Reviews - File-Sharing Church of Kopimism now Official Religion in Sweden

[kingpotnoodle]

The Merriam Webster Legal Dictionary defines:

Theft:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theft
A criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent

Calling copyright violation and illegal downloading "theft" is sketchy at best, a individual music file is nobody's property or service, you haven't taken it away from the creator. It is not stealing if I make an exact copy of your car for my own use because you still have the car, what I may be doing is making an unauthorised copy of a copyrighted or patented construction.

"Fraud" is certainly applicable where the illegal copy is passed off as genuine, and if I make a copy of some music for my own use I am depriving someone of potential revenue, it still seems closer to fraud:

"Any act, expression, omission, or concealment calculated to deceive another to his or her disadvantage"

I omitted to pay for a copy thus that it's creator was disadvantaged... sounds like fraud to me.

Theft is quite an emotive word because it conjours up a sense of loss that any burglary victim will probably know well. I don't think personal copyright violation is in quite the same league, it's very minor crime and should be punished with a fine (paid to the creator) equal to the RRP of any copies found in the offender's possession plus a top up towards court costs. People who copy DVDs and sell them on for profit etc are guilty of larger scale fraud and should do time as well as heavy fines, but they are the minority here.

Having said that copyright violation is definitely a crime - the creators of works are entitled to profit from their hard work, be that an individual unsigned singer or a global corporation who employed people to do the creation. Just because the company is huge doesn't made defrauding them OK, they have to pay people who would otherwise be out of work and the shareholders are not just rich fat cats - many of the largest shareholders in all kinds of companies are pension funds who rely on the positive performance of their investments to increase their pots and meet obligations to the retiring people (including us one day). You aren't just hurting some knob-end in his Jaguar and vacuous pop stars, there are real normal people just like us who depend on the performance of large corporations for their salaries, pensions etc. It's just how the great money-circle works! Sure some people get undeservedly rich out of all this, but you need to get to them in better ways than fraud ;-)

[Agent]

What a joke, using religion to legitimise theft.

Just sayin

[Smudger]

I think you'll find this:


Is piracy...

[Saracen]

The Merriam Webster Legal Dictionary defines:

Theft:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theft
A criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent

Calling copyright violation and illegal downloading "theft" is sketchy at best, a individual music file is nobody's property or service, you haven't taken it away from the creator. It is not stealing if I make an exact copy of your car for my own use because you still have the car, what I may be doing is making an unauthorised copy of a copyrighted or patented construction.

"Fraud" is certainly applicable where the illegal copy is passed off as genuine, and if I make a copy of some music for my own use I am depriving someone of potential revenue, it still seems closer to fraud:

"Any act, expression, omission, or concealment calculated to deceive another to his or her disadvantage"

I omitted to pay for a copy thus that it's creator was disadvantaged... sounds like fraud to me.

Theft is quite an emotive word because it conjours up a sense of loss that any burglary victim will probably know well. I don't think personal copyright violation is in quite the same league, it's very minor crime and should be punished with a fine (paid to the creator) equal to the RRP of any copies found in the offender's possession plus a top up towards court costs. People who copy DVDs and sell them on for profit etc are guilty of larger scale fraud and should do time as well as heavy fines, but they are the minority here.

Having said that copyright violation is definitely a crime - the creators of works are entitled to profit from their hard work, be that an individual unsigned singer or a global corporation who employed people to do the creation. Just because the company is huge doesn't made defrauding them OK, they have to pay people who would otherwise be out of work and the shareholders are not just rich fat cats - many of the largest shareholders in all kinds of companies are pension funds who rely on the positive performance of their investments to increase their pots and meet obligations to the retiring people (including us one day). You aren't just hurting some knob-end in his Jaguar and vacuous pop stars, there are real normal people just like us who depend on the performance of large corporations for their salaries, pensions etc. It's just how the great money-circle works! Sure some people get undeservedly rich out of all this, but you need to get to them in better ways than fraud ;-)

Oh dear.

First, on the definition of theft, you'd do better to use the definition right at the start of the Theft Act. That is, after all, the definition of theft that, in the UK at least, matters, not what a dictionary says. And there's more to it than Miriam Webster would have you believe. If all you do is what MW says, you have not committed theft, in the UK. If your actions do not meet each and every element of the Act's definition of theft, it isn't theft.

