That’s dumb. If you are supposed to pay for something and you just take it instead, you stole it. You can argue word meanings and technicallies all day, but it’s a lot easier to just be real about what we are doing here.
It is copyright violation, not stealing. Yes, it is damaging to the content creator, under current economic and law structure, but it is not stealing. If you burn a house belonging to the content creator, you do not call it stealing, just because it is damaging to them. So, why do you insist on calling it stealing here?
On a side note, one can incision a society where there is no copyright. In that society it would be completely lawful and “non-damaging” to copy things. Copyright is an artificial construct that we choose to have, but it does not mean that we can not rejected (we, as in the whole society, not individual)
We’re talking about the crime of theft and the civil offense of copyright infringement. There is no argument about word meanings or technicalities, just what the law actually says.
Media companies want copyright infringement to be considered theft, and they’ve lobbied the government to try and change the definition in their favour, but the fact is the law distinguishes between them. Copyright infringement is wrong, but it is not a crime and nor is it theft.
If you’re selling apples, and I steal and eat an apple, that’s theft. You no longer have an apple, you had a cost price for that apple and you can’t sell it anymore to make the profit you would have made. Meanwhile, if you sell a game and I copy that game, you still have your original copies. Yes, you haven’t had the money I might have paid for a copy, but it hasn’t cost you anything and you still have an infinite number of copies to sell. If I was never going to buy the game from you anyway, then you wouldn’t have even got that either way.
The US is weird though, in that the courts award statutory damages for copyright infringement. If you fileshare a few songs to a pool of users they might stack up the fines for each user you shared to up to hundreds of thousands of dollars - nevermind that they never would have made that money from selling to all of those people you shared it with. In the rest of the world, they deal with actual damages, and claims for copyright infringement were rarely if ever very large.
If you stole a car, you physically took something away from somebody. If you download a car, the original is still there - you’re just making an exact copy for yourself for free. Same if you swiped a candy bar at a gas station - you’re depriving that gas station the use of their property, which is to sell and make money. If you download a candy bar, nothing is taken and the gas station can still sell the original.
So let’s be crystal clear here: what’s happening is not theft, because nothing was taken and the owner is not deprived of the use of their property. Can you argue that you’re getting something for free when you shouldn’t? Yes, and that’s more in line of denying profits rather than actual theft.
You can steal digital goods, but to do so you have to copy it and erase the original. Otherwise its just copying.
That’s dumb. If you are supposed to pay for something and you just take it instead, you stole it. You can argue word meanings and technicallies all day, but it’s a lot easier to just be real about what we are doing here.
By your own definition, if you TAKE it, you stole it. Nothing is taken.
It is copyright violation, not stealing. Yes, it is damaging to the content creator, under current economic and law structure, but it is not stealing. If you burn a house belonging to the content creator, you do not call it stealing, just because it is damaging to them. So, why do you insist on calling it stealing here?
On a side note, one can incision a society where there is no copyright. In that society it would be completely lawful and “non-damaging” to copy things. Copyright is an artificial construct that we choose to have, but it does not mean that we can not rejected (we, as in the whole society, not individual)
We’re talking about the crime of theft and the civil offense of copyright infringement. There is no argument about word meanings or technicalities, just what the law actually says.
Media companies want copyright infringement to be considered theft, and they’ve lobbied the government to try and change the definition in their favour, but the fact is the law distinguishes between them. Copyright infringement is wrong, but it is not a crime and nor is it theft.
If you’re selling apples, and I steal and eat an apple, that’s theft. You no longer have an apple, you had a cost price for that apple and you can’t sell it anymore to make the profit you would have made. Meanwhile, if you sell a game and I copy that game, you still have your original copies. Yes, you haven’t had the money I might have paid for a copy, but it hasn’t cost you anything and you still have an infinite number of copies to sell. If I was never going to buy the game from you anyway, then you wouldn’t have even got that either way.
The US is weird though, in that the courts award statutory damages for copyright infringement. If you fileshare a few songs to a pool of users they might stack up the fines for each user you shared to up to hundreds of thousands of dollars - nevermind that they never would have made that money from selling to all of those people you shared it with. In the rest of the world, they deal with actual damages, and claims for copyright infringement were rarely if ever very large.
🤡
If you stole a car, you physically took something away from somebody. If you download a car, the original is still there - you’re just making an exact copy for yourself for free. Same if you swiped a candy bar at a gas station - you’re depriving that gas station the use of their property, which is to sell and make money. If you download a candy bar, nothing is taken and the gas station can still sell the original.
So let’s be crystal clear here: what’s happening is not theft, because nothing was taken and the owner is not deprived of the use of their property. Can you argue that you’re getting something for free when you shouldn’t? Yes, and that’s more in line of denying profits rather than actual theft.