- Burned CDs/DVDs have a shorter lifetime than pressed ones.
Yes, I can see why the ethics of selling a product with planned obsolescence would prevent the movie industry from engaging in such a practice. (Yes, some people would value the product lower, but as demonstrated by the success of free-phone-but-get-screwed-on-the-plan deals and the purchasing of low deductable insurance, the bulk of consumers are remarkably stupid when it comes to evaluating the worth of their product over the long term.)
You'd have to sell an awful lot of movies to each person in order to make back the cost of the burner, though. And it wouldn't come in a fancy box with a fancy label. The movie industry knows how to deal with physical distribution, and wants to spread the idea of a movie as something physical that you buy. I doubt that they want to move people any closer to the idea that they might as well just copy around movie files.
I'd say that most people are a little irrational about good and evil.
A *lot* of people (anyone that describes themselves as a moral absolutist is a good candidate, but most people probably vaguely have some opinion along these lines) feel that we order society based on morality.
I'd say that morality arises to address social problems. Something causes major social problems? It becomes "bad". Sure, sometimes government or other social structures can solve social problems, but making people irrationally do something because it's "good" or avoid it because it's "bad" is a pretty effective fix in a lot of ways.
I'd say that a concept of "good" or "evil" may even be important to a learning organism like a society. As Turing theorized (and seems pretty plausible), the way to build a learning system is to build a simple system that has the ability to learn, and then give it a "teacher". To avoid pure trial-and-error learning, you want to get the learning system to tend to treat the "teacher" as a significant factor in seeking out that-which-the-mind-seeks (the combination of positive external stimuli and positive internal feedback).
If you believe that "good" is a pretty stable, simple reduction of social fixes to solve otherwise-difficult-to-fix social problems, then you want everyone in a society to follow "good". If you can establish that "good" is associated with that-which-the-mind-seeks and then build a widespread concept of "good", then you have your teacher (well, a teacher) capable of bootstrapping a stable social system.
Because, frankly, I understand how annoying it is when someone says "we're going to ban this because it's *bad*", but you have to figure that if everyone just suddenly went entirely amoral, maybe society wouldn't be stable. Even if it's in people's interest to act in a fashion that mimicks how they'd act if they were acting based on a moral code, you can make mistakes in rational thought -- "maybe it's beneficial to kill this person that makes me angry". It seems like a simple moral code could solve this.
The time I'm most suspicious of people trying to apply morality inappropriately is when it relates to new technology or a wildly new environment. If you believe that morality is a set of societal-level knowledge, then morality is only well-adapted to deal with the past and continuing conditions that accurately reflect the past. So, for example, when it comes to genetic engineering, I'm exceedingly dubious that morality is worth a tinker's toot when it comes to deciding what to do...because moral codes weren't built up in an environment *containing* genetic engineering.
My kid's growing up listening to Snoop and watching John Woo.
No! You should put your child in a *box*, lock it, and never let him out! Completely shelter him from the world! That way, when he hits eighteen, he will be completely mature and capable of dealing with the world! Why, you can dump him out of his box in the red light district, and he'll do fine!
Does that mean that all the others only accelerate 2D audio?
A friend (with too much money and who read a few too many "Maximum PC" style reviews) once purchased a Hercules Game Theater card...it had some form of MP3 decoding hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, it also tended to crash his computer.
Really, all this 84.67 speaker stuff is kind of silly. The only point of more speakers is that they can more closely approximate headphones in the imperfect audio environment that is your room (and you normally have a subwoofer that gives you vibrations). If you have insufficient in-computer modelling of how audio sounds from behind, above, off to the left, etc, then an easy way to solve the problem is to have totally separate channels and just play them back separately and hope that the audio bouncing around the room comes out something like the real thing. A simple, good pair of stereo headphones has significantly more potential for accurate audio however, if your 3d audio model doesn't suck. It doesn't have to deal with all the interference from your room.
Well, maybe throw in a subwoofer plus the headphones, because you also want the vibrations hitting you. Maybe use a chair with the subwoofer built in (or a subwoofer as a footstool, as I do).
Seems like a money grab to me that will just alienate folk, just like their user/connection + terminal service licensing destroyed the terminal services.
Lock in creates economic value, which can be exploited by the company producing lock in up to and including the cost of switching away. You use IIS? How much do you think it'll cost you to switch to Apache and teach all your people Apache? That's how much Microsoft can suck out of you.
