Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
I certainly agree that it's theft.
But as you can see from the above posts, at least one person thinks that theft of intellectual property for their own gain is okay.
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For someone who's claiming to be misunderstood, I think it's you who misunderstands - there is no guarantee of theft going on. If I read a book from a library and remember all of its ideas an intricacies (or god forbid I have a photographic memory and can recite long passages from memory) am I stealing IP? If you cannot show harm, you cannot posit theft. If you read a book at the library (or better yet, let's say you read a book at the bookstore without paying for it) are you gaining something? Sure. Are you stealing? No.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
Just to be clear, I did not bring this "civic duty" nonsense into the discussion. Nor am I making "runaway analogies." I have made direct analogies and cited the law in place.
Your distinction between piracy and bootlegging in terms of what makes one right and the other wrong is artificial. You claim that only difference is that one makes money off someone else's work. However, in both cases, the author lost money. Just a question of how much money.
I disagree that there is no clearcut definition of copying. A full, complete, usable copy. That is what has always been discussed. And it's something which a router, packet, or inode does not provide you with. As if we didn't understand the term in the first place. Sheesh.
Show me exactly how and why my statements are "runaway analogy." Comparing theft to theft, crime to crime certainly are proper analogies, and nothing "runaway" about them at all, your qualifier is just rhetorical nonsense.
Show me, similarly, how a "copy" is not clearly defined, or understood in the context of my first post on the matter. Claiming a packet is a copy is just a smoke screen, a way to misdirect the discussion. (Ironic that I am accused of "runaway analogies" and "melodrama" by the person who wanted to argue that packets are actual copies!) It was completely clear what I meant.
And exactly how does the copyright law not apply to the issue at hand?
Sheesh. Seriously. Sheesh.
-Pie
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It's a runaway analogy because you're comparing something that you cannot prove harm or gain to someone being murdered. I think that's a pretty big difference. The author hasn't lost money. Nobody has taken money out of the author's pocket. The author
may have lost a sale, but you cannot guarantee that people who will download a book for their own use would have purchased the book otherwise. In fact, you cannot prove that any sales are lost at all.
And I'm not making declarations of right and wrong - I'm saying that you cannot compare the two.
Regarding copies, by the definition you've just stated I never have a copy of any file on my computer because I cannot have a "full, complete, usable copy" without also having the software that knows what that is, and OS to back it, and the hardware to back that. If you're talking about the data itself, well, if I copy the book from my computer to my ebook reader I'm actually creating 2 copies - one in RAM, and one on the reader. Then, when I read the book on my reader, I'm creating yet another copy. Face it. you're not talking about illegal copying - you're talking about limiting or eliminating distribution - which is not the same thing.
You're not comparing theft to theft because you cannot guarantee that theft is taking place. You're not comparing crime to crime because you cannot guarantee crime is taking place. You can, however, guarantee that where bootlegging is concerned, and that's why nobody will argue that bootlegging isn't theft.
Also, where did I say anything about packets? Irony? Not so much.
My point is that while everything is copyrighted the same way, an ebook and a paper book have drastically different allowances on what is ok. It is
impossible to sell an ebook without allowing infinite copies (if you want to take the data vs your self-contained thing which isn't possible itself). That's why your argument is a moral one. You're not even arguing against copying (though you insist that you are), you're arguing against distribution. Distributing a copy which you made is illegal. Sure. However, downloading a copy that someone else has made without redistributing it is not (quite explicitly so in Canada, actually). The reason for that is that you are not decreasing supply, you are not costing the artist/producer/etc extra money, you are not harming
anyone, though you can, obviously, help by buying a real copy of the book (or that author's other works).
Copyright does not apply here. Not outside of the US at the very least (and even then, I'm fairly certain that the DMCA doesn't so much forbid this as forbids circumventing DRM. If you download something off of the internet that has already had the DRM stripped, you're not actually breaking any copyright laws as far as I can tell).