Intellectual Property Law

[Jokodo]

Makes no sense. The copy didn't exist before, so you cannot have lost control over that copy.

Creation of a copy is definitely one of those things that is included in handling of that copy.

You've said that before, it was meaningless before.

 

[Juma]

Creation of a copy is definitely one of those things that is included in handling of that copy.

You've said that before, it was meaningless before.

What are you talking about?

 

[Malintent]

If you insist, but you haven't answered my question:

In what sense do you have less right to make a copy than you did before?

A teacher has the right to rule the classroom. This is granted by headmaster. If a pupil starts to ignore what the teacher says he should to he has taken the might over what he should do from her. But she is still granted the right by the headmaster. He has then taken the command over his actions from the teacher. Thus he has taken something that is not his.

What was taken is not 'property'. I do not believe your analogy is valid, unless I misunderstand your point.

 

[Malintent]

The one making/handling the copy is the beneficiary and the conttol over that copy is what I has lost.

Makes no sense. The copy didn't exist before, so you cannot have lost control over that copy. What you arguably did loose is control over all copies, but that the other person didn't gain.

You are not making any sense, Jok. IP law isn't about individual copies of protected content. It is about the owner's potential for making a living by providing the content. unauthorized copies of the content harm their ability to sell that content... but I suspect that is exactly what you are proposing... that you should be able to download unauthorized copies of other people's content without paying for it. Large groups of anonymous hackers sitting in mom's basement agree with you.

 

[Jokodo]

Makes no sense. The copy didn't exist before, so you cannot have lost control over that copy. What you arguably did loose is control over all copies, but that the other person didn't gain.

You are not making any sense, Jok. IP law isn't about individual copies of protected content. It is about the owner's potential for making a living by providing the content. unauthorized copies of the content harm their ability to sell that content... but I suspect that is exactly what you are proposing... that you should be able to download unauthorized copies of other people's content without paying for it. Large groups of anonymous hackers sitting in mom's basement agree with you.

No, I'm not proposing that "you should be able to download unauthorized copies of other people's content without paying for it". I'm proposing that copyright protections can and should be argued based on their own merit and not by falsely equating copyright violations with theft.

 

[Bomb#20]

Sorry, this fell off my radar...

Do you have anything about our hardwired property rights, more than your assertion?

It's circumstantial evidence. There's no known human culture without property rights; and chimpanzees act like they have and respect property rights.

Property and property are a social construct. ... Private property exists because the social contract defines some particular thing as "ownable."

Do you have anything about our alleged "social contract", more than your assertion? Social contract theory appears to be a secular origin myth; why do so many secularists imagine agree-by-proxy makes sense even though we fully recognize the absurdity of sin-by-proxy and be-redeemed-by-proxy?

Your slavery analogy is superfluous. We are discussing property and property rights. The argument for, or against property rights does not lead to slavery.

I didn't say it does. I said your argument for property rights does not lead to property -- plugging slavery into your formula was merely a demonstration that your argument was invalid. There are other, better arguments for property.

It comes down to this: if you steal my book, in whatever form you find it, whether shoplifting a paper copy from Barnes&Noble, buying it online with a stolen credit card, or downloading a pirated copy, I will think you are a thief. You can justify your action in any way which pleases you, but I don't believe you will ever convince me you had a right to my book without compensating me.

This is what makes attempting to have a rational discussion with an advocate of intellectual property so exasperating. Where the hell did I offer any justification for copying your book without compensating you? I didn't. It never happened. That was a figment of your imagination. You guys almost invariably utterly refuse to address the arguments that are made to you, to the point of insisting that skeptics made arguments completely different from what we actually said. The whole lot of you have an idee fixe. You are apparently incapable of reading what we actually write and taking seriously the hypothesis that it means exactly what it says. You guys just keep reading between the lines and assuming they're written by the pirates you're convinced are lurking behind every curtain, phantasms constructed from your consuming fear of people exploiting you by reading without paying.

 

[Juma]

A teacher has the right to rule the classroom. This is granted by headmaster. If a pupil starts to ignore what the teacher says he should to he has taken the might over what he should do from her. But she is still granted the right by the headmaster. He has then taken the command over his actions from the teacher. Thus he has taken something that is not his.

What was taken is not 'property'. I do not believe your analogy is valid, unless I misunderstand your point.

Why is it not property?

 

[Togo]

Ok, let's take one more run at this.

