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Property is theft!

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16:21 / 11.03.04

So, I should probably be careful about exactly what I say, but the other week my office mate had his laptop stolen. Only, I later found out that our boss thinks it was an insurance scam to get a new one. The boss didn't care very much, I don't think.

But it got me thinking, where do you draw the line with stealing stuff? Anywhere? Nicking your mate's PC is a no-no for most people, I think. What about from a shop? An insurance scam? Credit card fraud?Downloading music peer to peer? Where do you draw the line?

16:54 / 11.03.04

I draw the line where stealing the thing will deprive its owner of it. Which, I believe, is pretty much the legal definition of theft. But it does raise the question of whether P2P really is theft rather than just breach of copyright. Taking a copy of something isn't the same as nicking it, is it?

17:00 / 11.03.04

Breach of copyright is theft. You are stealing the revenues the copyright holder would get if you'd bought it. The argument, I think, is that most P2P exchanges, being individual songs, are not actually copyright violations, because no money changes hands and the product is not something the copyright holder would likely have made any money on.

17:04 / 11.03.04

But that's a strange definition of 'deprive' isn't it. A kind of potential deprivation, which isn't the same thing at all.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

17:17 / 11.03.04

I kind of resent when millionaires tell us not to steal their potential for more millions.

Did anyone see that ad with Britney et al, equating downloading music to going in a shop and stealing cd's?

All I could manage to think was "fuck off".

17:23 / 11.03.04

You probably wouldn't think it was strange if your financial life were based on calculations of album sales, or book sales, or whatever. The problem is that the losses "incurred" by filesharing or insurance fraud never come out of corporate profit margins, or even the artist's profit margins. They're passed on to the consumer. Which may be the logic for the big marketing push by entertainment companies to criminalize filesharing. Banning it outright is a) technically difficult, b) legally suspect and c) not really in their best interest; but it does give them a rationale to hike prices.

17:45 / 11.03.04

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to defend the ethics of file-sharing. Thinking about where I draw the line on theft I realised that I was essentially just saying that I draw the line at any theft at all, since I had a recollection of theft being defined as taking something without permission and with the intention of depriving its owner from it. And mention of P2P made me think about how that definition of theft doesn't seem to apply there. I dimly recall that when joy-riding became fashionable, the law regarding car theft had to be amended to take into account the fact that there was no intention to permanently deprive the car's owner. Thus, the offence of 'Taking And Driving Away' was established. I think. I could be so wrong about all that, mind.

23:27 / 11.03.04

There is also the notion of a reasonable profit. It's part of the idea behind making price-fixing and price-gouging illegal. Is it reasonable to expect that if manufacturing costs go down, that the consumer price will go down? If the consumer price goes up rather than down, then isn't the record company stealing from me, because they're taking something (my potential price savings) without giving me anything in return (extra content, for example). I have no problem paying more for a CD than a record if it has extra tracks, is a CD Rom with video content, etc. What I have a problem with is paying $18.99 for any CD, unless it's a Matthew fucking Barney CD, in which case that would represent a several hundred thousand dollar savings.

I mean, I'm broke. If I weren't getting it for free (and it were impossible to get a copy, even a crappy one on tape), I wouldn't be getting it at all. Does that mean I'm not stealing?

23:43 / 11.03.04

And by the same logic:

I can't afford to eat. I take food from a shop. If I didn't get it for free, I wouldn't get it at all. Is it still theft?

06:03 / 12.03.04

If you were creating near-identical copies of the food and then taking it, while still leaving the original food on the shelf then the question isn't so simple as that. It isn't as simple as depriving someone of something tangible, but it is illegal. Think about it this way - if your friend could make you a copy of his car, would you turn it down because it violated the intellectual property rights of the design?

I agree that the "I wouldn'ta bought it anyway!" argument is hollow on the subject - I think the real meat of the matter is in what "potential profit margins" ultimately ends up meaning to consumers. I'm personally very much for the legislation of taxing the sale of mp3-players/iPods that's going on in countries Canada and France. It recognizes that the "problem" cannot really be controlled at this stage and yet still compensates the owners of "shared" Intellectual Properties. It's certainly a quality interim solution, in my opinion.

Society in general is finally catching up to the surge of technology from the past 15 years, so arguments like these are finally really relavant. The next 10 years will be crazy for privacy and intellectual property rights development.

For as long as corporations have existed, the average citizen has held the idea that a little nip and tuck from the company's margins (via theft of office supplies, browsing the internet on company hours, etc.) is not necessarily wrong - a "victimless crime". As we move forward in a developed world where information is becoming more of a product and the product is becoming more easily available, the consequences of things like that will be made more defined/intense, I think - whether or not the general activities change.

