It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.
Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.
This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.
If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).
If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.
Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed.
Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
> If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.
Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff.
> Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.
I wouldn't really call theft of services "stealing", but I'm not a native speaker. Maybe that's something people say.
> Pirating is theft.
Do you mean copyright violations or ship piracy?
I don't see how this follows, because torrenting a movie doesn't take a service from the movie right holder. They wouldn't even notice if they wouldn't actively monitor torrent users. Theft of service is a crime because it causes unpaid work for the service provider, right? That's why I said the gym analogy doesn't apply here.
Theft of services isn't just about causing unpaid work; it involves intentionally depriving a provider of the rightful compensation for their services.
Both cases are equal in principle.
Theft of IP falls under a different law in the US than theft of something like gym services.
That's disputable by a strict reading of the original copyright law, before it was perverted by those who would vacuum up "IP" solely for the control and for potential profit.
Copyright is ultimately intended "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". Limited times. "75 years past the author's death" is not in any practical way limited, when none of the people who were alive during or in the years postceding the author may access what should be, at that point, their rightfully publicly owned work. Current copyright terms hinder the progress of human knowledge and creativity. It incentivizes people who get lucky and create the next huge hit, to rest on their laurels for the rest of their life, getting paid repeatedly for the same work, with no incentive to create anything new. At the same time, those who would make a transformative use of a work (that isn't otherwise a fair use) are rebuked.
14+14 is all we need. Anything else is rent-seeking.
Don't even get me started on those in the world who would support perpetual copyright (not that you espoused that opinion, but many do). Fortunately, that one would require a constitutional amendment in the US to be legal.
The dirtiest tactic used in the copyright push was the Berne Convention. It allows countries to throw their hands up and say "sorry, we can't do anything, we have to harmonize the copyright terms", thus making a treaty that effectively supercedes various national constitutions.
It is interesting that the wording specifies “the useful arts.” Perhaps implying the existence of non-useful arts. I wonder what they meant there.
I would include a lot of media as non-useful arts. Like maybe someone could argue that really thoughtful movies are useful as works of philosophy or education. But most movies, especially most blockbusters are basically non-useful, right? They are just for fun. And so shouldn’t be covered by copyright.
From my understanding of it, "arts" doesn't even refer to artistic works, but more the work of artisans, those skilled in a manufacturing craft. By the same token, "sciences" doesn't just refer to the institution of Science, but of all human knowledge.
Never has a copyright infringer been brought up on theft charges.
It is not theft, no matter how much you claim that it is. If I duplicate and distrbute a work you hold copyright in, I have not "stolen" anything from you. I have infringed your copyright.
This is the problem with using "intellectual property" as the terminology. It incentivizes rightsholders to hold the mindset of "ownership", as one does with property. Copyright is a limited term right, after which the rightful ownership of the public enters the picture.
> If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym ..
Theft of services and copyright infringement are two very different bodies of law and cannot be compared this way.
For example, at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve this year, if I sell you a copy of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", that violates copyright law unless I have an agreement with the copyright holder. However, if I wait 1 minute, it will enter the public domain, and I am free to do so.
There is no equivalent to the public domain for using a gym.
> Creator of the thing sets the terms.
The copyright holder sets the terms that end users agree to, which is rarely the creator.
For example, the copyright for commercial software is often held by the company, and not the software developers who created it. The work product of an employee is considered "work-for-hire", which means the employer is treated as the legal author.
Companies don't create. Unlike people, companies don't exist except as a shared consensus.
This means the people who make unauthorized copies of software are almost never breaking terms set by the creator, they are breaking terms set by the copyright holder.
The distribution oligarchy for fields like music and books puts the creator in a Faustian situation where technically the creator does set the original terms, but there's no real chance of distribution without transferring copyright ownership and control of terms over to the distributor, with little say on the end-user terms.
We can see a glimpse of what a "creator sets the terms" world looks like with copyright termination, where a creator can regain copyright after 35 years, as with Victor Willis and the YMCA song.
> But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
The legally correct ending is "via copyright infringement", because copyright infringement isn't stealing.
I mean, wage theft is much closer to stealing, and yet wage theft is usually (but not always) under civil law while stealing is usually under criminal law, so clearly the legal distinctions are important.
There's been hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising over the last 50 or so years to try to convince everyone that copyright infringement is equivalent to criminal theft or privacy. It's apparently worked on you.
Yet even though wage theft is massive, with dollar amounts which exceed actual theft, there's an almost complete lack of advertising equating the two. Almost as if the people who profit from copyright transfers from creators, and the people who profit from wage theft, have more control over advertising, and thus our perceptions of how things work.
Like I wrote, wage theft, which is very much 'theft of income', is often a matter of civil law, just like copyright infringement.
Piracy and theft-theft are criminal law.
While you may think they are all the same, the law clearly does not, and you've been subject to a lifetime of corporate activism to convince you they are the same.
You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.
Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.
That world we life in sure feels innovative ..not. 1 new thing per day,with 8 billion humans alive and connected. The web promising the new edison or tesla, meanwhile those two lifed in a time of mass book copying without repercussions. Copyright is toxic, extractive landlording , mining innovationspaces with penalties and bureaucracies. Its deeply anti-libertarian on an individual level.
People should be allowed to violate copyright all they want, but if they create something comercial the "inspiring work" as derived from the consumption history should get a kickback.
That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.
If patents are done away with then we go back to trade secrets. Nobody will share their advancements. Then there is potential for advancements being lost.
agreed. i often consider that "open source" IS exactly what you are saying: release to others a non latest version of software, in continually rolling fashion, whereas upstream is internally used.
I have never been sympathetic to the notion that copyright has just been extended too long. Copyright itself is the problem. For example, for an academic from a poor region trying to keep up with publications in his field, even the short length of copyright set out by the American Founding Fathers, is too long.
Obviously. But HN is American-dominated, and the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the original length of 14 years, are what most people are likely to think of when it is mentioned that copyright used to be a short monopoly to spur the arts and sciences. In modern scholarship, where progress is continual and scholars hail from countries that have differing degrees of access to paid resources, any monopoly for any length of time is harmful.
What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had).
What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth.
No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.
There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.
I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.
Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.
Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.
IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
If I take your car, you are now without a car.
If I copy your software, you still have your software.
If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing.
The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.
It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.
