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Comment by mrdingle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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