IP is a government-granted privilege, that is why the word "royalties" is derived from the word "royal". In Great Britain of the 18th century, where the concept began, the one who guaranteed your IP rights was the Sovereign and his/her courts. There isn't anything like IP in the Common Law or other traditional legal systems, while ownership of physical property dates at least until Antiquity. Two very different concepts.
I am not against IP as such, but violation of a legally guaranteed monopoly, even though it causes some loss of capturable value, isn't the same as theft/larceny.
Words have meanings and we should respect them. Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work. This kind of monopoly was routinely granted before by either the Sovereign or particular cities.
What is theft / larceny if not an abstract definition of ownership? How does theft work in cultures where ownership doesn't exist?
Isn't ownership a government-granted privilege as well then?
So if piracy is simply the act of ignoring sovereign privilege in open water (sea, space, internet), then I think the only contention one could make that piracy != theft is by asserting that piracy is not only theft.
People also say that someone stole their heart, but it does not mean that they have a gaping hole in their chest. Casual use of a language for narrative purposes is one thing, speaking about actual criminal activity another.
To be clear, I make some money on my IP (being a self-published author who sells his books) and I encountered people pirating scanned copies of my work. I do not mind on this scale, but I am aware that if someone just started publishing my books commercially and I had no copyright to protect me, I would be in trouble.
But it still wouldn't be theft, rather a foul kind of "competition". My physical books wouldn't disappear from my (rented) garage and readers who like me would still hopefully buy them directly on my e-shop.
The most sold book in the world, by a large margin, for a long long time, is The Bible. If genetic historians and biblical scholars succeed, perhaps someday the unknown decedents of the unknown authors and other known valid holders of IP rights, such as the decedents of Moses and brothers, sisters and cousins of Jesus, could one day be fairly compensated. But it would end up being everyone alive, so we should do that, fairly compensate all the IP holders for the unpaid use of all that IP, including all the movies and TV shows, and including all interest accrued across the centuries, and literally everyone will get rich off the proceeds of past, current and future Bible sales. Crazy idea, but it just might work.
Then you'd have to sue your business competitors if they manage to capture a part of your market. After all you've been deprived by them of the benefit of getting money from that part of the market.
This definition is almost explicitly crafted to make IP seem worthless.
Information that requires investment to gain is considered valuable. This argument is basically "any job that isn't physical manufacturing should not be paid, since the ideas only spread instead of move."
Oh you spent $500m developing a novel cognitive treatment for ptsd and proving it works better than sota? Humanity thanks you! Enjoy your total loss."
Oh you wrote a book? Hopefully it wasn't a book on business building, since you'll be earning nothing for your effort.
You seem to lack the simplest terms when talking of IP laws. Copyright is something you infringe. You don't even say what you are referring to here by talking of "IP". The important stuff is always in details.
There's a large amount of misinformation and people lacking an understanding on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks. Making these threads repetitive to read. Always such a pointless anecdotes such as yours, truncating all IP systems under "IP laws".
For example. The patent system came to existence to ensure that inventions were not hidden, but published to the public in a form patent. Instead of the inventor hiding the invention, the society grants the inventor sole rights to the invention thanks to them making it public.
Copyright and Trademark are different beasts to Patents, and all these are very linked to the laws of single countries, bar signed treaties. Please distinguish what you are talking about. Otherwise your point is moot.
Saying theft and copyright violation are different morally is not suporting copyright violation. It is to ask as the difficulty of copying wanes, perhaps it is time to rebalance giving up the right to copy in exchange for more innovation. When the right to copy was traded in exchange to protect publishers, it was a lot harder to copy stuff, so relatively less was sacrificed. Now copying things is super easy and crucial to normal work flows.
And yet taking a snap of a museum artifact still is quite distinct from stealing someones pen.
I do not deny the concept of IP (if it is me who you were addressing; see my other comments), but I believe that sloppy nomenclature leads to sloppy thinking.
Fraud vs. theft vs. copyright violation vs. insider trading etc. are all different categories of illegal activity and we shouldn't mix them up by using their names interchangeably.
I admit that as a maths major, I tend to be pedantic about definitions, at least in things as serious as crime.
There is a moral dimension as well. I do not believe that we should cut punishments for theft in half. But I do believe we could well cut copyright protection periods back to the levels where they were in 1960 without causing any major problems or undue hardship to anyone.
