From the first line of Wikipedia's article on theft: "In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
From Dictionary.com: "the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny.'
It's you and others who have to torture these definitions to begin using a term like "design theft," which very clearly doesn't involve depriving the owner of property or carrying anything away, and is obviously just copying instead.
If you have a counterargument to this, I haven't seen it yet, nor do I understand what it is. Why should we redefine copying as theft? It honestly just seems like propaganda to me. I'm making my points in good faith here.
> your use of "commodities" and "commodification" to suggest outright copies of existing goods are good for consumers.
I'm not trying to equate commoditization with copying. Rather, what I'm saying is that the entire process of commoditization is driven by people creating copies of other goods, or at least extremely similar versions. That's how it works. How else would commoditization happen, exactly?
Amazon is threatening to turn Allbirds' unique design into an entire category, and Allbirds doesn't like it:
https://image.businessinsider.com/5d83c7862e22af39354ac018?w...
But this is run of the mill for innovation. We've all seen other categories of shoes where the designs are extremely similar.
If you do something new, others will build off of it, and while that may be a challenge for you, it is a very good thing for consumers.
So you're saying if I rob your bank account it's not theft because it's not a physical good.
Okay.
> Amazon is threatening to turn Allbirds' unique design into an entire category, and Allbirds doesn't like it.
I am convinced you're misrepresenting what Amazon is doing. I've been trying to avoid that conclusion, but I can't avoid it any longer. Wool shoes aren't new. There are vendors before now. What is new is Allbird's specific look and minimally branded aesthetic. That is what Amazon is abusing.
> If you do something new, others will build off of it, and while that may be a challenge for you, it is a very good thing for consumers.
Let's destroy capitalism together to make this more likely to be true.
It's not about the physicality of the good. It's about it being rivalrous. If you take my money, I no longer have my money. You're not copying it. You're literally taking it away. Hence it's theft. I know you're more than intelligent enough to understand this concept if you try.
> I am convinced you're misrepresenting what Amazon is doing. I've been trying to avoid that conclusion, but I can't avoid it any longer. Wool shoes aren't new. There are vendors before now. What is new is Allbird's specific look and minimally branded aesthetic. That is what Amazon is abusing.
Okay sure, but that doesn't change anything about my argument. Allbirds' look is being commoditized, and perhaps in the future there will be an entire category of minimally-branded wool shoes, just like today we have entire categories of similar-looking shoes like wingtips.
> Let's destroy capitalism together to make this more likely to be true.
I don't understand what you're saying here.
But that's not true in the case of a bank account. Its insured. And often times you dont even get to see that the bank lost money, because of how banks are structured internally. And even if the bank can't insure it's the government can just print more money (and frequently does, without substantially impacting the value of the currencily). So me robbing your bank account isn't immoral, by your logic.
It seems to me like there is a hole in your metaphorical boat here if it allows such an obviously immoral action to be considered.
At some point you need to admit that reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property or depriving them of a livelihood in some fashion is some sort of theft. Otherwise you're just begging people to produce a series of trivial and obvious examples showing these kinds of obvious contradictions.
> Okay sure, but that doesn't change anything about my argument. Allbirds' look is being commoditized, and perhaps in the future there will be an entire category of minimally-branded wool shoes, just like today we have entire categories of similar-looking shoes like wingtips.
There already is this market. Tom's did it before and there are plenty of other examples. Amazon's specifically copying one vendor and then using their horizontal integration to hide the fact that Allbirds even exists.
That's not a commoditized good no matter how much you want to try and repeat the phrase.
The fact that my money gets replaced by someone who has agreed to do so (the bank, the insurer, whoever) doesn't mean it wasn't stolen. The very fact that someone had to reimburse or replace it is proof that it was stolen. That reimbursement couldn't happen otherwise.
Perhaps you could argue that it was stolen from the bank and not from me, sure. But it was still stolen.
Compare to copying. If you share an idea or reveal a shoe design, and then I copy you, have you been deprived of that idea or design? No. It's still in your possession, which it never left, not even for a moment. Nobody needs to reimburse you by giving you another copy of that idea to replace the one you lost, because you never lost it.
> At some point you need to admit that reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property or depriving them of a livelihood in some fashion is some sort of theft.
Reducing the potential value of someone else's work or property is literally the very essence of competition in a capitalistic system lol.
And this is what I predicted your argument would boil down to in the very end. You can't build a case that there was any actual theft of an idea. The best you can do is argue that original worker should be entitled to an exclusive right to profit from that idea. That concept has a name, and it's called copyright, not theft.