1) before the copyright violation, there is no copy.
2) A hacker makes a copy of a file that you assert rights over, without your permission, by burning that file to one of his CDs
3) You are asserting that the copy is somehow your property, but it isn't. The CD belongs to the hacker before, and it belongs to him now. He has the store receipts to prove it. Attempting to seize that CD would be theft on your part - you attempting to deprive him of a CD that is indisputably his own property.
4) The problem is that that CD has been changed so as to form of a copy of your intellectual property, which you have right over. Those rights have not been removed from you, nor have they been lost or transferred. The physical copy is not your property, never was your property and you have no legal rights whatsoever over the physical copy as an object.
5) The reason why people don't agree that copyright is theft is because theft involves the transfer of property from one person to another, and none of your property has been transferred. There is not a thing that has been stolen.
6) The fact that copyright violation is not theft tells us nothnig about either legality or the desirabiltiy of copyright violation. Murder is not theft either, but that doesn't mean anyone is advocating killing sprees.

 

[Veritass]

Conversion is not strictly theft either, but is also in a related area. Sure, the obvious case of purposeful theft of material goods (stealing a physical CD as above) is easily identified as a crime.

It gets a little harder when you are talking about property rights of intangibles. For example, I wrote a song. The intangible song itself does not have a copyright. The sheet music of the song, now being a physical manifestation of the song, can have a copyright. That copyright declares my intention to keep for myself the right to copy that manifestation. Similarly, if I record it onto a CD, that is a separate physical manifestation of the song, and I can assert a separate copyright onto that physical manifestation.

While the government has passed some laws making some forms of copyright infringment into crimes, conversion and copyright infringement are actually property issues, and are torts instead of crimes. If you copy my CD illegally, you have not physically stolen anything from me, but you have intangibly "damaged" my copy of the CD by making it less valuable. How much less valuable you make it would be the subject of a civil lawsuit to determine my damages. Note that this would be completely separate from a criminal trial that might result from the same act.

It is only recently that the technology has risen to the level of wholesale mass copyright infringement, creating a complete underground market of infringed goods, and thus it is only recently that governments decided to pass laws allowing for criminal prosecutions.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I have taken a couple of business law classes. I just wanted to help distinguish between crimes and torts in these cases.

 

[Juma]

Ok, let's take one more run at this.

1) before the copyright violation, there is no copy.
2) A hacker makes a copy of a file that you assert rights over, without your permission, by burning that file to one of his CDs
3) You are asserting that the copy is somehow your property, but it isn't. The CD belongs to the hacker before, and it belongs to him now. He has the store receipts to prove it. Attempting to seize that CD would be theft on your part - you attempting to deprive him of a CD that is indisputably his own property.
4) The problem is that that CD has been changed so as to form of a copy of your intellectual property, which you have right over. Those rights have not been removed from you, nor have they been lost or transferred. The physical copy is not your property, never was your property and you have no legal rights whatsoever over the physical copy as an object.
5) The reason why people don't agree that copyright is theft is because theft involves the transfer of property from one person to another, and none of your property has been transferred. There is not a thing that has been stolen.
6) The fact that copyright violation is not theft tells us nothnig about either legality or the desirabiltiy of copyright violation. Murder is not theft either, but that doesn't mean anyone is advocating killing sprees.

If a and b play a online game and b buy a sword there (using real money) and a somehow hacks into b:s player and transfers the sword tohimself.

Is that theft in your opnion?

 

[Jokodo]

Ok, let's take one more run at this.

1) before the copyright violation, there is no copy.
2) A hacker makes a copy of a file that you assert rights over, without your permission, by burning that file to one of his CDs
3) You are asserting that the copy is somehow your property, but it isn't. The CD belongs to the hacker before, and it belongs to him now. He has the store receipts to prove it. Attempting to seize that CD would be theft on your part - you attempting to deprive him of a CD that is indisputably his own property.
4) The problem is that that CD has been changed so as to form of a copy of your intellectual property, which you have right over. Those rights have not been removed from you, nor have they been lost or transferred. The physical copy is not your property, never was your property and you have no legal rights whatsoever over the physical copy as an object.
5) The reason why people don't agree that copyright is theft is because theft involves the transfer of property from one person to another, and none of your property has been transferred. There is not a thing that has been stolen.
6) The fact that copyright violation is not theft tells us nothnig about either legality or the desirabiltiy of copyright violation. Murder is not theft either, but that doesn't mean anyone is advocating killing sprees.

