If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
Of course, if you give people fewer incentives to share their information they can and often will simply keep it private. You can't copy information that people never gave to you, regardless of the law.
I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened, other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand where you're coming from.
This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.
Nah, the people who pretend that definitions in a criminal law book override natural linguistics are being deliberately obtuse. Language exists mostly outside of a courtroom.
Given that identity fraud leads directly into what is functionally actual theft (taking money out of you bank account or taking up loans in your name and scarpering), there's no wonder the term's confused. Doesn't make it theft though.
It isn't legally theft, but because people commonly use the word that way, it is colloquially theft. The qualifications are different. Legal crimes are defined by law. English is defined by its common use. They're not necessarily the same thing.
Just as many wiki's are called Wikipedias, by analogy with the biggest ones; that is, they aren't. Or maybe more fitting here, the word 'download', which can mean data transfer or modification in pretty much any way with a person not knowledgeable about computers.[1] Those uses aren't uncommon, but they are nevertheless wrong.
I think you just finished a circle there, so I don't think there's much reason to continue this line of enquiry, given neither of us is going to change our stance.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
"IP theft" is not counter to that definition. Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition, does not require depriving someone else of something. As another valid example, see "identity theft".
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
Between these two pages, you should be able to understand why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called out in the intellectual property article.
"Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property can be used by infinitely many people without depriving the original owner of the use of their property."
Whereas theft has this definition:
"Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property."
My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law system in the USA. This means that the definitions for things are based on history, previous cases, and the statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good thing because redefining words can make previously legal actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold people to different standards based on how "hip" they are.
I said you don’t get to redefine what words mean unilaterally. I disagree that enough English speakers agree with the MPA definition for us to adopt it. I sure don’t.
Good thing I don't recognise the existence of that. We live in a society that does, and I despise that. At least the EU has the sense to not recognise software patents, so 'intellectual property' is not all-encompassing. Maybe one day they can loosen the grip further.
> As another valid example, see "identity theft".
'Identity fraud' is a much better term for what this is. Someone using my name, phone number and my mother's maiden name to get money in my name is not stealing my name and phone number; it's just fraud. It's much closer to lying than stealing.
English is not a programming language. You're only disagreeing with my articulation here, which is irrelevant in relation to the thing of the matter - namely what I mean rather than what I type into the keyboard physically.
