Copying Is Not Theft

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• neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Copying is more like trespassing than theft.

  When you own a thing, it’s generally accepted that you gave away or sacrificed something of value (either money or time or effort) in order to own that thing. If another person comes along and steals that thing from you, that sucks. The other person never gave up anything of value, you didn’t get anything, and you probably didn’t consent to any of this to begin with. This is clearly unjust and should be a crime.

  Copying is a very different act. It’s still unjust, but much much less so than theft. When an object gets copied, the owner doesn’t lose the object itself, but they do lose something: exclusivity.

  A bluray disc for a movie that was just released is going to be more expensive than a bluray disc for a movie that’s 75 years old and part of the public domain. There are already a ton of discs of that 75 year old movie on the market, in libraries and maybe even available to watch online for free; its exclusivity is low. The movie that was just released isn’t going to be available anywhere else but from whomever is selling it; its exclusivity is high. When someone makes a copy of that new movie, it lowers the exclusivity of it. The owner of the disc may not care about a loss of exclusivity, but the people producing those discs very much do. Decreasing exclusivity means that there are more options out there for people to acquire what they’re selling, which lowers the value, lowers how much people are willing to pay, and lowers how much money the producers can make.

  Exclusivity decreases as access increases. And we have a name for the crime of taking unwarranted access: trespassing.

  Trespassing is generally a less harmful act than theft and is generally not punished as severely, which is how unwarranted copying ought to be understood and treated as a matter of justice.

  The mischaracterization of unwarranted copying as theft is punitive overreach by the owner-class and leads to unjust punishments.

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  • obbeel@lemmy.eco.br ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think it’s important to understand the philosophy also. The free software movement traces back to being able to transform any software in order to function on hardware as intended by the user. This is necessary and is its base philosophy.

    So you have a hardware that is unusable without property software. That is what is unacceptable by free software standards. And I agree.

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