Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
It is never stealing; it's copyright infringement, or sometimes distribution of illegal copies.
It's not "assault," either, no matter how hurt the author or publisher feels. Nor is it "murder," even if an author commits suicide from low sales.
Which doesn't mean it's acceptable or legal--just that "theft" is not the relevant legal issue. Attempting to assign a simple, emotionally-charged crime to a complex aspect of business law just shows that the anti-copying crowd can't get enough support for their stance if they use accurate terminology.
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Thank you.
It also shows how successful the entertainment industry's PR has been in obfuscating the issue, by the number of people here who are failing to differentiate the terms and are instead trotting out the "But it's STEALING!" accusation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
The problem with an industry that is based on selling digital files is that it depends on the consumers playing make-believe-- it depends on them pretending that it isn't extremely quick and extremely easy to make an arbitrary number of exact copies on their own, without depleting the number of source files in any way. It reminds me of the late, great WKRP in Cincinnati, where Les Nesman, wanting office walls around his exposed desk, put tape on the floor and pretended to have office walls. He expected everyone else to play along with him and "knock" when they wanted to talk to him or enter his "office." But those pieces of tape only counted as walls as long as other people were informed that they were supposed to pretend that they were walls, and chose to play along. Pretending that a digital file is something that is in any way a scarce resource that can be depleted or deprived from its source is putting strips of tape on the floor and expecting everyone to pretend that there are walls there.
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Excellent example.
