The category distinction is vital IMO as it is right that there is greater protection under the law against someone who steals your belongings vs someone who merely duplicates them.
If one considers that right to free enjoyment of ones personal property is oft considered a basic human right then it can readily be seen why denying someone ownership is considered to be a greater wrong, generally, that denying someone sole rights to reproduce a particular work.
Moreover the level at which the state intervenes has become twisted (at least in the UK) wherein the state is beginning to get involved (under USA's pressure it seems) in very low value tortfeasance on behalf of large corporations whilst at the same time ignoring rather higher value crimes (such as theft) against individuals. Indeed, though I'm not really on top of this one [perhaps you can elucidate], it seems that more copyright infringement is being treated in the USA as criminal than is elsewhere.
In short whilst, yes, copyright infringement is still illegal even if it's not criminal I don't agree that you can claim all denial of alienable rights is equal, or even nearly so, which appears to be the thrust of your argument.
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"or with your name attached" is only true with provisos; there are several laws under which I could object to your passing off (in the common sense) of this work as mine which would prevent you from legally selling the right to do so.
Here's a cool example that includes both civil law and criminal law: in America, if you trespass on someone's property without being told not to, that's a civil violation, and the only thing the owner can do is sue you for any actual damage you caused. But if you trespass after they tell you not to, it's also a criminal violation and they can ask the state to prosecute you. That's why you see warning signs saying "no trespassing - violators will be prosecuted." It skips the first step.
Point being, sometimes the legal system even treats infringement of the same alienable right under entirely separate branches of law, depending how many times you've done it. And with trespass, it's calibrated pretty well.
Copyright in America is calibrated terribly. It's mostly civil rather than criminal (you can tell because it's "RIAA vs." instead of "United States vs."). But unlike most civil suits where you're basically compensated in rough proportion to the harm you suffered, there's this incredibly punitive fine of up to $150,000 for each mp3, which is collected by the civil party suing rather than the government. So it looks a lot like criminal enforcement. It's grievously weird.
(Actually, there is an analogous law I can think of, the Clean Water Act. Under that law any citizen who lives in a polluted area can sue a polluter and recover a large bounty for winning the case, even if the actual damages that citizen suffered are trivial. This basically offloads the work of enforcing pollution laws from the government to private citizens, which presumably made the Clean Water Act cheap enough to pass. And that Act has been incredibly successful -- we've gone from like 2/3 of America's waterways being impaired to 1/3. So maybe the copyright laws are just the right tool for the wrong job?)
Anyway! What's going on is: (1) copyright laws are all screwed up because only one side is at the bargaining table, and that side is panicking; (2) the internet makes copyright laws impossible to enforce, while also (3) greatly increasing the societal cost of copyright laws in terms of lost value to consumers. So we need a new deal. The better you understand the nuts and bolts, the better you can take part in crafting it.
We get a distorted view based on things like the current extradition of a British man to the USA for having a listings site with links to copyright material. And the whole Kim Dotcom business operated at the international level by USA Government's agencies.
No the argument people make when they differentiate between copyright infringement and stealing is that perhaps the copyright bundle of alienable rights doesn't even make sense. They are saying this whole thing is talked about as theft but the fundamental situation is different, lets get the emotional word "steal" out of the picture. Instead lets call it what it is, and make a note of why these are different and why the rights granted and defended are perhaps outmoded and out-dated.
I totally agree. That's the real conversation to have.
The only thing I would add is to be careful not to adopt the indefensible position that infringement is nothing like stealing. Some of the reasons we protect physical property do apply to copyright. We frequently defend physical property not because stealing deprives the owner of anything or even costs them money, but because stealing interferes with the economic model where you invest in creating something and charge for transferring your rights over it.
For example, consider stealing a newspaper from one of those coin-op machines. The paper was going to be pulped anyway, and you weren't going to buy it anyway. So you actually saved the publisher money. But it would sound absurd to most people to suggest that laws against stealing from newspaper vending machines should be abolished. Because the point isn't that you're depriving the publisher of the ability to read that particular copy of the paper themselves. The point is that our economic model depends on their ability to meter access to copies of the stuff they produce.
I hate these metaphors cause there's always a hundred reasons they don't line up. So don't look for the distinctions, just take it for the point that sometimes theft laws and copyright are protecting approximately similar interests. That doesn't mean copyright laws are a good idea -- it can be totally rational to protect papers in vending machines without protecting their online equivalent. It just means that you have to not trip yourself up at the start of the debate by suggesting that infringement and theft are nothing alike, or that copyright serves no purpose. It serves a purpose. It accomplishes useful stuff. It also costs our society a lot. The burden's on us to convince people we have a better plan to accomplish useful stuff with less cost.
I've thought about this a fair amount, and you still managed to explain it in a way that made it new to me.
You do credit to lawyerkind.
It doesn't really matter wether it's 100% legally irrelevant. It's 100% philosophically relevant.
The people who do seem to be responding to some sort of intuition of this form: "a free lunch is unfair." It's not, as we'd say, unfair to you, and not even to the copyright holders necessarily, but something about a free lunch just looks suspicious. So the first comment in this thread says that whether Joe Blow's actions are unfair "comes down to how much Joe Blow WOULD have paid for avatar.mp4." You saw that he would have paid for X but instead he got it for free, and you said "man, there's something unfair here."
