Theft is theft, I don't care whether you're walking into a shop and stealing a CD or downloading it from someone else's hard disk, fact is you're stealing the intellectual property of the person who recorded that. Hence no sympathy from me.
This is suggesting an equation that I've never believed to be correct. Theft, by definition, is "
the act of stealing, specifically: the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it".
The definition specifies the
removal of said property. It also indicates the intent to deprive the rightful owner of
it, and says nothing of the derivitives which may or may not occur. It simply states that theft deprives the rightful owner of use of the actual property taken.
In other words, theft of intellectual property must include the removal of said property from the original owner. The establishment must be broken into and their computers and storage media must be physically removed from the location before it may be called an act of thievery. Otherwise, the correct term is Copyright infringement.
The word
theft many times is used to induce Copyright infringers into believing that their acts are much more harmful than they actually are. I think few would argue that obtaining a work without permission is far less harmful to the owner than completely removing the work from their possession.
Now, having said that, I'll also say that Copyright infringement, while less harmful, is still a crime. The problem I personally have with it is in the way billion dollar corporations have effectively removed Copyright expiration. I won't go into the ramifications again. I hope most of you can figure those out for yourselves. I'm afraid that it's only going to get worse before it gets better.