> Piracy is legally similar to a non-organized blacksmith setting up shop in a city where every blacksmith must be member of a certain guild to work.
No. It’s legally similar to a blacksmith copying another blacksmith’s designs and putting his trademark mark on their products. IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
> IP laws do not inherently restrict anyone from freely practicing their trade nor do they force you to join any trade/industry associations.
While true, it's a gray area when you get into certain industries. Cell phones, for example, are chock-full of cross licensed patents regarding the baseband chips and radio waves. There's a term in the industry for these kinds of patents (my mind is blanking). Ignoring the necessary industry talent, there's no way in hell one can make a new baseband processor without dozens of NDAs and patents that you yourself can offer up as leverage.
IMHO (and one many here share), IP laws (with regard to software) have gone way too far. The big problem is that the companies with the might to enact change tend to be part of the problem themselves.
How is this any different than saying "Cell phones are too complicated so lets just skip all that research for practical reasons?"
I agree that many patents are held by groups that don't use them how we'd like them to, but they still had to _buy_ the patent. Society promised them that the patent would be enforced and it is. Combating abuse of the courts is a separate matter.
You spend twenty years designing the perfect steel production method, spending millions of dollars, and start selling it as Pessimizer Steel. It's obviously superior. You start making some of your money back. I spend an hour watching you through the window and start selling it as Super Steel and claiming that it's just as good because I made it the same way. I sell it at half price because I'm not paying off any business loans. You go bankrupt.
That's the system you want? Who is going to invest in steel research in that system?
That's not an argument about forging trademarks - it's an argument for respecting patents (if the Pessimizer manufacturers got one) or trade secrets (if they didn't).
You can make an argument for trademark law on the basis of sunk costs to develop an intangible brand with intrinsic value, as opposed to as a consumer protection mechanism, but this isn't that.
In one case, you forbid everyone but the licensees to produce a certain type of nails. In another case, you forbid everyone but the guild members to produce nails at all.
For a claim of theft to be made, someone, somewhere, somehow must be denied property of some kind.
Piracy is infringement, and we have that word because the hard fact is nobody, anywhere, anyhow is denied property.
There is value, and all that, but it's not theft, and it's not simple.
In the case of say movie piracy, or music, some entertainment work, infringement can actually add value back to the creator by making that creator relevant and with that relevancy, a potential buyer of works. Bob likes a band, shares a track with Joe, who likes it and buys an album they would not have otherwise purchased if it were not for Bob...
In the case of a technology, someone learns how to do something other people would rather they not know. No party is denied understanding or property, unless one wants to talk about a physical instance of the understanding, but that's a side show really. The value is in the info, not the piece of paper detailing it, but I digress too.
Here's the interesting thing:
Once more parties have that understanding, and despite originators preferring they not have that understanding, all parties can gain from new understanding that always happens on top of existing understanding, and in the end?
That's how we advance.
Question is what is worth what?
It's not one of theft, but infringement and of what makes sense in economic terms as well as our overall development as beings.
I think the US will be taught a valuable lesson in this regard. In the 70s and 80s the MBAs figured that they could strip industrial assets and rely on "intellectual property". In the 21 century their children will be shown by China how wrong they were.
All wealth is the product of labor. Intellectual labor is labor, and the understanding it brings is wealth, but that inherently leaks out into the body of people, eventually becoming common knowledge, or at a minimum well known, or documented. Some secrets do die with their originators too, but that's more rare.
I changed careers watching those MBA's tear great companies apart, and the example close to home for me was Tektronix. There is a video out there "Spirit of Tek" that kind of gets at the powerful innovation culture once practiced there. In that culture, Joe Bloomstone can walk off the street, get training and advance into product design and even spin off into a company backed by Tek!
It happened a lot and the area was rich with technical understanding, manufacturing, all the good stuff.
Then it got sent over there...
Today, people want it back, many people are taking hard won skills to their graves, leaving current people to climb back to regain what was sold off for a little money in the now, leaving the region doing hair, nails, tires...
The people who can make stuff matter. Physical things matter.
It's not legally, because it is not philosophically. And that's without denying that e.g. copyrighted works, inventions, models, etc., can and often have value.
Piracy is definitely a theft. It’s ludicrous to suggest that IP doesn’t have any value like physical property.