Insurance scams are of another order entirely, though - they can go from something as small as breaking your cel phone on purpose to get a new one (which companies like Sprint account for in their pricing models anyway) to levels involving arson and murder - and the line of rationalization really blurs there. I think insurance muddling is another subject entirely.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

08:56 / 12.03.04

No, no, no, no, NO!! P2P filesharing is not, repeat not the same as theft.

There is a very good reason why we have invented laws relating to Rights Infringement, and called them Copyright and Publishing Laws, and not just lumped it all in under the same umbrealla, ah, fuck it, it's a bit like stealing innit, lets just charge em with theft.

For the last time, (ok, its the first time here, but my how we've had this one out on some other BB's I subscribe to), Copyright Infringement is not the same as stealing, and drawing specious, facile analogies is pointless, fruitless, and, from a personal point of view, fucking annoying.

It doesn't have to be 'like' anything else. It's Copyright Infringement, that's what it is. Neither 'tantamount to', nor 'the equivalent of' anything, just what it is, that's all.

Whew, sorry, must drink decaf in the morning.

btw, I earn the vast majority of my income from royalties and copyright being upheld and effectively policed, so I'm not just banner waving and ranting. The sooner people take the time to understand the difference, the better, in my opinion.

09:09 / 12.03.04

According to the The Theft Act 1968 - the 5 points that make up the definition of theft are :-
A person is guilty of theft if they:-
1) Dishonestly
2) Appropriate
3) Property
4) Belonging to another
5) with the intention to permanently deprive the other of it.

09:42 / 12.03.04

I'm not sure I want to go too far with semantics. I'm more interested in the moral than the legal question. But here is a hypothetical...

Your mate is a writer and you go to visit them. You get a chance to read their latest book, which they haven't shown to anybody. You copy it, and make a book deal yourself with their material. Pretty scummy, right?

E Randy: Is it theft if a starving person steals food? I'd say yes. But justified theft.

09:57 / 12.03.04

Yes, that's pretty scummy LA, and I don't think most peoaple would do it, as it would leave a bad taste in their mouth, um morally speaking. Maybe it wouldn't phase some people though, (Morvern Callar!).

I guess you draw the line where you personally feel comfortable with it, if you are speaking solely about morality. The problem with this of course is not everyone will feel the same about everything all of the time. Moral arguments cannot really be reduced to reasoning as there is always so emotive element which involves empathising with certain situations and people.

10:25 / 12.03.04

Sure, Jub. I guess I just want to hear what people think. For instance, that hypothetical has is different from p2p in some important ways. But it is also similar in others.

I have a friend who is completely opposed to p2p for these kinds of reasons - that is just theft where you know you can get away with it. He would also introduce the class issue. He would say that p2p is tantamount to walking into HMV and stealing a CD off the shelf. The former is considered ok since it is carried out by the privileged, who invoke a self serving definition of what constitutes acceptable behaviour.

He gets fairly heated about it, and I don't entirely agree, but he may have a point.

10:34 / 12.03.04

Is it theft if a starving person steals food? I'd say yes. But justified theft.

Precisely. And that's the disctinction that people seem to be drawing here - not between theft and, er, non-theft, but between theft and justifiable theft.

10:43 / 12.03.04

The theft of CD from HMV doesn't really hold up because its all tied to physical goods.

How about the loan of a book/cd/dvd to a friend? (again there is a issue of physical goods but I'm trying to obviate that with by centering this example on the intangible quality of having read/listened to/viewed the media)

You consume the media for free the artist doesn't get anything - ethical or no?

10:52 / 12.03.04

I dunno, sleaze. I think the example is closer to the whole P2P issue if you borrow the book then scan all its pages into your PC. You've still not got a physical copy of it, but you do have a copy of it.

Money Shot - yes, very good, Copyright Infringement is not the same as theft. Any danger of you explaining why you think that's the case?

10:56 / 12.03.04

Kant would disagree with you there Randy.

What I was trying to get at Lurid, is the differnec ebetween file sharing and HMV shop lifting is one of emotion NOT reasoning. Even though it's HMV and not some local shop and you approach stealing from them with the mentality that it's okay because they are a huge corporation - the file sharing is easier as it seems less deliberate.

I read an article recently where the guy posed this problem. If you were walking along a path and saw a little kid drowning in a pond, and you though "erm, no I can't be bothered to save that child's life because I don't want to ruin my £200 pound shoes" - people would look at you fairly reprehensibly. However, people *could* give £200 pounds to help save children's lives in Africa say, and the fact they don't is not met with the same reaction. Far from it in fact.

The only really difference is the emotional empathy involved.

11:01 / 12.03.04

Copyright infringement isn't theft for the reason Jub outlined above. It fails the definition on critereon 5.
It is copying though - which someone might object to for a number of reasons.

