Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald
I'm really getting tired of the old "theft and copyright infringement are not the same" crutch. They may have different legal definitions and even different penalties but, ethically, they are the same; you are taking something that isn't yours. Availability does not infer nor confer ownership.
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This has been around and around, but they are not the same ethically, I think. It is copyright infringement to rip your own CDs into mp3 format in order to listen to them yourself. If this is theft, most people are thieves - it loses its usefulness as distinction that means that you've taken something away from someone else.
Clearly, there are cases where someone obtains an illegal copy of something that is for sale at a reasonable price, which while technically copyright infringement, might seem to be ethically like stealing.
At the other extreme, there are cases where someone has purchased a CD and wants to listen to is, and needs to format shift to do so. To me at least, that feels totally different, but in the UK at least, it's a copyright infringement.
What I'm saying is that copyright infringement is a broad church.