Because you need the *pro-quality* transistors! You aren't gonna use any ol' bought-them-off-a-guy-with-an-overcoat-transistors in your camera, now are you? No, you need 'em gold-plated!
Look, there are legitimate statements that can be made regarding advantages of high end digital cameras over low end, but I am exceedingly dubious that reliability (of a device that is almost entirely solid-state digital electronics) is at severe risk.
I subscribe to exactly three online services. One is my NNTP provider, another is my mail provider (nice to not be tied to one ISP), and the last is Consumer Reports. We can buy a huge variety of goods today, but the one thing that's hard to obtain amidst the deluge of marketing is greliable, trustworthy information about products, and Consumer Reports does a pretty good job of (a) providing product class overviews and recommending what to look for, and (b) providing objective evaluations of large numbers of products.
Why is it that people get so worked up over Mitnick?
He was a dick to a bunch of people, he got in trouble, he spent some time in jail. Okay, that sucks for him, but why does everyone drool over him?
Woz was an electronic prankster, but he wasn't a jerk, and he *created things* instead of just making people unhappy. I could see being a Woz fan, but waving a "Kevin" flag is just weird.
"Kurt has killed an urban legend," Mr Williams said. There's something a little sad in that statement. In fact, I'm reminded of the day I found out Santa Claus wasn't real.
A true analogy would have Santa Claus catching a.308 between the eyes and losing the back of his head. *That* would be sad.
I don't agree. Everyone thinks that *they* are "such a skillful driver/cell users that an accident could *never* happen to them". Problem is that the numbers demonstrate that it *does* happen, and that when it happens, it hurts someone else that *isn't* necessarily using a cell phone.
Finally, I completely disagree that it is "essential" to make or take cell calls while driving. If you absolutely have an emergency call that must be made, pull off the goddamn road.
- loud ringers prohibited
Agreed here, but then again it doesn't stop the assholes that like to play "window rattling music" so it's not like a law will make a difference.
Those are annoying, but this is not cell-specific (though cells may be the most common instance of a disruptive loud-noise producing device). If this problem became truly epidemic, I could see a requirement that portable consumer devices (PDAs, etc) be sold with a maximum sound output in decibels. I think that making this cell-specific is not very helpful.
- Obnoxious ringtones prohibited.
Obnoxious according to...? People have different tastes.
I don't have a cell phone; however, I suspect that it is possible to get a plan of more limited duration if one purchases the ($400 or so) cellular phone onesself.
Currently, the cell companies essentially give you a phone and then expect to make the money back on your contract; this is why they force you to have contract lengths.
The real problem is that it *costs money* to design and produce phones and to set up and maintain cell towers and pay to set up and maintain long distance and transcontinental lines.
In the early forties, the federal government sponsored a lot of artists to produce really nice art to convince people that it was *really important* to kill lots of Germans.
I'd say that it's at least as useful to convince people that science is fun.
"Lex" is only one letter different from "sex"! That's even less than the three letters that you had to change! Couldn't they have chosen a better name for their software package?
Re:The only people who call infringement theft...
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RIAA Sues a Child
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Whether or not the downloading is accidental is completely irrelevant to whether or not my argument is correct.
The fact that the lawsuit *existed* was not a problem. The fact that Big Tobacco is going down in flames is not, per se, a problem.
The fact that it was phenomenally profitable for the lawyers involved (I've seen numbers quoted for up to a sixth of the payout going to lawyers involved, which is insane) *is* a problem. It encourages lawyers to take on class action and other suits for *anything*, which results in companies doing utterly stupid things "to avoid liability". I'm not talking about common sense things like "don't sell addictive, cancer-causing things to people", but things like "No, I can't have an employee drive you to the airport because of *liability*."
Note that last time they had at least a couple House Representatives saying "copyright infringement from kids is bad, but we shouldn't allow this kind of way-out-of-whack punishment". There is clearly at least enough public support that I would be concerned if I were an RIAA lobbyist.
The GPL is designed to and steadily places an increasing amount of content in the open, available to the public. Copyleft does what copyright was intended to do, even faster than copyright did. We're still stuck with the ridiculous length of copyright, but other than that, copyleft pretty much accomplishes what the Founding Fathers were trying to do.
Music copyrights that last the life of an author plus a hundred years have absolutely *nothing* to do with giving the public more content. No record industry executive takes into account potential income beyond four years or so -- they don't know if their *company* will be around in twenty years, much less a hundred and twenty. The overextended copyrights have to do with the music and movie industries successfully buying out enough legislators over the past few years to subvert a major function of our Constitution.
