Awesome reminder that if you steal a soda from Disney World the police will enforce the law (with extreme violence if they want) but if Disney steals from you no one will enforce the law.
Physical theft from a store and failure to address contractual obligations are totally different things. This is purely a contract dispute. There is no criminality here. Reneging on a debt is not theft, theoretically because the two parties at some level consented to the relationship. There is no concept of consent when discussing physical theft, hence the criminality.
I don't expect the cops to arrest Amazon when they fail to deliver what I ordered.
Fraud is a crime. Criminal copyright infringement is a crime.
If amazon were to take your money and not deliver, and it can be proven they did so intentionally, never intended to deliver, they would face criminal charges for fraud.
If Disney, as is alleged here, is "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"[0] using other people's works, that's criminal copyright infringement.
They say they have the right to exploit these works commercially through contracts, but at the same time say the contracts do not apply to them. So either the contracts do not apply, in which case they have no right to commercial exploitation and therefore commit criminal copyright infringement, or the contracts do apply and they are criminally defrauding the authors.
Why is theft from a store stealing and not withholding payment? It would be one thing if I stole money from the cash register, but if I took an item the store had for sale, the store consented for people to take items out of the store in exchange for payment, I did what the store consented to do, I just hadn’t completed my part.
Point is, I’m not arguing with your legal argument but from a moral perspective, the law seems (in)conveniently bent towards supporting institutions and not people. If Amazon kept your money and didn’t deliver a product, then yes, they should be held criminally responsible.
Perhaps the most insidious part of what’s happening and the argument you make: it’s criminal when you or I do it but it’s “a civil matter” when a corporation does it!
