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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Copying music or a movie or software in violation of its license terms is not really stealing. When you steal something, the other person doesn't have it anymore. E.g. if someone steals my watch, I don't have a watch. But the owner of IP doesn't have an actual loss when you copy it without permission. At most they forego some revenue they feel they're entitled to.

People in the music industry have been doing their best to stretch the despised word "stealing" over onto this new behavior they want to discourage, but that doesn't make it so.

At best it's a metaphor to call illicit copying "stealing," but really more of a lie.

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Darn, now I'm going to be downmodded into oblivion ;)

But I don't understand. Let's say Wal-Mart is selling a chair. Some guy comes in and steals the chair. Wal-Mart "forgoes some revenue they feel their entitled to" because of the missing chair. Except wait, they were legally entitled to that revenue, same with music's licensing agreements. The only difference is you can't prove that someone that stole music would've bought it if he didn't have the option to steal it.

..So because it's a gray area it's not stealing? Making up a new word to call the behavior just to make everyone feel better seems like a bad idea.

The difference is that the instance of the chair cost Wal-Mart money.

Imagine if you had a machine that could reproduce something from a photograph of it. You could then go to a shop and take a photo of a chair, and reproduce yourself a chair from it. But the shop wouldn't take an actual loss in that case.

There's nothing gray about that difference. If you steal a chair, the value of their inventory decreases by one chair, and if you merely reproduce one from a photo, it remains the same.

Nor do we need to make up a new word for the behavior. The English word is "copying." It's centuries old at least, and the behavior, in the case of manuscripts, goes back millennia.

So I'm not proposing we use a new word to make everyone feel better. I'm proposing we continue to use the existing word, instead of the one the music industry is trying to get us to switch to to make everyone feel worse.

The word "copying" works if it's not illegal, but it is. You have to say "illegal copying" for accuracy.

Let's look at it from another angle. Let's say someone paints a nice painting of a hand scrunching up a piece of cloth. If you think about it, an original painting is a form of artificial DRM. It's artificially more valuable than a copy, which causes implicit DRM.

But let's say it wasn't. For whatever reason, people just didn't feel like the originals were worth paying for. What do the artists do who want to make a living that way, if they're not good at other skills yet? Maybe they've devoted their whole life to painting. It puts a lot of creative people out of business for no good reason. It's not because their work isn't valuable, it's just because people can copy it.

Do you think they should be protected?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_M...

A little post-modernist theory, just to add fuel to the fire. People have been struggling with the issues surrounding cheap and easy reproduction since the 30s - but art has survived. It just changes.

So we agree that copying isn't stealing because stealing involves an actual loss for the victim, right?

It's fine with me if people want to use the phrase "illegal copying," but they should understand that they're on swampy semanic ground, because the meaning of "illegal" fluctuates depending what laws the music and movie industries have most recently bribed their pet congressmen to pass.

How to encourage young artists is a totally separate question. However, I will say (having been one) that most social-engineering type approaches go badly wrong.

The word is "infringement."

When you take a photograph of someone, you are stealing their soul. Photography would be more accurately termed "soul piracy". It's the same way with music.

Stealing is taking the control of property from someone, not just the physical property itself. Because taking control of something is usually done by physically taking it, this aspect seems to define stealing, when really it's secondary to what stealing really is.

This argument is circular, because it assumes that a digital copy is property in the same way something physical is.

Did a monk making a copy of a manuscript "take control" of it? Not as most people use the word "control."

The information is the property, it doesn't matter what the format is. iTunes will still charge you .99c even though what you're buying is only a digital copy.

By "control" of something, I mean the ability to decide what happens to it. A monk copying a manuscript doesn't take control of the original, but he is able to then decide what happens to that information. That's what's being taken.

In the case of a monk I would guess spreading a religious text wouldn't be a problem for the person who gave it to him. But when someone copies the latest Harry Potter manuscript the author/publishers do have a problem, because they are losing something. As they can no longer control what happens to that content their ownership is diminished. And when someone's ownership is taken from them against their wishes, what else would you call that, other than "stealing"?

Yes! Thank you. Perfect description.

You would take someone's ownership of a recording if you took the only copy of the master tape. That would be stealing. Merely making a copy of a digital song on your friend's computer changes the copyright owner's ability to control what happens to their content not one iota. So by your own standard it's not stealing.

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