Piracy, theft, copyright infringement
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 1
How come NOBODY on this newsgroup EVER gets all antsy about the number of articles or posts about "Identity Theft".
Identity theft is not a legal term. It's a pop culture term coined by.com journalists.
Exactly this *does* happen with copyright infringement and "piracy". I don't gripe about use of the term "piracy" as long as it isn't used in a legal or legislative context (it should *not* show up in the courtroom or Congress), because it is a pop culture term for copyright infringement. It's not a great choice; "identity theft" is not overloaded as a term, but "piracy" is. However, it's entered the common lexicon.
"Theft" is not a pop culture term for copyright infringement. It is simply the wrong word, and an emotionally loaded one. It is only used by people who have failed to make a factual argument and are trying to make an emotional one. It is akin to calling someone guilty of manslaughter a "murderer".
This is why we don't like it. If you can't successfully make an argument for something using the term "copyright infringement", you don't get to go back and try stuffing "theft" in at the appropriate places to try to appeal to emotion and irrationality.
I'm a law student, and let me tell you, we're not taught to lie.
I agree. But you *do* work in a field where it is very beneficial to use loaded rhetoric. This is not your fault -- as long as juries are going to respond to emotional arguments instead of being coolly factual, if you don't do it, the other side is going to do so, and there's no mechanism in the legal system to dissuade lawyers from using loaded rhetoric.
The real complaint (why people tend to transfer a lot of their anger onto lawyers) is that it's fucking hard to build a perfect system for resolving issues between people. Pull juries out of a system, and you establish a class of judges as incredibly powerful. So, given that, it's really hard to take Joe Average and make him intelligent, analytical, and thoughtful to the point where a guy whose professional is to convince Joe Average of one side of a case can't make his point. Now, what's the guy on the *other* side of the case going to do? Be purely factual and keep losing cases? No -- that's an unstable system. He's going to use rhetoric too.
The masses see that something isn't perfect and choose to focus on lawyers, because they're the most visible target. Hence, "Lawyers are Evil". It becomes a common mantra after a while.
If I had to make one suggestion that would improve the quality of our legal system immensely, it would be to change two things (both of which lawyers would oppose, so not likely to happen):
*) Plaintiff never gets punitive damages above a certain (small) amount. Any punitive wins in this class get used by a state-run organization to help avoid future problems of this sort. This eliminates the massive, multi-million dollar "lottery" wins for plaintiffs and lawyers that make abuse of the legal system so profitable.
*) Indirect and direct profits to lawyers in class action suits get capped. Yes, in very extreme cases, this *could* limit the likelihood of some independent law firms going out against some big corporate-backed lawyers with tons of funding, but, for instance, the Big Tobacco lawsuit was absurd. Class actions should not be a lottery system for lawyers.
I'm not against lawyers making a good living -- they work in a highly specialized field and have to be knowledgeable and skilled. They're important to the functioning of society. What I *don't* like is that a select few make phenomenal amounts of money through abusing the legal system. Putting social pressure on lawyers to not do this is useless, because it doesn't matter what the masses of lawyers do; only what the few that cause problems do.
The only people who call infringement theft...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 1
The only people who insist on calling copyright infringement theft are those who are trying to make a weak argument and want more irrational, emotional support from who they're speaking to. "Theft" has more emotional ties than does "copyright infringment". It seems to me that your real problem is not that people are using the incorrect word, but that your argument that "copyright infringment" of this music is very bad is so weak that you have to use the term "theft" to try to influence people.
If you ever accidently hit someone at night with a car, and they die, I sure bet that you don't want the newspaper calling you a "murderer".
So you have a group of people who are trying to keep people being rational about the crime (those using the term "copyright infringment") and a group of people who are trying to make an emotional argument because they can't win on rational arguments (the people using "steal" or "theft").
Kid is stealing music, kid must be stopped from stealing music. What is everyone else suggesting, kids should be able to help themselves to stuff? Hey - Johnny - go steal me a Ferrari 360 Spider.
Hey, Johnny -- go infringe those Ferrari 360 Spider copyrights!
Slashdot Mirror
- Burned CDs/DVDs have a shorter lifetime than pressed ones.
Yes, I can see why the ethics of selling a product with planned obsolescence would prevent the movie industry from engaging in such a practice. (Yes, some people would value the product lower, but as demonstrated by the success of free-phone-but-get-screwed-on-the-plan deals and the purchasing of low deductable insurance, the bulk of consumers are remarkably stupid when it comes to evaluating the worth of their product over the long term.)
