• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
A great moral crime, no doubt...
The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.
> the actor "stole" the show
> A team has... "stolen" the game
These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.
> Mallory "stole" his fiancé
Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.
> the rival company "stole" your secret formula
> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"
These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.
Piracy is not stealing.
Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.
Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.
How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).
They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.
Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?
Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.
I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:
* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)
* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.
Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.
The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.
I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.
- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM
- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself
I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.
problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.
That is their problem though :)
The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).
I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.
Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.
Edit: Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.
The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.
Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.
A ride requires a vehicle, a driver, fuel, etc. You can’t freely copy a vehicle, a person’s time, or the fuel required to power the vehicle.
A theater requires electricity, seating, space for seating, an audio and video system, etc. These are also things that you can’t freely copy.
Not everyone is a A-List celeb or director.
The legal term you're looking for is probably "theft of services", e.g. https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/theft-of-services/).
And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.