How is their right to distribute the movie removed by me distributing the movie? True, they have lost their _exclusivity_, but once again, _I_ don't have it. I did not "steal" anything.
And maybe people talk about stealing "movies" and "music" instead of "removing the exclusivity of the corporation's distribution rights" because that's how _they_ almost always frame the debate; "You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a purse....". And that framing is _wrong_. All a pirate has done is take away the artificial scarcity they have introduced into the market.
And quite frankly, I don't give a flying crap what the media companies _think_ they are selling me, I am buying the _movie/software/ebook/almbum/whatever_ not "licensing rights" to it. That's a legal fiction to which I refuse to give lip service.
Exactly. Whatever IP is, it is _not_ the same as physical property. Copying a movie isn't _theft_.
If I steal your loaf of bread and give it to my friend, afterwards my friend has bread and you and I have nothing.
If I copy your DVD and give a copy to my friend, at the end not only do both I and my friend have the movie, but _you still do too_.
These are not equivalent situations. The later is not "theft". We don't have a good word for what it is; English is not particularly well suited for the nuances of the noosphere. But it's not _theft_.
I don't know what "the answer" is. I do know that it isn't going to come from trying to shoehorn the fundamentally new classes of entity that arise from the unprecedented powers we are provided by modern technology into the legal and conceptual frameworks that arose from what was essentially an agrarian and industrial society.
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How is their right to distribute the movie removed by me distributing the movie? True, they have lost their _exclusivity_, but once again, _I_ don't have it. I did not "steal" anything.
And maybe people talk about stealing "movies" and "music" instead of "removing the exclusivity of the corporation's distribution rights" because that's how _they_ almost always frame the debate; "You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a purse....". And that framing is _wrong_. All a pirate has done is take away the artificial scarcity they have introduced into the market.
And quite frankly, I don't give a flying crap what the media companies _think_ they are selling me, I am buying the _movie/software/ebook/almbum/whatever_ not "licensing rights" to it. That's a legal fiction to which I refuse to give lip service.
Exactly. Whatever IP is, it is _not_ the same as physical property. Copying a movie isn't _theft_.
If I steal your loaf of bread and give it to my friend, afterwards my friend has bread and you and I have nothing.
If I copy your DVD and give a copy to my friend, at the end not only do both I and my friend have the movie, but _you still do too_.
These are not equivalent situations. The later is not "theft". We don't have a good word for what it is; English is not particularly well suited for the nuances of the noosphere. But it's not _theft_.
I don't know what "the answer" is. I do know that it isn't going to come from trying to shoehorn the fundamentally new classes of entity that arise from the unprecedented powers we are provided by modern technology into the legal and conceptual frameworks that arose from what was essentially an agrarian and industrial society.
This are new things that require new ideas.