You'd have to sell an awful lot of movies to each person in order to make back the cost of the burner, though. And it wouldn't come in a fancy box with a fancy label. The movie industry knows how to deal with physical distribution, and wants to spread the idea of a movie as something physical that you buy. I doubt that they want to move people any closer to the idea that they might as well just copy around movie files.
I'd say that most people are a little irrational about good and evil.
A *lot* of people (anyone that describes themselves as a moral absolutist is a good candidate, but most people probably vaguely have some opinion along these lines) feel that we order society based on morality.
I'd say that morality arises to address social problems. Something causes major social problems? It becomes "bad". Sure, sometimes government or other social structures can solve social problems, but making people irrationally do something because it's "good" or avoid it because it's "bad" is a pretty effective fix in a lot of ways.
I'd say that a concept of "good" or "evil" may even be important to a learning organism like a society. As Turing theorized (and seems pretty plausible), the way to build a learning system is to build a simple system that has the ability to learn, and then give it a "teacher". To avoid pure trial-and-error learning, you want to get the learning system to tend to treat the "teacher" as a significant factor in seeking out that-which-the-mind-seeks (the combination of positive external stimuli and positive internal feedback).
If you believe that "good" is a pretty stable, simple reduction of social fixes to solve otherwise-difficult-to-fix social problems, then you want everyone in a society to follow "good". If you can establish that "good" is associated with that-which-the-mind-seeks and then build a widespread concept of "good", then you have your teacher (well, a teacher) capable of bootstrapping a stable social system.
Because, frankly, I understand how annoying it is when someone says "we're going to ban this because it's *bad*", but you have to figure that if everyone just suddenly went entirely amoral, maybe society wouldn't be stable. Even if it's in people's interest to act in a fashion that mimicks how they'd act if they were acting based on a moral code, you can make mistakes in rational thought -- "maybe it's beneficial to kill this person that makes me angry". It seems like a simple moral code could solve this.
The time I'm most suspicious of people trying to apply morality inappropriately is when it relates to new technology or a wildly new environment. If you believe that morality is a set of societal-level knowledge, then morality is only well-adapted to deal with the past and continuing conditions that accurately reflect the past. So, for example, when it comes to genetic engineering, I'm exceedingly dubious that morality is worth a tinker's toot when it comes to deciding what to do...because moral codes weren't built up in an environment *containing* genetic engineering.
This is your random dose of philosophy for today.
But in the real world- there are too many sources so why pick on video games over movies, television, radio, books, magazines, etc?
Because the video game industry doesn't have a nice, established industry that's learned to buy off politicians?
My kid's growing up listening to Snoop and watching John Woo.
No! You should put your child in a *box*, lock it, and never let him out! Completely shelter him from the world! That way, when he hits eighteen, he will be completely mature and capable of dealing with the world! Why, you can dump him out of his box in the red light district, and he'll do fine!
How can make an mp3 sound BETTER than the CD?
Add bass. It *will* sell.
Does that mean that all the others only accelerate 2D audio?
A friend (with too much money and who read a few too many "Maximum PC" style reviews) once purchased a Hercules Game Theater card...it had some form of MP3 decoding hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, it also tended to crash his computer.
Really, all this 84.67 speaker stuff is kind of silly. The only point of more speakers is that they can more closely approximate headphones in the imperfect audio environment that is your room (and you normally have a subwoofer that gives you vibrations). If you have insufficient in-computer modelling of how audio sounds from behind, above, off to the left, etc, then an easy way to solve the problem is to have totally separate channels and just play them back separately and hope that the audio bouncing around the room comes out something like the real thing. A simple, good pair of stereo headphones has significantly more potential for accurate audio however, if your 3d audio model doesn't suck. It doesn't have to deal with all the interference from your room.
Well, maybe throw in a subwoofer plus the headphones, because you also want the vibrations hitting you. Maybe use a chair with the subwoofer built in (or a subwoofer as a footstool, as I do).
Seems like a money grab to me that will just alienate folk, just like their user/connection + terminal service licensing destroyed the terminal services.
Lock in creates economic value, which can be exploited by the company producing lock in up to and including the cost of switching away. You use IIS? How much do you think it'll cost you to switch to Apache and teach all your people Apache? That's how much Microsoft can suck out of you.