If a and b play a online game and b buy a sword there (using real money) and a somehow hacks into b:s player and transfers the sword tohimself.

Is that theft in your opnion?

I can't speak for Togo, but in my opinion and I would believe in his, yes; it would even remain theft if no real money were involved.
The difference to making a new copy that didn't exist is that something is transfers, that A is no longer in possession of something he previously was in possession of.

 

[Juma]

If a and b play a online game and b buy a sword there (using real money) and a somehow hacks into b:s player and transfers the sword tohimself.

Is that theft in your opnion?

I can't speak for Togo, but in my opinion and I would believe in his, yes; it would even remain theft if no real money were involved.
.

Since its an online game there is no object to steal. Just changes in configuration, changes stored on the gameserver which neither a or b owns. So what has really happened here?

 

[Togo]

I'd treat it as a 'theft of a chose in action' - the same classficiation given to misappropriation of bank transfers and cheques. After all, claiming the theft of a small peice of paper, which is all that actually changes hands, isn't really the issue. The issue is that something of value to one person, through the criminal act, is transferred to another.

Again, it's not the same as copyright, because the 'chose in action' is something that existed before the crime took place, and it is transferred from one person to another. Neither is true in a copyright violation.

 

[Jokodo]

I can't speak for Togo, but in my opinion and I would believe in his, yes; it would even remain theft if no real money were involved.
.

Since its an online game there is no object to steal. Just changes in configuration, changes stored on the gameserver which neither a or b owns. So what has really happened here?

Why do you focus on the no tangible object thing? As far as I'm aware (feel free to prove me wrong, with quotes), nobody in this thread is arguing that intangible property isn't a thing, or that it can't be stolen. What we're arguing is that copyright violations aren't theft because they don't fulfill the requirement that some "thing" is transferred from A to B, i.e. comes into B's possession by means of being taken away from A. Nothing in that definition hinges on what, if any, physical form the "thing" has.

 

[Juma]

I'd treat it as a 'theft of a chose in action' - the same classficiation given to misappropriation of bank transfers and cheques. After all, claiming the theft of a small peice of paper, which is all that actually changes hands, isn't really the issue. The issue is that something of value to one person, through the criminal act, is transferred to another.

Again, it's not the same as copyright, because the 'chose in action' is something that existed before the crime took place, and it is transferred from one person to another. Neither is true in a copyright violation.

I have never said that it is not the copy that is the stolen object! It is the control of a copy. That that object is created when the copy is made is of no importance.

And note: likewise is the ownership of the substrate where the bytes are stored not of importance.

 

[Jokodo]

I'd treat it as a 'theft of a chose in action' - the same classficiation given to misappropriation of bank transfers and cheques. After all, claiming the theft of a small peice of paper, which is all that actually changes hands, isn't really the issue. The issue is that something of value to one person, through the criminal act, is transferred to another.

Again, it's not the same as copyright, because the 'chose in action' is something that existed before the crime took place, and it is transferred from one person to another. Neither is true in a copyright violation.

I have never said that it is not the copy that is the stolen object! It is the control of a copy. That that object is created when the copy is made is of no importance.

And note: likewise is the ownership of the substrate where the bytes are stored not of importance.

The control of a copy that didn't exist is also something that didn't exist before the copy was made.

 

[Juma]

I have never said that it is not the copy that is the stolen object! It is the control of a copy. That that object is created when the copy is made is of no importance.

And note: likewise is the ownership of the substrate where the bytes are stored not of importance.

The control of a copy that didn't exist is also something that didn't exist before the copy was made.

In the moment that copy exists the control of it belongs to the copyright owner.

I dont understand why you have problem with understanding that.

 

[Jokodo]

The control of a copy that didn't exist is also something that didn't exist before the copy was made.

In the moment that copy exists the control of it belongs to the copyright owner.

I dont understand why you have problem with understanding that.

I understand what you're saying, it just doesn't make sense. When the copy didn't exist, the control of that particular copy wasn't a thing (tangible or otherwise) and thus could not be owned. If you didn't own something before and don't own it afterwards, you cannot claim to be a victim of theft.

 

[Juma]

When the copy didn't exist, the control of that particular copy wasn't a thing .

Yes it was. The control of it exists before the copy is made.

 

[bilby]

When the copy didn't exist, the control of that particular copy wasn't a thing .

Yes it was. The control of it exists before the copy is made.

So having a copyright is like being the owner of a pork futures warehouse; you have to employ watchmen to protect stuff that doesn't yet exist from thieves.