Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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Untrue statement: "The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online."

It is theft, but it's not quite the same.

If somebody downloads a movie that they could have gotten on a Blu-Ray disk for $20, that doesn't mean the industry is out $20 -- if the person had to pay full price, they might not have gotten the movie at all. Downloads probably do displace purchases to some extent, so it's fair to say that this costs the industry some lesser number, say $5.

This has to be seen in the context of the ecosystem too. I've neither bought nor stolen music in the last year -- I just haven't been looking for music than I haven't already got. This is bad for the music industry, but I'm not stealing from them.

If a person goes to the theatre with his kids every other week and buys an optical disk every so often and also illegally downloads a movie from time to time, the movie industry might not be getting 100% of the cash they want, but they've got an engaged customer who's spending $80 a month on their products and who's always telling his friends about movies he likes. If the music industry tried to tighten the screws on this person because they think they can get $120, they may end up getting $0, just like the music industry ends up getting $0 from me... not because I'm a pirate, but because I'm disengaged.

When Amazon sold Lady Gaga's latest album for 99 cents, the volume of purchases crashed their servers. Even I bought the album, and I'm not a Lady Gaga fan. Why? Because it was 99 cents. It stands to reason, if lowering the price of a good by 90% increases sales 10 fold, then lowering it to zero increases consumption even more. So it's not unreasonable to say that 95% of pirated content would not have been purchased otherwise, and results in zero loss to the industry. It's also the only reasonable explanation why Hollywood continues to make record profits in the face of such "pervasive" piracy.

It's not theft. It's copyright infringement. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theft

The phrase "intellectual property" is a misnomer. It's like saying "corporate personhood".

I guess so. If you could steal the deeds to Harry Potter, then tell the publishers to deposit royalty checks in your account, that would be IP theft. You would have stollen the right to control publication, which is the real IP.

If you copy a movie, that's not the theft of the IP (i.e. the underlying copyright), it's infringement.

Piracy isn't like the theft of a piece of land, it's like trespassing. You don't say someone squatting in your lawn is stealing your lawn, you just say he's a trespasser.

Piracy isn't like anything, it's copyright infringement. There is no need for an analogy. What takes place is completely obvious.

Using any analogy actually decreases the understanding even for the layman.

While I understand why you, and others do it, it gets annoying that people try to define piracy out of existence, by wordplay.

I get told it's not theft, or piracy, it is copyright infringement. Now there is no intellectual property.

While I can understand wanting to re-frame the argument, reframing it in terms of terms much longer (copyright infringement) than the terms everyone current uses (piracy, theft) looks like a pure attempt to downplay the issue.

Not entirely sure what my point is here. Come up with a short (1 word, no longer than 7 letters) alternative for copyright infringement, and I might start using it. I'm not going to start talking about copyright infringement when having this discussion with my uncle. I'll say piracy.

Sure, use piracy. We all understand what that means. But I'm not trying to define it out of existence, I'm trying to use the english language effectively. It's plainly not theft. And furthermore theres no such thing as intellectual property. Unfortunately you will never own any of your copyrightable creations. Your will just own a temporary monopoly on their reproduction in certain circumstances.

It's as simple as that. Thinking that you own any creative works is misunderstanding the law and society. Thinking that copying something is theft of it(or indirectly theft of anything else) is a misunderstanding of the same.

Thanks for your reply.

I don't really understand the difference you place between physical property, and intellectual property. My ownership of both is imposed by the government. Without government support, I am sure I would lose control of both my physical and intellectual property very quickly (unless, in both cases, I started shooting people who tried to take them).

You don't own "Intellectual Property". You own a temporary monopoly on its reproduction in certain circumstances. But the creative work itself you don't own. Sure, if you paint a painting, you own the physical canvas, paint, and wood frame. Those are your property. But the depicted image? You don't own that. You own its copyright. Which is that temporary monopoly I described before.

It's not 7 letters, but it got me thinking, and I came up with copyfoul/copyfouling. I particularly pleased with it, especially after looking up the definition of foul, one of which involves committing infringement of rules.

Theft requires that you deprive the owner of their property. "Intellectual property" is not legally property in any form, and copyright infringement is hence not theft.

That the copyright holders try to perpetuate this fantasy is all the more galling because they often try to attach more limitations to their products via licenses than they would be legally able to if what they sold was not largely predicated on it not being property.

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