Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
Actually yes. Me. I'm a lawyer.
It's not the legal definition of "theft" that is in issue here. It's the legal definition of "property." What everyone calls "intellectual property" is NOT actually property. As a legal matter, it cannot be stolen (unless, of course, there is some other law specifically establishing some form of intellectual property as "property" for purposes of the statutes against theft. I believe that there are some concerning trade secrets. But in the case of copyright, there are none that I am aware of.)
That's why we have copyright laws. If your misunderstanding of the law of theft and property were correct, we would not need to have any copyright law. The very existence of copyright law demonstrates that "theft" doesn't do the trick. Otherwise, we'd simply bring prosecutions for theft.
My advice is to keep the law out of this discussion. It won't help you that, for example, it is not a violation of copyright law (in the US) to download a book from a pirate site for free, if all you are going to do is read it yourself. Nor is it a violation to strip DRM from a Kindle ebook in order to read the ebook on your Sony.
It MAY be unethical, in your view. But that's a different matter.
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Many thanks for your input on this - at least as far as the US is concerned the difference between theft and copyright infringement is now very clear. There may be other jurisdictions of course where things are different, but it is good to have it from the horses mouth - or maybe that should be the gorillas mouth
