James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
I love you James Lileks, but I had to stop listening to Ricochet #102 for a moment and punch this out. Breaching copyright -- for personal use, anyway -- is not theft! As a former policeman in a common law jurisdiction, I can tell you that there are eight very specific elements of the crime of larceny that must be proved in every case. One of those elements, with regard to the stolen property:
depriving the owner of the use therein
That is, if I take your iPad, you don't have it any more. That's stealing. That is what might be called a natural crime. Any society that has improved itself beyond rule of brute force recognises this. Steven Pinker lists 'Property' amongst the human universals in The Blank Slate.
But if I copy some music you downloaded from the iTunes store, you still have the music. So does iTunes and the copyright owner. What we are talking about is breaching a recently invented law in the same category as, say, smoking a cigarette in the wrong place in New York, or breaching a provision of Dodd-Frank.
Illegal, yes. Wrong, arguably. A widely and naturally recognised sin? No!
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Stephen Dawson: "…there are eight very specific elements of the crime of larceny that must be proved in every case. One of those elements, with regard to the stolen property:
"But if I copy some music you downloaded from the iTunes store, you still have the music. So does iTunes and the copyright owner."
Then by your own definition, you have committed a theft. The "use" of which you have "deprived the owner" is the ability to sell you his work product at the price and in the manner he has determined. You may argue that you haven't stolen the music (though I think you're on pretty shaky ground), but you certainly can't argue that you haven't deprived him of use. Go as far as Valiuth proposes, and you have deprived him of the ability to sell his work product to anyone ever again!
Mar '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Jeff Younger
No, they are not. They are rare, which not the same thing as scarce. By discovering an idea, you do not thereby prevent anyone else from discovering it or using for their own purposes. · 21 hours ago
It isn't the idea that is copyrighted, but the eloquence with which it is expressed. No one wants to read what I write about economics, but they do want to read the same idea expressed by Milton Friedman, who was a much more skilled writer than I shall ever be.
Apr '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
James Lileks:
You own a copy. Not the contents. To say otherwise is to say that just because you own a copy of "Star Wars" you own the Millennium Falcon.
Well, there we get to it Mr. Lileks. I disagree with the very idea that you as the Author have any right to the Contents of a book. I agree that this right has been granted to you by the government, but it is an artificial privilege that suppress my natural rights to own and utilize the things I possess or the knowledge I have. I accept that this limiting of my natural rights may have overall benefits for society, if done properly. I think current copyright law and patent law though have gone far out of line and with each extension and expansion become a means of further depriving everyone in society of their natural rights for the benefit of a few.
I don't think you and I will ever agree on the fundamentals here. Thus we will never agree on the moral dimensions of the issue. The question though is can we ever come to an agreement on what the law should be?
Apr '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Peter Christofferson
which you have "deprived the owner" is the ability to sell you his work product at the price and in the manner he has determined. · 1 hour ago
The right to sell something...what does that mean? Does it mean the right to offer me a product for a certain price? If that is the case no amount of pirating can deprive the author of that right. He can always offer any one his work for whatever price he wants.
There is never a guarantee though that he will get the price he wants...even if there is no pirating. You make it sound like the author is owed a specific amount of money for his work. He is owed nothing. There are no guarantees in a free market of revenue. So how can you say you have deprived some one of something they never had, which is a guaranteed source of income.
You can argue copying their work deprives them of the ability to earn a living being an author, but again what free market principles guarantee that any job should be able to earn you a living?
Jul '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
"Guaranteed sources of income" have nothing whatever to do with it. You are depriving him of even the opportunity to offer his own work product for sale in the marketplace and thereby to determine its fair market value.
You're not defending the free market; you're definding anarchism.
Jul '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
So you're asserting his right to offer for sale an item that anyone can obtain freely from other sources? Please. That's not a serious argument.
Feb '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
James Lileks: Valiuth wrote: "My goal is not to allow them to copy the book but simply see it, and read it. They would have to be on my site to do this. If they left they could not continue reading it. I view this as being equivalent to me leaving a book on my coffee table opening the door to my house and letting any one come in, pick it up and begin reading it. That would not be stealing would it?"