Because you need the *pro-quality* transistors! You aren't gonna use any ol' bought-them-off-a-guy-with-an-overcoat-transistors in your camera, now are you? No, you need 'em gold-plated!
Look, there are legitimate statements that can be made regarding advantages of high end digital cameras over low end, but I am exceedingly dubious that reliability (of a device that is almost entirely solid-state digital electronics) is at severe risk.
I subscribe to exactly three online services. One is my NNTP provider, another is my mail provider (nice to not be tied to one ISP), and the last is Consumer Reports. We can buy a huge variety of goods today, but the one thing that's hard to obtain amidst the deluge of marketing is greliable, trustworthy information about products, and Consumer Reports does a pretty good job of (a) providing product class overviews and recommending what to look for, and (b) providing objective evaluations of large numbers of products.
Why is it that people get so worked up over Mitnick?
He was a dick to a bunch of people, he got in trouble, he spent some time in jail. Okay, that sucks for him, but why does everyone drool over him?
Woz was an electronic prankster, but he wasn't a jerk, and he *created things* instead of just making people unhappy. I could see being a Woz fan, but waving a "Kevin" flag is just weird.
"Kurt has killed an urban legend," Mr Williams said. There's something a little sad in that statement. In fact, I'm reminded of the day I found out Santa Claus wasn't real.
.308 between the eyes and losing the back of his head. *That* would be sad.
A true analogy would have Santa Claus catching a
- Cell phones prohibited while driving.
Depends entirely on the person.
I don't agree. Everyone thinks that *they* are "such a skillful driver/cell users that an accident could *never* happen to them". Problem is that the numbers demonstrate that it *does* happen, and that when it happens, it hurts someone else that *isn't* necessarily using a cell phone.
Finally, I completely disagree that it is "essential" to make or take cell calls while driving. If you absolutely have an emergency call that must be made, pull off the goddamn road.
- loud ringers prohibited
Agreed here, but then again it doesn't stop the assholes that like to play "window rattling music" so it's not like a law will make a difference.
Those are annoying, but this is not cell-specific (though cells may be the most common instance of a disruptive loud-noise producing device). If this problem became truly epidemic, I could see a requirement that portable consumer devices (PDAs, etc) be sold with a maximum sound output in decibels. I think that making this cell-specific is not very helpful.
- Obnoxious ringtones prohibited.
Obnoxious according to...? People have different tastes.
Agreed.
I don't have a cell phone; however, I suspect that it is possible to get a plan of more limited duration if one purchases the ($400 or so) cellular phone onesself.
Currently, the cell companies essentially give you a phone and then expect to make the money back on your contract; this is why they force you to have contract lengths.
The real problem is that it *costs money* to design and produce phones and to set up and maintain cell towers and pay to set up and maintain long distance and transcontinental lines.
...Stanford probably still won.
Man, you mean I have to put up with ribbing from the Stanford guy at work?
[sigh]
In the early forties, the federal government sponsored a lot of artists to produce really nice art to convince people that it was *really important* to kill lots of Germans.
I'd say that it's at least as useful to convince people that science is fun.
I'll bet that you get *really angry* when you read through the dictionary and see all those word usages marked "archaic".
"Shotokan...Shotacon"
"Lex" is only one letter different from "sex"! That's even less than the three letters that you had to change! Couldn't they have chosen a better name for their software package?
Whether or not the downloading is accidental is completely irrelevant to whether or not my argument is correct.
The fact that the lawsuit *existed* was not a problem. The fact that Big Tobacco is going down in flames is not, per se, a problem.
The fact that it was phenomenally profitable for the lawyers involved (I've seen numbers quoted for up to a sixth of the payout going to lawyers involved, which is insane) *is* a problem. It encourages lawyers to take on class action and other suits for *anything*, which results in companies doing utterly stupid things "to avoid liability". I'm not talking about common sense things like "don't sell addictive, cancer-causing things to people", but things like "No, I can't have an employee drive you to the airport because of *liability*."
Note that last time they had at least a couple House Representatives saying "copyright infringement from kids is bad, but we shouldn't allow this kind of way-out-of-whack punishment". There is clearly at least enough public support that I would be concerned if I were an RIAA lobbyist.
The GPL is designed to and steadily places an increasing amount of content in the open, available to the public. Copyleft does what copyright was intended to do, even faster than copyright did. We're still stuck with the ridiculous length of copyright, but other than that, copyleft pretty much accomplishes what the Founding Fathers were trying to do.