However, you are right in that theft is not a technically accurate term for what happens in copyright infringement. But as theft relates "permanently depriving" someone of their property (amongst other things), then theft is a pretty good analogy to what copyright infringement does to intellectual property. But it is only an analogy, and like just about any analogy, it falls down of you push it too far.

Step back a notch and think about what copyright actually is. It is, really, the right for the owner of the copyright, and that'll often but not always be the creator of the work, the right to control the creation of copies .... with certain statutory exceptions. And that is not always about getting paid. It is also about the right of the copyright holder to determine when and if, and by whom, and for what, his or her work is used.

Personally, I hold copyright to several thousand works. And by that, I mean works I have received payment for, not just my personal photo collection. And that copyright includes not just the reward of getting paid if someone uses my work, but the ability and the right, for example, to decline to allow my work to be used in certain ways, or by certain people of organisations. For instance, I might be happy for the Labour party to use my work with charge, but wouldn't let the Tories use it even if they paid. Or I might be other other way round and let the Tories use it but not, under any circumstances, Labour. Or I might let either use it, but refuse permission for the BNP or the Communist party, or both.

In other words, it's about control of my work, and yes, that includes getting paid for it when someone uses it, unless I decide I'm happy to let them use it for free. I might let Cancer Research use it, but require payment from the RSPCA. I might let BP use it, but only in the UK, and not in t he USA, perhaps because I can get more from an American company in the US than BP will pay.

So when someone illegally copies my work and uses it without permission, what they do is to permanently remove my right to control the uses to which my work is put.

The term "theft" is a very good parallel for what is being done to intellectual property rights, bearing in mind that the sheer fact that it is IP means there is no physical property to be taken, and the time-worn examples of copying a car and leaving the original entirely miss the point.

No, you will not be prosecuted for theft if you copy protected works. It is not, legally, theft, since that is as defined in the Theft Act, and relates specifically to physical property. It is, however, the IP equivalent of theft.

.....

Having said that copyright violation is definitely a crime - the creators of works are entitled to profit from their hard work, be that an individual unsigned singer or a global corporation who employed people to do the creation.

Erm, no. In many cases, copyright violation is not a crime. The basic illegality is a civil matter, not a criminal one. It certainly can be criminal, but basic copyright infringement, by individuals and not for profit and not as part of a business, is a civil matter between the infringer and the rights holder, not a matter of criminal law. And for that basic level of copyright violation, the only remedies available to the court are:-

- an injunction to stop you doing more copying.
- a seizure order for infringing copies
- damages for losses suffered. And that's actual losses, so it's compensatory not punitive. No fines, and no jail options.

So no, it's not "definitely" a crime. It might be, but depending on circumstances, it might well not be.

[badass]

<piracy image>

Just sayin

A perfect example of why piracy is not theft. It does irk me people constantly calling copyright infringement theft.

However with the car example it would be fairer to say:

Imaging you spend millions developing a revolutionary new car that's pretty cheap to make on the expectation of profiting selling copies.
Then someone steals a copy of the design from you and makes a copy for themselves.

Then, on the internet, they share that design with everyone else who then makes their own copy.

[b0redom]

- an injunction to stop you doing more copying.
- a seizure order for infringing copies
- damages for losses suffered. And that's actual losses, so it's compensatory not punitive. No fines, and no jail options.

So no, it's not "definitely" a crime. It might be, but depending on circumstances, it might well not be.

In any case file-sharing isn't the same as copying. If it were the jokers at ACS etc would never have had a case judging by what you have written above. The act they were pursuing for was distribution - that is the upload portion of torrents. I don't know, but would hazard a guess that there are punative damages associated with that?

Presumably that's why the pressure was put on Newzbin to be shut down. People were 'only' downloading rather than uploading so there could be no punative damages for individual downloaders.

[Saracen]

In any case file-sharing isn't the same as copying. If it were the jokers at ACS etc would never have had a case judging by what you have written above. The act they were pursuing for was distribution - that is the upload portion of torrents. I don't know, but would hazard a guess that there are punative damages associated with that?

Presumably that's why the pressure was put on Newzbin to be shut down. People were 'only' downloading rather than uploading so there could be no punative damages for individual downloaders.

