Is that not the case in the UK? Can you be charged because the DA read about a hypothetical crime in the bews?

Do you have any examples of charges and convictions on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good or service from an owner? Or are we just being pedantic?

Then you shifted the goalposts to “charges and convictions”.

The real question is do you have an example of a judge ruling that someone can't be charged and convicted on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good and service from an owner? Because I'm pretty sure you are wrong.

If you were correct about your belief, I'm sure you can find an example of someone charged with murder and theft, and the theft charges being thrown out because the victim is unavailable to say something was stolen.

I guess in your imagination I can steal money from the wallet of a person in a coma in front of a cop, and get off scot free, since the victim can't testify against me?

Does that help?

How could that possibly help?

Furthermore you know you are just making things up, why not just concede you like to imagine how criminal law works and you are having fun making up things like "authority of agency"?

Or perhaps you think i'm a very stupid person and treating you unfairly, maybe you can educate me by finding a reference for your claim that "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something"

I suspect your source was your impression of law and order episodes, but even if I'm wrong it seems unfair for you to demand evidence from others without providing any yourself. I look forward to being educated by how you know "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something".

This seems to be a crazy claim on it's face, since, as I explained, the owner of the object might be dead, in a coma, an infant, being threatened by the mob not to testify, etc. And the concept of hostile witnesses also exists in criminal law.

First, my wife is a lawyer.

Second, I pasted that link because I thought you didn’t know what “agency” meant based on your non-sequitur response. As in “principal” and “agent”.

I never claimed that was a legal term. If you are an agent with authority, what would you call it? Power of attorney doesn’t apply here. In general, someone that acts on the behalf of another. That’s it. No one is inventing new words. That’s just how grown-ups talk.

Ergo. If the owner is dead, then someone else is the owner. If the person in a coma, someone else can legally act on their behalf, like a spouse or family member. You know, someone with authority. Acting on behalf, like an agent. There’s those poetic words again! Same applies to an infant. Understood?

Finally, the point I was making is that someone has to report the crime and demonstrate that theft actually occurred for a successful prosecution. You are extremely unlikely to get arrested, much less prosecuted, for openly hypothesizing about whether a theoretical crime took place. Which is the very topic we were originally discussing.

I’ve already clarified my position once, and now ad nauseum. I don’t know what else to say if you’re still confused.

To go back to the Doctor Who example, there's clearly concern by the archivists that admissible evidence exists to show the film was stolen by them. Whether this is likely to be prosecuted and conviction is likely to occur is a different matter.

Of course I have no idea what you think you mean by "claim of ownership" at this point- courts make ruling based on "admissible evidence" as I said. There is no legal requirement for the evidence to be a "claim of ownership".

Feel free to have last word if you want, this conversation has gotten silly.

1. You are informed of the theft. You confirm that the wallet is yours and perp is charged.

2. You are informed of the theft. Instead you claim that it was not stolen because you either don’t care, feel bad for the perp, you hated that wallet anyway, or any other reason. There is no case. One rando stranger’s word against another, the perp walks.

3. You are not informed of the theft. No one can prove that the wallet was stolen, because we find ourselves back in situation #2.

Not sure it was that simple in, for example, the case where Aaron Swartz 'stole' articles from JSTOR. JSTOR declined to press charges, but the prosecutor went berserk with self-righteous bloodlust, and well, we all know how that turned out.

I'm not sure I buy the article's premise that this is the main issue to be honest. My understanding is that the main problem is simply that some of the people involved just want a bunch of money, and the BBC finds it very hard to countenance why they should pay someone for stuff stolen from them, especially at not very realistic valuations.