Oatmealing and the new practice of ethical bittorenting

The problem with this is that HBO is owned by a cable company.

One does not simply watch HBO a la carte.

Stealing is when I take something away from you. Copying your DVD of a movie doesn't qualify, because you still have your DVD after I copied it. ...

something has absolutely been stolen. The opportunity to make money from the results of the artistry. That right belongs to the artist.

I suppose we can all make our own definitions of words to make them mean what we want them to mean ... but then where would we be?

In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. (emphasis mine, T.)

Do you suppose it's not "stealing" to illegally tap into cable television ... the cable company hasn't lost anything tangible, after all. But you are taking something of value, without permission.

What word would you prefer to use instead of steal?

Boomerang's claim was that there is no incentive for creativity other than copyright

Falsely lumping all of these specialized areas into the "theft" bucket leads law enforcement and politicians to take easy mental heuristics that have them assume that even if infringement is not exactly like theft it's "close enough" that you can treat it like theft and respond to it like theft. And that's exactly what we see happening. The legal proposals and constant changes to copyright law are all about treating infringement more like theft, and believing that greater enforcement leads to less infringement, and that greater "education" does the same. But that assumes that individuals intrinsically believe that making a copy of something is bad, even though in many, many cases they do not feel that way. Calling it theft when they know it's not theft doesn't convince people to stop file sharing. It just makes them respect copyright law even less, since it's clearly completely out of touch with the times and the technology.

“The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied. There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike,” Larsson explains.

One of the obvious problems is that it suggests that every “stolen copy” is a lost sale.

“Following this conception, some iPods could be valued at millions of dollars and a file sharing service could aid in copyright infringements representing more value than the Gross Domestic Product of entire countries,” Larsson says.

...

The researcher explains that the public perception of the law, or social norms, is out of line with what the law actually says. In part this is because the “theft” metaphor is built into law, while there is no such thing as theft where piracy is concerned.

“In other words, this means that legal concepts can become metaphorical if their meaning expands into new areas, and the fixed conceptions that once ensured their legitimacy may seem unjust in the eyes of a reality that has moved on. This supports the gap between legal and social norms regarding parts of copyright today.”

This gap between the law and what people see, feel and experience in real life is a problem, one that lawmakers are now trying to address with even more draconian laws based on the same nonsense metaphors.

....

Larsson doesn’t think that the current trends of stronger copyright laws and more surveillance of Internet users is the right path to take. These measures often violate the rights of the masses to benefit the interests of a few, which can never be a good solution.

So counterfeiting and forgery are not stealing?

But you are taking something away from them -- money.

This kind of thinking takes away any incentive creative people have to make anything.

Boomerang's claim was that there is no incentive for creativity other than copyright

That was not my claim at all.

Boomerang's claim was that there is no incentive for creativity other than copyright.

Being on somebody's staff is one incentive for creativity