There’s no equivalence, unless you’re the sort of chap who leaves his door open, lets anyone come in your house, and doesn't mind a stream of people outside the door waiting their turn. What’s more, in your analogy, there’s one person at a time reading it. On the web you can have thousands of people reading it simultaneously.
.....
Not only that, James, but Valiuth would also have to be the sort to advertise that his house is open to public use by allowing people to see a list of the specific things available at his house (e.g. a Google search).
Feb '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Joseph Stanko
James Lileks:
* Copying something you own is not stealing. You bought it. Lending it to a friend is not stealing. You bought it.
What if if I buy an MP3 album online (buy, not pirate) and then give a copy to one friend, not an anonymous stranger but someone I actually know and think might like it. Is that stealing? Or if I want to "lend" it to a friend am I ethically obliged to delete from my iPod first, so I can't listen to it again until he "returns" it? · 12 hours a
There is a difference between emailing a file to a friend (equivalent to giving them a cd or cassette you bought) and posting a file on a searchable website available to any and all comers (equivalent to making copies and handing them out on a busy street corner). One is personal use, the other is distribution without having paid for the right to do so.
Aug '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Valiuth
Songwriter
Valiuth
The assumption always seems to be that given a choice between free and some price people will always choose free. This I think is a flawed view of how people chose to spend their money. · 1 hour ago
So all the college kids who downloaded millions of songs on P2P sites are gonna start paying for those downloads any day now out of their love for the creators of that music?. I'm not holding my breath.
And the people who paid for art prior to copyright were patrons. Very wealthy patrons. · 3 hours ago
I have a friend who has done just that. Not with music but with videos. He bought several pirated versions of shows and animes he liked. Then when given the opportunity and money of employment he bought the legal copies too. I have done this also with music. I have bought copies of music I already have through sharing with my friends, because I believe in the bands and I want them to have the money. · 12 hours ago
Musicians everywhere applaud your honesty (though it came only after test-driving the material). But you are in a tiny minority.
Aug '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Valiuth
Well, there we get to it Mr. Lileks. I disagree with the very idea that you as the Author have any right to the Contents of a book.
That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website.
Oct '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Songwriter
Michael:
As I said, it was "one of the reasons." So, explain why my children shouldn't benefit from the music I've written after I'm gone?
I began writing when copyright was 28 years plus an additional 28. US Copyright Law has changed (thankfully) to mirror International Copyright Law, so that US creators weren't at a disadvantage to the counterparts around the world. · 23 hours ago
When Congress set the copyright term for 14 years, they did it to give incentive to create intellectual works. 14 years was long enough in their opinion for authors and songwriters to derive income for their work. I don't have a problem with extending it longer because we are in a much different media environment.But making that incentive last 70 years past death is an incentive of diminishing returns.
The fact is, most books, music, and anything else is going to have very little value after that long a time. But being absolutely sure that an author has been dead for 75 years is going to be a logistical nightmare in the future and discourage publishing things that are rightfully in the public domain.
Aug '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Michael Pate
When Congress set the copyright term for 14 years, they did it to give incentive to create intellectual works. 14 years was long enough in their opinion for authors and songwriters to derive income for their work. I don't have a problem with extending it longer because we are in a much different media environment.But making that incentive last 70 years past death is an incentive of diminishing returns.
Not trying to be combative - but taking away a creative person's income (whether by law or by illegal copying) is not much incentive to create more. Among writers I know, it often has the opposite effect. People leave the business altogether. So much for Congress' wisdom. (sigh)
BTW - I'm not arguing for perpetual copyright. In fact, a good deal of my living is earned from doing new arrangements of old hymns in the Public Domain. I get the need for a limit, believe me.
But copyright has come under assault lately, even by folks who consider themselves conservatives. (And what is more conservative than the recognition that a person should own what he creates?) So - apologies if I come across as testy about this.
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Songwriter: "That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website."
It's like arguing the details of property rights with a Communist. The individual is irrelevant; the Common Good matters above all.
