Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
If someone takes something of mine and is arrested, I hope the court is not going force the prosecution to prove I was harmed. Maybe my house has so much clutter I'm better off without that stuff. Maybe it was just a bunch of old junk I was about to throw out. Maybe I am pleased with my homeowner's insurance settlement (and the insurer did, for the long term, OK as well, because I was so pleased that I switched to them for car insurance). But it would be insulting if the judge allowed testimony concerning whether I was really harmed. Harm or no harm, it is wrong to appropriate my stuff without paying for it.
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But taking something--depriving the rightful owner of something tangible--is by definition harmful to the victim. Simply copying something that is intended to be disseminated and is being disseminated (as opposed to copying some private/personal/secret document), though--if there is no quantifiable harm to the originator of the material, and if the person who copied the material is not attempting to make money selling copies, what exactly makes it wrong?
I think the focus should be on stopping distribution to file-sharing sites--I think that's the problem, not my stripping DRM and making a backup copy and maybe providing a copy to a friend in the same way I might loan out a physical book.