Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
It's theft in my jurisdiction. Although I don't know of any prosecutions, mostly because the people providing the stolen IP aren't located here.
Also, even under federal law, criminal copyright infringement is still criminal, not civil.
The federal act allowing prosecutions for certain types of noncommercial infringment is called the NET Act, with NET standing for "No Electronic Theft."
The Bureau of Justice Statistics categorizes these crimes as "Intellectual Property Theft."
As a practical matter, most IP holders prefer to sue because they can do so easily and don't have to convince prosecutors to take time away from prosecuting murders and rapes to bring thousands of small theft cases. But, legally, in jurisdictions that have adopted most forms of the model penal code, most forms of "software piracy" would could be prosecuted as "theft".
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Taht's why, in an international forum like MR, it's better to specify the jurisdiction.
In Italy theft and copyright infringment follow different procedures in the court, and they cannot be confused (they're even investigated by different enforcing agencies)...
So, if you specify "in the USA" whenever you call "theft" the act of downloading digital goods without permission of the copyright holder, a lot of confusion can be avoided.
