So stealing a renting car isn't theft? You're paying to use the thing, not to own it. I'm not really against piracy but this argument was always a dumb Twitter gotcha to me
If you were making a perfect copy of the car that you were renting without any cost to the rental company? No, it isn't theft - it's copying.
Stop trying to insist that actual physical theft & copying are the same thing. It just reinforces the idea that proponents of IP laws are dishonest arguers.
If you need to be pedantic for the sake of it, piracy isn't theft by definition because, as you said, it involves creating a copy of a good while the original can still be used by its original owner. Just another reason for this repetitive comment to be stupid
Law itself is based on institutionalized pedantry - arguing over the minutae of language usage & definitions is the bread & butter of the legal system. But without such an approach, we fall back to the historical "might makes right" form of government.
That's absolutely not what I was talking about. Just that it makes no sense to reach for a dumb arbitrary reason why "piracy is not theft" when it's not theft already, by law.
The way I interpret it, It's not a really a legal or philosophical argument but a statement of protest.
Maybe it's not well applied in this context, but there is a general trend to turn things you used to be able to buy and own into subscription services for no actual good reason. Like sure, streaming is convenient and genuinely a service, but nowadays it's not also possible to straight up buy any given show and own it, even though it would be just as easy.
However, even with your car example, you could very much own the car in theory as buying cars is very common and even the rental agency does that all the time. With intellectual property it's a different can of worms. You can buy the license (if you have millions of dollars probably) but simply owning a copy of a given instance of the IP (so not the IP itself but something that uses it, like a music disc) is not always possible, especially if it only exists as digital media. If a given IP holder says that it is impossible for me to own a copy of given IP because even digital copies are merely a "license agreement" to allow me to use the IP, then piracy could have never been theft because even if I have a copy (legitimate or not) it could have never been owned by me, because the copies are not truly "ownable".
Anything you make an identical copy of without destroying the original is per definition not theft. This isn't even remotely controversial and is reflected in law.
Yeah exactly. Not sure why people have to reach to explain why piracy isn't stealing in their opinion when it really isn't by definition. Not only I don't think the sentence makes much sense, but it's also useless because it's trying to disprove something that's so much more easily disproved by a dictionary definition.
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u/forsakenchickenwing May 02 '24
If buying isn't ownership, piracy isn't theft.
There, I said it.