Quote:
Originally Posted by RichL
I understand the point exactly, you cannot, so to speak, steal what's not in a persons pocket.
The way I see it is that that argument is simply a justification for stealing. The exact (I believe) equivalent in the physical world would be if I were some sort of a weird multi-millionaire and printed up thousands of books of a just released best seller then stood outside all the bookshops and gave them away to anyone that would accept one. Would that meet the legal definition of physical theft by those that accepted the book when they knew it wasn't one published by the author? Probably not (But who knows for sure. :-)) but the fact is, by willfully preventing the author from making as large a profit as would have been made without my giveaway they would be stealing those profits just as surely as if they had taken that money out of his wallet.
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That would be copyright infringement as you would be reproducing and distributing it without permission. Still not theft, even with the argument that the author and publisher are not going to have as many sales.
You just have to realize that despite the similarities, they're still different things. They're bad, no one is saying otherwise. Personally I feel that there should be a better term than copyright infringement, because that covers a lot more than just downloading a copy of something you shouldn't have. "File sharing" while has a narrower scope, it gives a non nefarious connotation, and lumps legit in with the nonlegit. Swindicate, for swindle and duplicate? If you go with an existing term, I'd say bootlegging is a more appropriate term than theft.