11:10 / 12.03.04

But - and fogive me if I'm being dumb here - aren't you permanently depriving the other of the royalites from what might otherwise have been a sale?

11:22 / 12.03.04

Well, the in the definition of theft, the deprivation refers to the thing itself. And I don't think that's just semantics or pedantry. All kinds of actions might end up deprive someone of something or other else.... but that begins to take us away from even a common sense understanding of what theft is like. Don't you think?

Jack The Bodiless

11:34 / 12.03.04

No, actually the definition of 'Theft' refers to property. 'Property', in turn, also includes money. So electronically stealing money from someone's bank account is also theft, despite that lack of a physical object or 'thing' being stolen. Of course, that's UK law...

Smoothly, you're right about the advent of joyriding leading to the introduction of the 'TWOCking' offence. See also various laws surrounding deception/false accounting (there is no criminal offence of 'fraud' in the UK). I know this to be true. I used to be a criminal investigator, at least according to PACE.

To turn it away a little from the P2P issue (which is a highly emotive one for people who regularly do it and don't like to be told it's morally confusing) - a Daily Telegraph survey a couple of years ago found that 25% of people surveyed did not believe that defrauding insurance companies was dishonest. Not that they'd done it, or where thinking of doing it, or would do it - but that they did not think it was actually WRONG...

11:50 / 12.03.04

Jack, when you say the deprivation refers to 'property', does that mean any property - rather than the object the 'thief' is acquiring? If, for example, I steal £1000 of you, which you were intending to buy a car with - I've not stolen your car have I?
To bring this back to P2P for a moment (I, for one, don't mind being told that things I do are morally confusing, not one bit), isn't the fact that the loss of revenue is by no means a given, affect the moral status of the act? I mean, if I make myself a pie, have I stolen potential revenue from my local pie shop?

The statistic about insurance fraud is interesting. I wonder how many people would change their minds if really questioned on it though. And I suppose quite a few people would say that stealing from the rich isn't wrong.

12:03 / 12.03.04

If, for example, I steal £1000 of you, which you were intending to buy a car with - I've not stolen your car have I?

No, not in that case, but turn that around. I have a car that I spent £1000 on. You steal it. You've stolen £1000's worth of car. I can claim that I've lost either the car, or the £1000.

Go back to my earlier point. No, you've not stolen the royalties I would have recieved from a sale, but you've stolen £X amount worth of property (intellectual or otherwise). Or don't we consider the stolen item's financial worth at all?

I feel like I'm fumbling in the dark for my point here.

Jack The Bodiless

12:06 / 12.03.04

Well, the legal definition is predisposed criteria identifying a specific crime that has already happened. So it's great for charging your man who's nicked a grand of someone else's money, but lousy at making moral distinctions about hypotheticals.

That being the case, the 'property' relates to 'the thing that has been stolen' - ie, the money. However, judges have often been known to relate any award for compensation to the context of the property or the theft itself (eg, that cash was earmarked for Smoothly's new car. As he couldn't buy himself the car, he wasn't able to do that drivign holiday across Europe he'd planned, and so lost deposits etc. I order the defendant to pay £150.00 towards said deposits).

But I think the legalities are getting in the way of the point. Theft is illegal. QED. It's utterly irrelevant whether it's 'justifiable' or not (and 'justifiable' is second only to 'reasonable' when it comes to words that no one can agree on the definition of - indeed, it seems to depend rather on the fast talking ability of the justifier and trhe credulity of the justifiee).

However, morally - if you didn't need the money, and can't prove even that you lost any by the act, and it's up to you whether the offender is charged/prosecuted - is it morally 'right' for you to press charges?

Similarly, for the P2P debate - is it morally 'right' to continue to file share a particular artist's work when ze's on record as saying that ze finds it unacceptable, and that it's damaging him?

(By the way - it's equally facile to say that people who file share will then go out and pay money for the music. You don't know that they will. And why should they, if they don't have to? You wouldn't believe the number of people I've heard claim that they always buy stuff they're interested in, remark again in an unguarded moment "ah, don't worry about it, I'll rip a copy from [wherever] ")

12:12 / 12.03.04

I feel just the same, Randy, for what it's worth.
My examples could be better, but with the £1000 vs. Car thing, i was trying to get to the bottom of something Jack suggested about the object of a theft. I thought the legal criteria on theft - in particular the 'deprivation' clause - refers to the property itself - rather than any potential other property that thing might be able to bring about. I assume, for instance, that if I steal some paint from a collectable artist, I've just stolen paint - I haven't stolen the painting she might have created with it.
Sorry, my examples are pretty clumsy. I'm fumbling with you Randy.

