On Tuesday 24 May 2005 23:11, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote: > It's taking of something that you don't have permission to. If that is > not stealing, what is? It's not taking, either.
Taking and stealing both imply that the person you took from now has less of the thing you took. A zero-sum system. This is not true for digital data copyable at zero cost. The correct term is not taking, but copying. In copyright infringement, you commit a crime not because you take something and the copyright holder now has less property. He doesn't even have less 'intellectual property'. However, the market price and power of his copyright is now _potentially_ smaller, because 1) you _might_ redistribute, competing with him, and 2) if you hadn't copied it illegally, you _might_ have bought it yourself. So the wrong you're doing isn't stealing. You're causing a _potential_ loss of profit due to loss of potential future sales. (Although it is arguably highly probable in some circumstances.) Now this doesn't sound as evil as piracy and theft. But just in case it still sounds evil, I'll mention another name for 'causing potential loss of future sales'. It's called competition. And the only reason copyright infringement is different is due to a legal monopoly granted in very different circumstances from today, which makes some people argue it's not necessary anymore. But whether or not it's necessary, it's not automatically evil (or automatically ethically acceptable), and it certainly isn't theft - so please stop calling it that. -- Dan Armak Gentoo Linux developer (KDE) Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951
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