> Otherwise you're just begging people to produce a series of trivial and obvious examples showing these kinds of obvious contradictions.
You haven't shown any contradictions. For some reason you just aren't grokking the concept of rivalrous vs nonrivalrous goods.
I'm trying to find a reason why you've got such an elaborate and specific definition of theft (when english dictionaries certainly don't include it) but when you use words that have clear meanings in the space of economics you're willing to stretch them to metaphorical limits (e.g., your use of "commodities" and "commodification" to suggest outright copies of existing goods are good for consumers.
> It's only recently in human history that we've begun to assign rightful ownership to intangible non-rivalrous things such as ideas, inventions, designs, words, and the like. And that came about not for moral reasons so much as for utilitarian reasons, e.g. perhaps we will incentivize more creation if we give creators temporary monopolies over profiting from their intangible ideas.
This isn't true. The idea of misrepresenting other people's work as your own as theft (in particular: music and writtne work) is an old concept with examples in literature long before the advent of copyright law. It's pretty trivial.
> Of course, any copyright owner is financially incentivized to extend their ownership for as long as possible, and so thanks to lobbying from companies like Disney, copyrights now extend dozens of times longer than their original length. And we also have new propaganda terms like "intellectual property" which were intentionally created to get people to begin thinking of ideas as property, and copyright violation as theft, and immoral. Unfortunately it seems to be working.
The infinite extension of copyright in the US is a bad thing, I agree. But there is a difference between "infinity is bad" and "allowing people to be rewarded for their work in a society that starves them if they don't work" that clearly exists. You seem to agree that design and art is work.
But if we're going to level the accusation of "goalpost shifting", it sure seems like a goalpost shift that you're trying to draw a line from "infinite Disney copyright" to "Amazon has created an inferior but vaguely similar looking product and used their historically unprecedented and immense capitalization and ability to manipulate the retail market to capture the profits a small vendor was growing."
> But it's not theft. Nobody is actually being deprived of any goods. Nobody is actually "stealing" any designer's work from their shelves and drawers.
Theft is not exclusively limited to "goods" in any framework I can find. Money is not a "good" but stealing money is clearly theft.
> This is 100% about people wanting to be granted exclusive legal access to profit.
Well yes, because this is what they're required to do in a capitalist society that says they starve if they don't work. And since we're at least in agreement that design work, performance and art are work with concrete (if relative) value, this is most folks only option. A few hundred years ago, you might have said "access to patronage" instead of "exclusive access to profit".
> Which is fine if they want to lobby for that, but using words like "theft" is inaccurate and propaganda, and injects a moral component where there is none.
If it means they're materially damaged, isn't that the immoral bit? We can surely argue for moral and immoral theft and there is a rich tradition of this (starting from the most basic, "if a starving family steals a loaf of bread from a store to feed their kids, that is theft but is it immoral"
Oh also:
> We must be talking past each other, because I sincerely don't understand why you think I'm arguing this. Where am I saying that people shouldn't have this choice? I've said the opposite.
You literally just did this. You just said:
> I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.
Not only is this begging the question, but it's a false ... uh... trichotomy? That's a word now.
Skipping ahead:
> No, not at all. I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.
You were arguing it shouldn't be immoral and using as evidence of this that it is not illegal. Your definition of "theft" is curiously limited, but I think this is all a distraction. Ask anyone on the street if misrepresenting a musician's work as your own without permissions is moral. You will get an unambiguous answer.
Given how obvious this value is in our culture, your presentation of it as "not theft" seems... well... it stands out.
> Yes, the point. Nobody is saying capitalism should be unrestricted. In my view, capitalism is created by restrictions. It's all about restrictions.
This is not a well-supported view by history, economics or the philosophies underlying economics.
> It's an attempt to limit the ways that people and companies can profit so that they're forced to do so in ways that create value for consumers, e.g. innovation, lower prices, easier access.
This is not even faintly the definition of capitalism. Its also an attempt to define it by intent which is... a strange anthropomorphism.
> But no, I don't support unrestricted capitalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, I think the term "unrestricted capitalism" is basically nonsensical and an oxymoron.
I'm sorry, you're strictly wrong here. "Unrestricted capitalism" has a clear definition. It means "the deciding political and social factor is the accumulation and exercise of capital." This is only a few steps removed from, "the deciding political and social factor is the blessings of our Lord and Savior upon the King's family."
The thing you're discussing is interesting, but it's difficult to parse because you're muddling it with a lot of pre-existing terms in this space.