It may sometimes be useful to regulate things which our ethical intuitions don't speak very strongly about. Our ethical intuitions don't speak very strongly about living in a messy room; a boarding school might nonetheless demand that its students keep their rooms clean. (I have heard a cute theory that we lack this intuition because our primate ancestors lived in trees and therefore literally did not have to handle their own crap.) Seatbelt laws, licensing drivers, and regulating CO2 emissions would also fit into the same category. So "who has the right to copy this book?" can still be a valid question, even when that book is a .pdf and our relevant moral intuitions instead say, "hey, I'm just giving the book I bought to a friend -- that's within my rights as a person who bought the book." That moral intuition, even if you have it, doesn't necessarily obviate the potential social value of that law.
In all kinds of stupid little cases, every day, lawyers hammer out what kind of people we want to be -- how our society wants to instantiate our morality. It's glorious.
Anyway, the copyright question is partly the legal question of what people should be allowed to do, and partly the moral question of what laws it's OK to break when there's no real prospect of enforcement. But it's all about laws.
To claim that the idea of copyright is pretty well-settled when it comes to digital works just illustrate the problem here.
It's not well-settled cause there isn't anything to settle as such. This is not a discussion about right or wrong but about whether it should apply to digital work.
Even a discussion of property on physical things aren't a settled discussion. There are no conclusion only a decision.
There are a number of indicators hinting that it's far from settled when it comes to digital. Among other things the very fact that we are debating it and the very fact that many people don't seem to have a problem downloading things and don't consider it wrong.
And not just because they are cheap. But because the very fundamental idea of demand and supply, the idea of owning ideas that are themselves byproducts of others ideas is way way way too complex to just say. Done deal. There is something more fundamental in play here.
Perhaps for you, but not for me and many others.
> The useful question is whether the particular rights bundled into "copyright" are the best way to do the things we're trying to do.
Yes, the ultimate goal is to reform that, but I think the argument needs to be that there is a more optimal way of codifying copyright for everyone - content creators, consumers, and 'mashuppers' - that can create more abundance, dynamism, an opportunity for all parties.
But instead the prevailing argument seems to essentially be one of technological entitlement - that taking something for nothing without the consent of the creator/rights owner, at least as defined under current laws, has no consequence for the rights owner, and that it should be legal to do simply because it can be done.
No, it should be legal to do because there is ultimately more utility and value in it for everyone including the rights owners than under the old regime, so much so that they do it willingly like some are starting to experiment with now (NIN, Louis CK, etc).
That's the argument that must and can ultimately convince society, government, and Hollywood (or at least drag the latter to it kicking and screaming) that there is a more optimal copyright system. Spurious appeals to neo-entitlement will just fail there.
There are laws against stealing physical property. Copyright infringement doesn't violate them. There are laws against copyright infringement. Copyright infringement does violate them. The question of whether "stealing" is good shorthand for "copyright infringement" is a total waste of time. The real point is whether the copyright infringement laws are good laws.
In fact, let's get technical about it. Here's what's going on under the hood. Both areas of law relate to the idea of "alienable rights" -- stuff that only you are entitled to do, that you can sell or give away so other people can do.[1] For example, I "own" my bike. That means I have a bunch of rights over it. I can exclude anyone else from riding it. I can destroy it. I can sell the right to destroy it. I can sell the right to ride it on alternate Thursdays. I can sell the right to sell the right to ride it. Or I can sell the whole bike so someone else gets the whole bundle of rights. Lawyers, with a flair for the dramatic, analogize this set of rights over the bike to a "bundle of sticks" that can be separated or kept together.
Example 2: I rent an apartment. My landlord "owns" the property, but she's sold me the temporary, exclusive right to decide who can come on it and who can't. I can let neighborhood kids run through the backyard or tell them to take off. But I can't charge other people to sleep here -- she hasn't sold me that right.
Example 3: I "own" this comment. I can sell or give away the right to display it at ycombinator.com (in fact, that's what I'll effectively do when I click "reply"). I can sell the right to print it worldwide in any medium. I can sell the right to make a movie adaptation. I can sell the right to distribute it without my name attached -- or with your name attached. Or I can sell the whole thing and let someone else dispose of all these rights ...
So when we talk stealing and infringement, we're talking about violations of someone else's alienable rights. When you take away all of my alienable rights over my bike, that's called stealing. When you take them temporarily, it's "wrongful appropriation." When you take my right to exclude people from my property, that's called trespass. When you take my right to decide who rents my bike, it's theft of services. When you take my right to decide where this comment gets published, it's copyright infringement.
So at this point the copyright debate becomes a little clearer, right? The question is which alienable rights should attach to instantiated ideas (intellectual property), and how long should each right last, and what should be the consequences for infringing each right, and can we give artists something that works as well for them as these exclusive alienable rights, and so on. When people say "copyright infringement is stealing," it's intuitive, emotional shorthand for "the same arguments that justify the rights attached to physical property also justify the rights attached to instantiated ideas." When people say "nuh uh," that's shorthand for "nuh uh."
So the answer to whether copyright infringement is stealing is that there's a bunch of reasons we attach various rights to physical property, and there's a bunch of reasons we attach various rights to IP, and some rights and reasons apply to both and some reasons apply to just one or the other. Which is to say, it's a pointless question. The analogy is kind of right and kind of wrong, in a totally unhelpful way. The useful question is whether the particular rights bundled into "copyright" are the best way to do the things we're trying to do.
Seriously, when I think about it, I can't believe how many hours have been spent on the internet debating this pointless question. The next time you're tempted to start, just link to this comment instead. Then take that time to make something. Anything you like. Even a LOLcat or a drawing in MSPaint. Put it in the public domain. It'll be better for the world.
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[1] You know how the Declaration of Independence says we're all endowed with "inalienable" rights? That's inalienable as in the opposite of the "alienable" rights I discussed above. That's why you can't sell yourself into slavery -- your right to liberty isn't alienable.
The More You Know.