[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

"Depriving a creator control over his creation" (without their consent) violates copyright law... so it is illegal. If I write a novel and copyright it, I have the right to withhold that novel from specific use or any use at all, as long as the copyright is in effect. Violating that is against the law.

Authors don't have the right to total control over their creations.

If your novel is found to be libelous, or a threat to national security, someone can step in and prevent you from distributing it. If someone dislikes it, and writes a review that pans it, and you don't sell any more books after that, that, too, is a legal way to deprive you of sales. If your book is popular, someone can quote from it extensively in their book, "The Philosophical Meanings of Steve Jordan's Book." You don't get to control their use of your content.

There are legal limitations on others' use of your content--but you don't get to decide what those limitations are.

CERTAIN TYPES of copying, CERTAIN TYPES of depriving control of use of content, are illegal. Other types are legal. There is no law that says "depriving a content-creator of control of his/her content is punishable by a fine of $X and/or prison sentence of Y time."

[quote]... Of course no physical property was stolen, but it is still against the law, because it violates copyright law. So the discussion over whether copying an e-book should or should not be legal has already been settled by precedent. [quote]

It is still against the law. And it should be.
It is not theft.

Libel is against the law. It's also not theft, even though it can result in loss of income.

Yes, copying a digital file of copywritten work for personal profit (or to deprive the copyright owner of potential profit), without the copyright owner's consent, is illegal.

Hmm. Mostly, yes, but I can think of a few examples off the top of my head where that's not true.

1) Educational--teachers are permitted to, for example, make 40 copies of a poem to hand out to the class, instead insisting that each student buy a book for that one poem.

2) Personal use--I'm not required to buy a digital copy of a book I own physically, and have scanned & converted myself in order to avoid buying the DRM'd version. (I don't have any of these. Yet. But I'm considering starting a collection; the used paperback version is often cheaper than the ebook version, and I don't mind scanning, OCR'ing and formatting books. I've done this for a few books that don't have commercial ebook versions available; is that depriving the author of potential profit? Certainly I don't intend to buy an ebook version if one becomes available.)

3) Reviews: Reviews are allowed to copy some of the original, for the purpose of convincing people not to buy the original. That's use of the author's work, for profit, without consent.

All of those are copying without permission for profit or to avoid paying for new copies. None are copyright infringement in the US.

Secondly, splitting hairs over the choice of words is largely irrelevant. It's semantics, and seems to be based on whether the arguer wants copyright infringement to sound like a very bad thing, or only a slightly bad thing. (And please, no "badcrime." Sounds like you've been re-reading 1984 too many times!) Whether it's a car or a candy bar, theft is theft. You might as well call it what it is.

It's semantics, and semantics are important to our laws.

Theft covers both cars and candy bars. It does not cover "unauthorized use of someone else's arrangement of thoughts in a fixed format."

If you can only convince people that copyright infringement is bad by pretending it's an entirely different type of lawbreaking, the arguments against it must be pretty weak.