201–210 of 275 posts
Well EFF won’t be getting any more donations from me, just like I cut off IA when they started this. Don’t ask for money to fight a legal battle where you are so obviously in the (legal) wrong.
How do you go about challenging a corrupt and unjust law, then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
Why should the federal government be taken as the authority on the definition in terms in a non-legal context (most of the conversation here is about an ethical argument)?
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
You're channeling Thomas Jefferson, who himself channeled a Zoroastrian idea. Jefferson said: "... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me." [0] The flaw in this concept is the free-rider problem: 1. Not all new IP can be created as a side projec…
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Copyright infringement is not stealing.
That's a slogan I hear a lot. Unfortunately, the law disagrees. Copyright infringement is defined as a stolen property offense: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
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I'm not assuming that at all. My model is extremely simplified so it would fit into a comment, but it doesn't need to be that simple for the general idea to hold. Suppose you pirated a thousand games and would've legitimately purchased one. Your piracy then represents a theft of one game. Since there's no way to tell which one game you would've bought, we could simplify it to say that stole one one thousandth of a ga…
That's a lot of supposing. Suppose instead if piracy wasn't an option the poster just played free games instead, or did something else with their time. > but it's also probably not "buy zero games". In this scenario, the poster may very well not have a credit card (because what's the point if you have no income, also a minor), so it might very we be the case he was physically unable to purchase these games online, es…
For someone who complains about the quantity of my supposing, it's strange that you are supposing counterfactuals explicitly rejected by the OP.
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Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…
Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
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That's what makes it not theft. Theft deprives the person of the original. If I have two books and you take one I have one book. If you buy one of my books and give it out, I did not have any of the books I had stolen from me.
Theft does deprive the victim of something. As I've written above, piracy is theft as it deprives the victim of potential sales.
E wry game I've bootleggedI've eventually gone and bought When I had the dosh and the terms were right. You can't claim you "lost me as a potential sale." Otherwise, you'd have grounds for counting everyone who didn't buy your game or whatever IP as a loss.
Until it materializes, it isn't yours to account for. Just as I can't sue a chicken for the egg inlaid, it makes no sense to allow for the legal recognition of "potential sales lost".
Especially nowadays more than ever, where one isn't even largely acquiring the thing anymore, but signing a contract to host an entertainment experience on hardware they supposedly own,but which has been in reality co-opted at the manufacturing and design level by rights holders to put in place the means of extortion from society their perceived pound of flesh with no recourse.
In fact, I'd say if it's fine for you to keep track of and argue the harm of lost potential sales, I should have a matching valid claim in potential buys I was never able to make because industry colluded to ensure that proprietary anti-features in the form of DRM were included in all the hardware I haven't subsequently purchased.
Fair's only fair after all.
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer the law stick to matters of the actual rather than hypothetical.
And before you argue there is a difference between not making something for purchase (hardware platforms sans DRM mechanisms) and not realizing a sale because of privacy, I would advise you to consider the dual nature of transactions. Value is not created, merely exchanged via fungible means. Just as I'm cheated out of DRM free hardware by collisions with industry by rights holders, so too are rights holders plagued by those who find ways around things.
I'd rather live in a world where useful information could flow freely. I'm still willing to compensate for something that genuinely entertains, enlightens, or helps me. That magnanimity goes down the hole once it turns into extortion.
And make no mistake, it always does. I've yet to see a significantly cheaper ebook than a paperback. Instead, I see them treated as roughly equivalent despite the sharp loss of utility of a DRM'd artifact.
Until that madness resolves, and I stop running into people who feel entitled to hypothetical sales, I see no reason to take rightholders as arguing at all in good faith.
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"Piracy of songs, movies, and applications actually improves sales, according to a study that the European Union funded and then tried to keep from getting published" doesn't mean anything. it's still illegal.
If something is beneficial for everyone involved, why should it be illegal?
For anybody interested in the IA's claimed ethical and legal justifications, they summarise and link to them at the following page: http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds...
I can’t imagine what their legal strategy could possibly be...