[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

While I fully agree with you carld, it's a lost cause here. I've learned trying to convince many people here of what you are saying merely resulted in heated arguments that degenerated in the other parties resorting to hateful insults directed at me when I kept punching holes in their arguments. Unless people are ethical enough to understand the difference between right and wrong, honesty and stealing, they will just rationalize their actions with lame arguments, suchas there is no loss of a sale if you duplicate something you wouldn't have bought in the first place. It still is stealing but people will believe what is convenient for them to believe. At this point I'm bowing out.

Since that appears to be directed at me, I'd like to make a few points:

First of all, I don't believe I've ever used "hateful insults" in a disagreement, not least because you've never successfully punched holes in my arguments.

Second, I consider myself a very ethical person. I understand the difference between right and wrong, honesty and stealing, etc. I have no unethical actions to rationalize. Every ebook I own, every song, every other piece of content, was either legally free or bought and paid for. I register my shareware. I contribute to calibre. The fact that I disagree with the idea that a particular action constitutes a lost sale when there is no evidence that absent that action, a sale would have occurred -- and even when, as in the case of that hypothetical 13-year-old warez d00d, there is fairly compelling evidence there would be no sale -- does not mean that I do, or ever have, download illicit books, or, well ... anything.

Yes, I mentioned visiting such a site. I did so strictly for research -- specifically, to read the listing of titles indexed in a hopefully typical (randomly selected among the fantasy/sf offerings) collection of illicitly copied ebooks, so that I could have some background for a post I was writing on MobileRead. I didn't download anything -- just read the listing of books contained in that particular torrent. So you are accusing me of something I have not even contemplated doing.

But, back to the theft angle ...

You are, in all probability, sitting in a chair right now. If I entered your house and took your chair away, that would be theft, right? It's easy to identify: there's an empty spot where your chair belongs. If you were sitting in it at the time, you'd have abruptly hit the floor. But what if I, instead, zapped your chair with my Ultra-Duplotron Ray, which caused an identical chair to appear in the Duplotron Regeneration Chamber back in my secret mad scientist lab? Did I just steal your chair? How could I have, when your chair is still right where it was? You're neither hovering in mid-air nor sitting on the floor.

So obviously I didn't steal your chair, seeing as you'd still be sitting in it, wondering what that brief octarine shimmer around it was all about.

But I've also got a chair that I didn't pay for. Is it possible to have a thief without having a victim of theft?

What I stole there was not in fact a chair. You still have your chair, so it wasn't stolen. What I stole was a sale-of-a-chair from the chair factory. Whether that counts as theft is a much squirmier can of worms than simply yanking your chair out from under you. With my Ultra-Duplotron Ray, I got a chair identical to yours without paying for it. The factory isn't out any wood, or any glue, or even those little metal things they screw into the ends of the legs. But now I don't have to buy a chair, because I Ultra-Duplicated yours.

But, for me to have stolen a sale-of-a-chair from the chair factory, that sale would have to have existed. You can't steal something that doesn't exist in the first place! In the case of the chair, that would mean that if I hadn't duplicated your chair, I would have necessarily bought a chair from the chair factory (through however many layers of resellers). But what if I bought a used chair at a yard sale? Sat on the sofa instead? Built a chair of my own? Rented a chair from one of those rent-to-own ripoff places? Maybe I've spent all my money developing the Ultra-Duplotron technology, and I couldn't afford any chairs. Those are all alternative situations in which the sale-of-a-chair that I may (or may not) have stolen would not exist at all.

So there's no surefire way to determine whether I stole a sale-of-a-chair or not.

And that's the situation we're in with ebooks. When it come to the actual data file, we can be certain that it exists, but the necessary aspect of theft, that of depriving another person of their possession, is lacking. The file, like our notional chair, is still right where it was. When it comes to the sale, we know that was taken away, but we're missing another necessary aspect, namely whether it existed in the first place. There was no sale, but we don't know if there ever would have been one; maybe the reader would have gone to PG and downloaded Oliver Twist instead.

This is why trying to deal with non-tangible objects, such as ebooks, with metaphors for tangible objects, just doesn't work. The analogy doesn't fit. They're two different types of things, and trying to make one into the other is doomed from the outset.

So, while there is certainly something wrong going on when someone utilizes something that is offered for a price without forking over the cash, it's not theft. I'm not sure what else it might be called (aside, of course, from copyright infringement) but it's not theft. You've still got your chair and your ebook, and now so do I.

Mind you, I'm not trying to justify the illicit copying of ebooks. Something doesn't have to be called theft to be wrong, you know. Trying to call it what it clearly isn't just muddies the waters.

Oh, and I've derived my income from intellectual property in the past, and probably will do so in the future. I've been involved (on the receiving end) in a copyright infringement situation. I do have a horse in this race, and it's got a big copyright symbol painted on its back.