownst to me) DRM-locked with very onerous DRM.

- I fired up IDA Pro and broke the DRM so that I could read the PDF without their invasive DRM; I have no intention of distributing the results. This is actually illegal, and in violation of the license under which I was granted any rights to the PDF. Was this unethical?

- If I couldn't break DRM on my own, would it be wrong to download a copy from the internet?

- Given that I own the physical book, if my purchase hadn't included the PDF, would it be wrong to download a PDF of it?

- If I wanted to know what was in the publication before I paid a great deal of money for it, would it be wrong to download it?

- If I didn't have the money to pay for the PDF (as was often the case when I was a teenager and where I learned to crack software), would it be wrong to download for free -- but not distribute -- the PDF? How wrong?

... and so on ...

It really isn't stealing. Not even legally, despite how how much people say it is. Copying is not theft:

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

It might be cheating, it might be copyright infringement. Depending on the circumstances it may or may not be moral. But 1000 unauthorised copies do not mean 1000 lost sales. The situation is more nuanced than a simple 1-1 correspondence.

To put it the other way - all my life I've had free music. From the radio. In the car. In stores. Elevators. Birthday cards. Gas stations. Retail workplace. On the bus. Now even on Youtube and thousands of other streaming video sites.

And now you suddenly want me to pay for it? Why, what changed?

You've never had free music (unless you stole it). Radio and YouTube are free due to advertisements. All of your other examples are either public domain or a business paying to play music for you.

I don't think the liquor store pays the guitar bum loitering in front. :)

The United States and Canada allowed free music (for personal use) if you wanted to tape it off the radio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act.

I believe a portion of the cost of blank tapes was allocated to recording artists to cover this costs, so perhaps it wasn't entirely free...

The funds were allocated to recording companies, not directly to artists. Which means the artists rarely saw any of that money - the percentage of that payment to which they were entitled rarely rounded up to 1 cent.

> You've never had free music ... Radio and YouTube are free ...

So which one is it: was music free or not?

Free.

When an ad comes onto one radio station, you switch to another without ads. Redundant array of independent radio stations. Advertising is damage. So advertisers coalesce their ad timing, so the damage happens on all independent channels simultaneously, so you turn off the radio for several minutes, maybe switching to Pandora or another stream.

When Youtube plays ads, you mute it and goto another tab, and keep watching a different video. When the ad is done (such nice ads for telling you their duration), you simply return to the tab and watch your content.

There's always another service that's looking to hook you before they advertise. So you can just switch between them.

If everyone did that, advertisers wouldn't make money. That only works because most people do listen to the ads.

Then maybe everyone would find a less invasive monetization means.

It's not stealing if another person isn't deprived of an object. That is the definition of theft. Not a certain series of bytes travelling into my NIC. IP zealots need to make all kinds of rationalizations for why this is "stealing".

What is stealing, however, is the theft of rights perpetrated by the content industry by extending the terms of copyright so they can "own" ideas in perpetuity.

When I (and many others) say "piracy is not theft", it's not to "rationalize" piracy. It's to fight incorrect terminology, because such loose, imprecise use of language muddies the discussion and hinders productive discourse. Piracy is not theft, nor is it murder, nor is it rape. It is a different crime, with different costs and repercussions.

Most people don't realize what they are doing is wrong.

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