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Old 01-07-2010, 10:59 AM   #212
cian
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<i>Only in a strictly legal sense as currently defined.</i>

Well there are only two senses in which theft can be defined. The social sense (something that is generally accepted as "theft") and the legal sense.

<i>It is theft, it is theft of intellectual property.</i>

But you can't just state this as if its a given, or obvious. It isn't. Intellectual property is pretty nebulous, requiring a huge legal framework to define and the legal definitions do not have a particularly strong social basis (people informally infringe IP all the time, and don't see anything wrong with doing so), which is partly why the complex legal definitions are needed. If I download a book you wrote and read it, what have you lost? The revenue? Well I haven't taken it from you, its simply that you've been deprived of a potential revenue (and only if I downloaded it with no intention of paying you). Nothing tangible has been taken, only something nebulous. And it is no different in practice to if I had borrowed the book from my dad, or the university library, or bought it from Oxfam. Your IP has been used and you haven't benefitted.

Quote:
It is wrong, it's a crime, and immoral as well depending on the specifics.
So's murder, but its not generally seen as theft, though there's probably a stronger case for it to be defined as such (the theft of another person's life, though its hard to hang onto it once taken).
And incidentally, while stating that its immoral lets other know where you stand, it is not really an argument. Lots of people think abortion is immoral, but simply stating it is unlikely to convince those who don't. And defining why it is immoral is going to be tricky. Is it immoral to download a book by somebody who is dead, but whose heirs (that he never met and never knew) own the copyright? Why is it immoral to download something 21 years after it was written, when a hundred years ago that would have been perfectly legal in some places. If you want to define it as some kind of universal bad, well its tricky.
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