But to describe an album, say, as X amount of potential revenue is moot, isn't it. I mean, it might derive a certain amount of revenue. But it might not. For instance, does it make any difference if I had no intention of buying said album, even if an opportunity to copy it didn't exisit?

12:16 / 12.03.04

Ah, thanks for clarifying that legal point, Jack. So, legally, there is a sense that a car theif might also be seen as stealing something else too (eg. those deposits). Interesting.

12:33 / 12.03.04

By the way, Jack, in my mind 'reasonably' is second to 'morally right' in when it comes to definition everyone can agree one. See my thread on Rights in the Head Shop, ignored out of sheer contempt. So I think that might just be me.

13:56 / 12.03.04

e randy said

Go back to my earlier point. No, you've not stolen the royalties I would have recieved from a sale, but you've stolen £X amount worth of property (intellectual or otherwise). Or don't we consider the stolen item's financial worth at all

But how do you value that intellectual property? Is a Beatles track worth more than a 50 cent track?

15:57 / 12.03.04

I suppose for that, you're going to have to take into account what the average pirce of the thing is when bought. How much money would have been gained from a sale, had it made a sale.

But to describe an album, say, as X amount of potential revenue is moot, isn't it. I mean, it might derive a certain amount of revenue. But it might not.

Yes, but as a copyright owner, would you want to take that chance? How do you judge a case like that? Is there any way of guaranteeing that you wouldn't have made a sale anyway? And isn't the system so open to abuse - and actively abused - that the argument you're putting across only applies in theory and doesn't apply to the likely reality of the situation? I mean, if I knew I wasn't going to buy an album - and, as a result, the owner wasn't going to make a sale in the first place - it's highly unlikely that I'd even consider obtaining a copy of it by other means. On the other hand, if I'm downloading that content, then it's reasonable to assume that I've got an interest in it and, yes, would have bought it if it hadn't been available for free.

And if the point of P2P is sampling something to see if it's worth buying, as many people keep claiming, isn't streaming media much more fitting? The listener doesn't end up with a copy of it, so it's comparable with sleaze's "borrowing a book from a library" scenario.

Apologies to Lurid, btw - I know the point of this wasn't to talk specifically about P2P and file-sharing.

16:05 / 12.03.04

An interesting aspect of the debate is the extent to which theft is linked to property. Theft from HMV is considered theft because the goods are on HMV's premises, and are therefore demonstrably their property, just as our goods are by being on our own premises.

If I go out and leave my door open, and someone wanders in and takes my stuff, the police and insurance companies would not be interested, because I failed to protect them sufficiently. Isn't this equivalent to going on-line and leaving a particular folder or drive open for people to browse around and take what they please?

If a replicator machine was invented which allowed someone to wander into my open house and copy all of my stuff, not hurting me but defrauding the original manufacturers, how would police and insurance respond then? The nature of theft would have changed entirely, and would become unpoliceable, because no-one would be interested in reporting thefts which didn't hurt them, and there would be too many of these thefts to police.

What would the moral duties of the citizen be then? To keep one's door locked at all times?

Would the replicator machine be seen as good or harmful for the economy as a whole?

17:20 / 12.03.04

I wouldn't copy a CD I could buy used for $5-$10.

If I walk into a store and take a CD, it feels like stealing.
If I download a CD, it sort of feels like stealing but not really -- similar to the way it feels to take home a pen from the office (but not a whole box of pens).
If I copy a friend's cd, it doesn't feel like stealing at all.
If I make a cd for a friend and put a song from here, a song from there, etc., it doesn't feel like stealing.
If I burn a cd to archive an LP, it doesn't feel like stealing.
If I make a copy for a friend of that LP CD, it doesn't feel like stealing.

I think I have a garden variety-conscience.

Am I wrong? Am I an amoral rat? Are my morals behind the technological times? Or is there a limit beyond which technological advances will just have to conform to old-style emotion-based morals (meaning you can't charge $20 fucking dollars for a CD, because you're paying not only for the music, but also for the tape, LP, or 8-track -- and if a CD costs less than an 8-track then they should charge less for it and make up the difference in volume -- though not necessarily tons less as CDs [an even more so MP3s] have a feature which makes them more desirable -- namely portability).

Sorry for the rambling post, a bit sleep-deprived.

18:36 / 12.03.04

Aren't you permanently depriving the other of the royalites from what might otherwise have been a sale?...

...No, you've not stolen the royalties I would have recieved from a sale, but you've stolen £X amount worth of property (intellectual or otherwise). Or don't we consider the stolen item's financial worth at all?

is it theft if i scare the stock market?
or if i let off a stink bomb outside mcdonalds?

it might be crime, but is it theft?

19:23 / 12.03.04

Lurid, please stop asking such hard questions in The Conversation. My head hurts.

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