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Originally Posted by TGS
You are equating copyright violation with stealing - people who conflate these two things are scum.
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Stealing is a moral category, not a legal category. There is no "crime" of "stealing". But people who steal from authors are scum. Not because of what they believe, but because of what they do.
Seriously, I can't believe that you can come out in public and acknowledge that, yeah, the author worked for months or years on this book, but I'm going to steal it and not pay him/her because I can.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheSFReader
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I was talking about "stealing," which is a moral category. But what would clearly be copyright infringement under federal law is going to be "theft" under state law. Federal and state law are different.
Under *federal law* there is a crime of copyright infringement. It is different and distinct from the federal law of theft. That's what the supreme court was saying in its opinion. And that's all that it was saying - you can follow the analysis in part II of the discussion, where the court is determining whether congress intended for the federal theft statute to cover copyright *in light of* the copyright act's criminal provisions.
98% of criminal prosecutions in the US are *state* proceedings. The supreme court's determination of congressional intent with respect to the federal crime of theft has no bearing on the meaning of state laws. States have different laws, using different words. And in every state that I know of, using someone's IP without their permission is defined as "theft" (or "larceny," in states with the older nomenclature). It's clearly the case in my state.