To invalidate that argument you have to redefine ownership, and that is a tricky thing.
However, we can't conflate access to another's property and the deprivation of that property. If I walk on my neighbor's lawn without his permission, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership. Similarly, If I misappropriate someone's copyright, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership.
In each case, the owner's rights are being invaded, but the owner is not deprived of ownership.
Perhaps this explains the problem analogizing copyright infringement to theft. It doesn't quite fit. Theft necessarily deprives the owner of his property, copyright infringement does not.
Therefore, a more appropriate analogy in the law might be to trespass. If someone trespasses on my property, they violate my right to exclude other's access to such property without stealing it. The same can be said for misappropriation of intellectual property.
- Copyright law provides authors a financial monopoly. It gives them exclusive rights as to how a work may be sold, displayed publicly, or performed publicly. It does not make that work the "property" of the author. - Copyrighted material is known as "infringing material", which is not the same as stolen goods. - Violators are said to have "misappropriated" a copyright, or to have "infringed" upon the province of a copyright, thus committing "copyright infringement". This is not the equivalent of piracy.
Even trespassing doesn't seem like a valid analogy. But I would argue that we don't really need to analogize. Why not just look at the law for what it is?
The point is incentive authors to create new works by granting them a financial monopoly on their works, but to protect public interests and the freedom of speech, information, and ideas by making this monopoly limited in time and scope. It wasn't designed to prevent people from accessing an author's work. It was to prevent them from profiting off of it.
> Perhaps simpler: If you make something and I take it
without permission, I'm a dick.
- If I breathe, and you grow a plant that utilizes the carbon dioxide from my breath without my permission, are you a dick?
- If I go to the park, make a snowman, and leave, and you use the snow to build an igloo, are you a dick?
- If I'm singing a song in a subway, and you're also in the subway, and your tape recorder picks up a faint echo in the background from a mile away, are you dick if you keep the recording?
- If we live in a hunter gatherer society, and I create the idea to build a house, and you take my idea and build a house on your land, too, are you a dick?