I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.
If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then…idk find something better than this.
See comments below for more mental gymnastics
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We’re just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn’t seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
Property rights aren’t even fair. Big guys assert them, and little guys have them taken away. A good comment: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/5648831
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company’s resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don’t even put any additional load on Netflix’s servers. With their current monetization scheme I don’t even make the show’s producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren’t even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
When you steal cable, you don’t deprive the cable company of anything.
wrong.
I torrrented a gratis OS called Arch the other day. Please understand torrenting doesn’t equate to copyright infringement.
It was clear from context what was meant, i.e. torrenting copyrighted content. Let’s not be disingenuous about this.
It’s not gymnastics. It’s a pretty easy step. Corporations fuck you over. You fucked them over. No mental gymnast skills required for that
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.
If you hire me to paint your portrait and then don’t pay me you have stolen my labour. I have given my time and effort and have not been reimbursed for it.
If you paid me and then gave your neighbour a copy of your portrait then you have not stolen my labour.
No, that’s not theft. That’s fraud.
I don’t know if any freelancer who has not been paid for their work will agree with you
Freelancers may be upset if they’re mistreated, but that doesn’t mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn’t occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.
You’re being pedantic in the cases you want while complaining to others when they are differently pedantic. I’m not stooping to pretending to misunderstand due to pedantry.
If you are using the term theft colloquially, which most of us are as this is not a court, legal journal, economic journal, etc. Given that colloquial means the way people generally speak, as we are now, theft has a meaning: taking something that’s not yours through force or trickery. That would mean fraud is a type of theft in this case and not a different thing altogether.
So be a pedant I guess but it’s boring and lazy-brained.
I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.
If you’re not going to use the term in a colloquial context while you are in a colloquial setting, then you need to cite what source you are referencing for your definition. Given that you are talking about laws, then you need to recognize that every place defines things differently according to the law. So which law, where?
Being unnecessarily argumentative and snobby while at the same time not meeting your own standards is ridiculous.
Nah, no need to go to laws, just use a dictionary.
So salary theft by employers is not really theft. Got it.
If it’s theft, it’s theft. If it’s fraud, it’s fraud. It could be either. But “wage theft” is not copyright infringement, which is not theft.
Here’s what California’s Department of Industrial Relations says:
https://www.dir.ca.gov/fraud_prevention/Wage-Theft.htm
Stealing services doesn’t necessarily have to do with copyright infringement.
My point is that OP over simplification of theft is not even worth considering, from a legal or personal point of view.
Not really, theft is theft. Fraud is fraud. Just because something feels like theft doesn’t make it theft.
You were the one who quoted that wage theft is a form or fraud, so I’m not sure what’s your point. Yes, some theft can be fraud… but still theft.
Wage theft isn’t theft, it’s fraud.
So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?
Distribution.
Who cares? The point is, it’s not theft. The person who had the art still has the art, so it’s not theft.
That is an assumption made that the artist still has the original thing that was not paid for. I understand what you’re being pedantic about. I just don’t think you’re right.
What part of that statement suggests that the artist no longer has the original art? As stated, no theft occurred.
I guess you can’t steal anything when you just decide to limit the definition of the word.
But if we’re in reality and using the way words are actually defined then yes you can steal something intangible, and no it does not require someone to be deprived of something.
I’m not going to look up every state, but the Penal Code in some states explicitly define theft as:
So, I think it is reasonable to include intent to deprive as part of the definition.
You do understand the difference between penal code and the definition of a word, no? Surely the reason why the two are not at all even slightly interchangeable is plainly clear to anyone of reasonable intelligence.
In the state where I live, the penal code includes the legal definitions of words such as “theft”.
The legal system here does not use a Webster’s dictionary to define words. We use the penal code, code of criminal procedure, traffic code and other legal guidance codes to define the meanings of words used in the law and in official government communications.
These are the definitions that would be used by complainants in cases brought against pirates, if such a case were to be brought. For that reason, I believe these definitions are relevant here.
The penal code necessarily uses incredibly narrow definitions with very specific verbiage.
Using the word steal in OPs title is common use of the word, which aligns with the dictionary definition, they certainly are not quoting a legal definition
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
So much ‘verbal’ diarrahhea to try to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.
I pirate shit, that is a form a theft. Cope with it or stop doing it.
I was genuinely following your debate points until you got to:
I have been kind and polite our entire interaction. I didn’t even initially downvote you. In fact, I initially upvoted you. If I’ve worded something in a manner that implied I was attacking you, my apologies.
I’ve simply offered a reason one might include a specific phrase in their definition. There is no reason to be this angry or insulting in such an innocuous and ultimately meaningless debate.
You made some good points. I feel I made some good points. That should be the end of it, whether we agree or not. There’s no need to bring emotion into our interaction other than support for each other’s valid points.
You’re right, I got frustrated with work and took it out on you, I apologize.
I don’t think you understand how laws work. Many times, they are required to define terms in order to enforce the law.
Keep reading.
To what it actually means? Sure.
To selectively focus on one small sliver of the definition of the word, ignoring the full meaning of the word and the context to push your agenda? Smells like propaganda.
The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.
I guess you can steal anything when you expand the definition of the word to anything you want.
You live on the internet, it would take you 5 seconds to link to the “actual definition” you are using if the word was actually used that way.
I buy water, I own it. It just passes Thur my body or shower and pipes. That’s like saying you don’t own your tires as they wear away. You can own consumables. I get your underlying point about theft is more then taking away something. You could be depriving someone of money they would have made. Same with copyright theft. Someone buys your product and copies it then sells it. They didn’t steal from you directly but still caused harm. Piracy is a service issue, if things you buy on that service don’t work people will stop using that service. I’m not going to download 12 game launchers to play the games I want, I’ll stick with steam. Same way with tv/movies.
“muddy waters” is a saying, I don’t think you should take OP literally. The Rest you’ve written seems to agree with their sentiment btw.
Ahhh, thanks I misunderstood. I do agree but also I have a Plex server. I started it when I worked at blockbuster. Technically even ripping your Blu-rays can be illegal so, you have to find your one morals and not rely on laws.
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Copyright infringement causes less harm than the copyright itself. Piracy causes less harm than the cruelty and greed in production and distribution of mainstream media. Less harm is caused by theft than by a system that willfully starves the public and vaults away excess to drive demand and market price.
No artists should go hungry but then no non-artist should either. And yet in our system artists are enslaved and had their work taken from them so that enterprisers can live in luxury while the rest of us toil, undernourished.
How much media production does piracy fund?
You’re asking a loaded question.
You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.
You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can’t turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.
You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It’s made worse because we don’t know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don’t know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso’s estate). It’s a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.
So maybe you should ask better questions.
Is this when you steal someone’s copyright and collect licensing fees posing as the legitimate copyright holder?
Or indirectly.
Maybe, maybe not. But no theft occurred.
I meant infringe on the copyright. I don’t think what Disney and some others are doing is right with extending it but I do think the person that created the things should have some legal protection from it being copied for a bit.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.
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