File-sharing inherently involves copying, but goes beyond it. Basically, if you copy a protected work without either having explicit permission or being covered by one of the various statutory exemptions, it's an "infringing copy". And if you do that, you open yourself up to the possibility of getting sued over it. However, as an individual downloader, the odds of getting sued are minimal, partly because they're so many of them that they can't sue them all, so statistically, you're not likely to be one of the few. But secondly, because the options of what happens to you are limited to the above, the financial implications are limited to compensation for the losses involved. So if I download an album, the losses are effectively limited to the rights-holders lost profit on that album. And, of course, legal costs may be added.

But, if you're uploading, the argument can be made that that act of uploading enabled thousands of downloads, and that the losses suffered ... well,

And as for ACS, as I understand it, that was the basis of what they were claiming .... settle now, or face potentially very high costs if we get an award for damages based on the 20 million (or whatever) copies we claim resulted from uploading. Whether that argument would have succeeded in a court is another matter, but my guess is that if convincing evidence for that "20 million" (note 1) could be provided, it might well have.

But either way, it's still about compensatory damages, not punitive damages.

I am, of course, talking about the UK. IN the UK, punitive damages in civil cases are almost unheard of and, as I understand it, not an option in copyright cases. In other jurisdictions, especially the US, that may well be different, but punitive damages aren't a remedy open to the court in most circumstances in the UK.



Note 1 - the "20 million" is pure speculation, used as an example, as illustration. I've no idea, without looking it up, what basis ACS may have claimed for the number of copies resulting from uploading.

[kingpotnoodle]

Oh dear.

Calm down dear.


I'm just explaining my logical position based on common definitions, as you can probably tell I'm not a legal expert, and laws vary, so picking one over another wouldn't really suit to explain my personal position. It's heartening that UK law and I seem to agree on the punishment for personal/individual copyright violations, i.e. some compensatory damages, but not all countries are the same and in many cases lawyers seem to stretch this or pursue people with unfounded threats (ACS).

I don't believe theft is an accurate way to describe copyright fraud/violation in common parlance, the emotive connotations of "theft" are rather greater than copying or using something without permission, although perhaps there is a sliding scale and crossover, having the BNP use a photo you took of your kids is probably more unpleasant than someone nabbing your pen. But in general...

What copyright violation does is deprive the creator (or owner if the rights were transferred in some deal) of a work the revenue they are entitled to and as you point out control, which to me is not theft - it's more like fraud. In your example you believe this is analogous to theft of IP, you have been "robbed" of control... personally I don't think you can term a concept such as intellectual property in such a way, if you take control from someone then you have defrauded rather than thieved. It's rather a thorny issue though and people like to use a lot of terminology.

As other people have said the description as theft seems irksome and out of place, the common understanding and connotations of fraud seem to fit better to my mind. Really I suppose we need to specifically define "copyright violation" in our minds and use that rather than likening it to another crime which it doesn't really fit a definition of very well.

So no, it's not "definitely" a crime. It might be, but depending on circumstances, it might well not be.

My legal definition of crime vs a civil offence might not be correct but the sentiment stands, and I'm sure you agree as a content creator that copyright violation is not "OK" and is something to be discouraged, particularly on the industrial scale some people stoop to.

I'll admit as a kid I did a lot of downloading, I did also buy a lot of music and films and I wouldn't have had any money to buy more than I did, so I downloaded it. As an adult I have re-evaluated, a while ago I deleted all my ill-gotten media and replaced the bits I wanted using legitimate copies from Amazon's MP3 store, I felt it was the right thing to do.

[shaithis]

However with the car example it would be fairer to say:

Imaging you spend millions developing a revolutionary new car that's pretty cheap to make on the expectation of profiting selling copies.
Then someone steals a copy of the design from you and makes a copy for themselves.

Then, on the internet, they share that design with everyone else who then makes their own copy.

The thing is, with the speed at which 3D printer tech is progressing, it won't be long until we can print ourselves a Ferrari (or at least some parts of one!)

[baius]

The thing is, with the speed at which 3D printer tech is progressing, it won't be long until we can print ourselves a Ferrari (or at least some parts of one!)

You'll still need to buy the carbon-fibre.