a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by JakobVirgil
JakobVirgil  ·  4041 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Pirate Bay is now hosted in North Korea

How can it be stolen if the owner still has it? What file-sharing folks "steal" are legal fictions not tangible objects. Media corps steal from us all privatizing bits of the culture and selling them back to us.

Perhaps in the old days of reasonable copyright arguments could be made but really what is my moral obligation to respect the rights of say the Avengers film's makers?

The film is based on characters Marvel stole from Kirby (characters that should be public domain by now). So when a person downloads that film is he stealing from Joss Weldon, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby?





hiyou102  ·  4041 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Should we steal movies because the copyright is morally ambiguous? By the same token, it's OK to rob banks because the mafia might have them.

Piracy is still stealing in the same way copying answers off of someone else's test is.

JakobVirgil  ·  4041 days ago  ·  link  ·  

the word theft does not even apply to file-sharing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

I disagree with your test analogy what test is a pirate cheating on?

In my opinion it is okay to rob mafia owned banks. (if you can get away with it).

dublinben  ·  4041 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Plagiarism and copyright infringement are entirely different, and neither are stealing. Nobody who is downloading the latest Bruno Mars album is passing it off as their own, in order to take credit for it.