cmb said:
He [Republican Senator Lamar Smith] said: "The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store.
Really? Has it not been made to be a theft, by modern conceptions of 'Intellectual Property'?
Theft is 'taking something, without the intention of giving it back'. How can data be 'taken' and 'not given back'?
More precisely: "Theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it."
The "intent to deprive the rightful owner" is the all-important part. This holds even if the thief decides to later return the goods (he still had the original intent to deprive at the time of commission of the crime).
Copyright violation is NOT theft. It's more akin to using water from your well without your permission (even when you have a great excess, so you will never be short). In fact, even this is not accurate since in a lot of cases, the "victim" (in the parallel with the "theft" analogy) is a willing party to the file-sharing - *someone* originally has to buy the music/movie to start sharing it online, right?
So using the analogy to determine the "victim" here is meaningless. The "victim" in copyright cases is said to be the holder of the copyright. They superimpose the faces of the artistes so the little people can make the emotional connection, but in most cases, the copyrights are held by faceless corporate entities trafficking in billions of dollars per annum. If one goes back to the "theft" analogy, it's like Lamar Smith is accusing you of stealing, not from the store
per se, but from Kellogg's or Black and Decker directly. It makes absolutely no sense, but when was sense to be expected from a politician?
What's going on here is that the physical medium for the transmission of the product has become redundant. It's the data stream, the 1s and 0s that's become the real commodity. Unfortunately, it's also a commodity that's eminently suited to being effortlessly duplicated ad nauseam, unless it's crippled in some way with DRM (a rather ironic moniker, because rights are actually being taken away from the consumer, without any real rights being conferred on the artistes who dreamt up the product). So instead of a purchasing sort of structure, they're forced to go to a licensing one - when you buy music, a movie or an ebook, you're only buying the license to use it in certain approved ways. Anything outside those bounds, you're breaking the law. But it still isn't *theft*!
Allow me to meander a little tangentially here - I often think about the "Star Trek" economy - with "replicators" in common use. Right now, when we need to use a hammer or a lawnmower or a car and we don't have one, we have to go to a rightful owner we know and borrow one. Neither the makers nor the designers of those implements are likely to be coming after us. But what if, one day, we could just take a friend's thing and replicate one for ourselves from valueless raw materials? Would the designers of that thing (the "IP holders") come after us for copyright infringement? In Star Trek, stuff like this revolutionised the economy to the extent that it no longer made sense to be remotely capitalistic, but would we get so lucky if that day ever came? Or would we lurch into a half-enlightened state where the only things of value became energy (assuming there was a limited supply and no trivial way to collect/extract it oneself) and "IP"? Will we ever free ourselves of the tethers to greed? I guess it remains to be seen.