Music copyrights that last the life of an author plus a hundred years have absolutely *nothing* to do with giving the public more content. No record industry executive takes into account potential income beyond four years or so -- they don't know if their *company* will be around in twenty years, much less a hundred and twenty. The overextended copyrights have to do with the music and movie industries successfully buying out enough legislators over the past few years to subvert a major function of our Constitution.
How come NOBODY on this newsgroup EVER gets all antsy about the number of articles or posts about "Identity Theft".
.com journalists.
Identity theft is not a legal term. It's a pop culture term coined by
Exactly this *does* happen with copyright infringement and "piracy". I don't gripe about use of the term "piracy" as long as it isn't used in a legal or legislative context (it should *not* show up in the courtroom or Congress), because it is a pop culture term for copyright infringement. It's not a great choice; "identity theft" is not overloaded as a term, but "piracy" is. However, it's entered the common lexicon.
"Theft" is not a pop culture term for copyright infringement. It is simply the wrong word, and an emotionally loaded one. It is only used by people who have failed to make a factual argument and are trying to make an emotional one. It is akin to calling someone guilty of manslaughter a "murderer".
This is why we don't like it. If you can't successfully make an argument for something using the term "copyright infringement", you don't get to go back and try stuffing "theft" in at the appropriate places to try to appeal to emotion and irrationality.
Manslaughter is not "murder".
Copyright infringement is not "theft".
I'm a law student, and let me tell you, we're not taught to lie.
I agree. But you *do* work in a field where it is very beneficial to use loaded rhetoric. This is not your fault -- as long as juries are going to respond to emotional arguments instead of being coolly factual, if you don't do it, the other side is going to do so, and there's no mechanism in the legal system to dissuade lawyers from using loaded rhetoric.
The real complaint (why people tend to transfer a lot of their anger onto lawyers) is that it's fucking hard to build a perfect system for resolving issues between people. Pull juries out of a system, and you establish a class of judges as incredibly powerful. So, given that, it's really hard to take Joe Average and make him intelligent, analytical, and thoughtful to the point where a guy whose professional is to convince Joe Average of one side of a case can't make his point. Now, what's the guy on the *other* side of the case going to do? Be purely factual and keep losing cases? No -- that's an unstable system. He's going to use rhetoric too.
The masses see that something isn't perfect and choose to focus on lawyers, because they're the most visible target. Hence, "Lawyers are Evil". It becomes a common mantra after a while.
If I had to make one suggestion that would improve the quality of our legal system immensely, it would be to change two things (both of which lawyers would oppose, so not likely to happen):
*) Plaintiff never gets punitive damages above a certain (small) amount. Any punitive wins in this class get used by a state-run organization to help avoid future problems of this sort. This eliminates the massive, multi-million dollar "lottery" wins for plaintiffs and lawyers that make abuse of the legal system so profitable.
*) Indirect and direct profits to lawyers in class action suits get capped. Yes, in very extreme cases, this *could* limit the likelihood of some independent law firms going out against some big corporate-backed lawyers with tons of funding, but, for instance, the Big Tobacco lawsuit was absurd. Class actions should not be a lottery system for lawyers.
I'm not against lawyers making a good living -- they work in a highly specialized field and have to be knowledgeable and skilled. They're important to the functioning of society. What I *don't* like is that a select few make phenomenal amounts of money through abusing the legal system. Putting social pressure on lawyers to not do this is useless, because it doesn't matter what the masses of lawyers do; only what the few that cause problems do.
The only people who insist on calling copyright infringement theft are those who are trying to make a weak argument and want more irrational, emotional support from who they're speaking to. "Theft" has more emotional ties than does "copyright infringment". It seems to me that your real problem is not that people are using the incorrect word, but that your argument that "copyright infringment" of this music is very bad is so weak that you have to use the term "theft" to try to influence people.
If you ever accidently hit someone at night with a car, and they die, I sure bet that you don't want the newspaper calling you a "murderer".
So you have a group of people who are trying to keep people being rational about the crime (those using the term "copyright infringment") and a group of people who are trying to make an emotional argument because they can't win on rational arguments (the people using "steal" or "theft").
Kid is stealing music, kid must be stopped from stealing music. What is everyone else suggesting, kids should be able to help themselves to stuff? Hey - Johnny - go steal me a Ferrari 360 Spider.
Hey, Johnny -- go infringe those Ferrari 360 Spider copyrights!