>> Copyright violation is not theft. ... The PDF "sellers" are not >> selling their property; they are selling right-to-copy.
(A perhaps better way for me to have phrased that might be, they are selling right-of-access to their (intellectual) property.) > And "escorts" aren't hookers because they sell their time, not the > sex, right? Possibly, in some cases - I don't know either industry (either the escort trade or the sex trade) well enough to be competent to comment. But what's your point? It looks to me as though you are trying to draw another analogy between copyright violation (and non-violation, eg, paying for a legitimate PDFed manual) and another industry, a service industry in this case - and, while I'm speculating here, your phrasing sounds to me as though it's trying to invoke disapproval by appealing to a culture in which the sex trade is illegal, or at least sub rosa. Any such analogy is bound to be flawed; if copyright violation were theft (of either property or service), we wouldn't need special intellectual property law. It's a fundamentally different thing and any attempt to shoehorn it into a framework designed for other things is bound to be a bad fit. That's why I speak out against attempts to paint copyright violation as other things, such as theft: it's an appeal to emotions, trying to equate "thing I want people to oppose" with "very different thing I expect people already consider bad". It's a fundamentally dishonest bit of oratory. I don't support copyright violation. But I also don't support attempts to bias people against it by depicting it as something it's not, whether the "something" is theft or selling sex. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
