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Originally Posted by Shaggy
Borrowing something without permission has nothing to do with copyright violation.
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It does if you want to photocopy my notes without my permission.
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This is an excellent example of why using the wrong terms is just confusing you. They did not steal your notes, they photocopied them. You still have the notes and can sell them if you want to. Yes, the person photocopying your notes has deprived you of a potential sale, but it was money that you never had in the first place and may never have gotten anyway. That is absolutely not taking money from your wallet. Removing money from your wallet is stealing something that you already have.
The reason that people on here are objecting to throwing the terms 'theft" and "stealing" around when talking about copyright infringement is because it causes a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of the real issue. You are a perfect example of that.
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As I have pointed out here, there are two issues, legal and ethical. Copyright is a legal term. Theft is both a legal and an ethical term.
I will point out that both depriving someone of economic incentive to work and depriving them of a fair wage for their work are both discussed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church under the section dedicated to stealing. Obviously I will not insist that anyone accepts the Catholic Ethical framework; however it does show that I am not an ethical radical for considering the denial of economic incentive and wages before they are received to be ethically equivalent to theft.
If copyright violation does not meet the legal definition of theft, but I think one is one rather shaky ground to try to claim that it is in a different ethical realm than theft.
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Bill