May '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Stephen Dawson
There are wrongs other than theft, you know. That a copyright violation isn't theft does not make it right.
Plagiarism has been brought up before, and that is yet a different thing. Its essential wrongness is that the plagiarist is fraudulently holding himself out to be the author of the material. Often using quotation marks and footnotes would completely remove the wrongness.
There is far too much mixing up of issues here.
I agree that it's fraudulent and they are not the same issue. My comment was directed at Valiuth. I anticipated where Valiuth was going with the argument and it turns out my gut was correct; Valiuth later wrote, "I disagree with the very idea that you as the Author have any right to the Contents of a book."
If that is the basis for the argument that copyright infringement is not theft, it should also justify plagiarism. Sorry if I seemed to imply that your argument justifies plagiarism.
Edited on Jan 20 at 10:17amApr '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
James Lileks: Songwriter: "That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website."
It's like arguing the details of property rights with a Communist. The individual is irrelevant; the Common Good matters above all. · 1 hour ago
A bit melodramatic aren't we?
The content of a book belongs to the person that has read that book. How can you say it does not?
They have it, by virtue of their memory. If you assert that people should have control over their own minds and the expression of those minds, how can you deny them ownership of that which is now part of them. Unless you can expunge their memory they now posses the content. Perhaps they do not wish to posses it, but nevertheless they do.
Copyright seeks to restrict human ownership of things that humans come to own by the every workings of their humanity. It is unnatural to claim to own a piece of another persons mind, even if you claim to be the originator of that piece.
Plagiarism is a form of fraud, simply making copies is not fraud if you do not claim authorship.
May '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Valiuth
Plagiarism is a form of fraud, simply making copies is not fraud if you do not claim authorship. · 3 minutes ago
But you said the author does not own the content, the reader does. So why can't the reader just write down from memory the content that he now "owns" and put his name on it as the one who wrote it down?
Apr '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
You are conflating lying and stealing, they are different things and can not be used interchangeably. By not acknowledging the original author of the work I copy I imply I am that author which is a lie. It need not be theft that I write down their words. So I have a right to use the words which I own as much as the author, but I also have a duty to be honest about where I originally got the words from.
It is like buying a cake and saying I made it, instead of giving credit to the bakery from which it was purchased. It is not theft, I own the cake. It is a lie.
Aug '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Valiuth
James Lileks: Songwriter: "That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website."
It's like arguing the details of property rights with a Communist. The individual is irrelevant; the Common Good matters above all. · 1 hour ago
A bit melodramatic aren't we?
Not one bit. I was not exaggerating.
Nor do I find what James wrote to be melodramatic, but rather spot on.
May '10
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
Valiuth: You are conflating lying and stealing, they are different things and can not be used interchangeably.
...I also have a duty to be honest about where I originally got the words from.
But I'm not talking about the lying. I'm talking about ownership; namely, your assertion that the author has no claim whatsoever to his intellectual property, and that you own it because you bought it. If you own the information, have the right to do whatever you want with it, including modify it or arrange it in any form you please, put anyone's name you want on it, and sell it.
The only was you could possibly have a duty to acknowledge the original author is if the author has rights related to his work.
Edited on Jan 20 at 12:52pmApr '11
Re: James, oh James: Copying is not stealing!
You have a duty to be honest. If you imply you wrote the work, which you do by putting on the copy you made "Written by: Mark Wilson" you are a liar. If on the other hand you put "Written by: James Lileks and Edited by: Mark Wilson" you are not a liar. To me that seems obvious.
Songwriter
Valiuth
James Lileks: Songwriter: "That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website."
It's like arguing the details of property rights with a Communist. The individual is irrelevant; the Common Good matters above all. · 1 hour ago
A bit melodramatic aren't we?
Not one bit. I was not exaggerating.
Nor do I find what James wrote to be melodramatic, but rather spot on. · 8 minutes ago
Have I ever claimed to not believe in the rights to any property? No, I have claimed to believe that a particular thing you view as property is in fact not property. You find it scary that I can think your songs are not property, and the Romans might have found it scary to think men could not be property too.