Great post from Whiskey and Gunpowder:

SOPA Dead On Arrival

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of Internet users and major Web behemoths like Google, Facebook and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, dead on arrival:

“Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

“The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

“The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, ‘We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.’ It added that any proposed legislation ‘must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.’

“Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

“A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

“Sourced from Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple“

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include Democrats and Republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the Internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of a direct attack against the First Amendment and the right to free speech:

“On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech…and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of ‘wrongdoing.’ It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding, allowing ‘them’ to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.

“How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet service providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait — I thought it was innocent until proven guilty…oh…that was ‘before’ the NDAA.

“Source: ‘The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech’”

While this bill of goods was being sold to the American public as a way to reduce online piracy originating on foreign shores, in essence, the legislation would have made it possible for any organization (with the financial assets and access to attorneys to do so) to target websites (foreign or domestic) using excerpts, quotes and videos without express permission of the authors or producers of such content. Furthermore, any website linking to suspected copyrighted content would be guilty by association for facilitating the infringement.

By linking to and excerpting Daisy’s article above, for example, this particular website — and anyone who republishes this article, excerpts it or pulls a link from it — could be shut down on the service provider level until such time they prove their innocence. (*Note to DHS, et al.: Daisy has given us permission to reprint her article or portions of it, and the excerpt from Washington Monthly has been reprinted under fair use to advance understanding of this political and Constitutional issue.*)

The scariest part of the legislation, as Daisy points out above, is that due process would have been eliminated (just like in the NDAA), forcing Internet providers, search engines and ad networks to simply shut down a website(s) based on just the complainant’s accusations, leaving those website owners who were shut down to deal with the fallout with costly legal expenses and lengthy court battles.

You may recall that in 2010, the government shut down 73,000 websites in exactly this manner. Though the owners of the majority of the targeted sites were not technically infringing copyrights, some were linking to other sites that did, making them accessories.

Even more alarming is the ability, under legislation such as SOPA, of the government to control the flow of information across major Internet providers. Articles or videos criticizing political figures or policies could easily be targeted, as they were in October of this year, when the government moved to shut down rogue publishers of critical content .

As I’ve said before: “Make no mistake, this is a thinly veiled attack not on pirates (because laws for this kind of activity already exist, whether on the Internet or offline), but alternative news media and controversial online communities. When there existed only three ‘news’ channels and a handful of influential print newspapers, the message could be easily controlled and repeated to the masses. With the advent of alternative media in the last decade, those who would rule us no longer have the ability to control the message. And this scares them.”

What it boils down to is that SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing. Alternative news and “extremist” information were the targets (and still are).

While we applaud President Obama (yes, we agree with him on this move) for formally issuing a veto threat, we remain skeptical of his motivations. This being an election year, the last thing the President needs to be dealing with along with the economic crisis and tensions in the Middle East is the protests of millions of voters who would have undoubtedly taken to the streets when access to their favorite web sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter was shut down because of alleged SOPA violations.

Moreover, we aren’t one bit convinced that this veto was done in the interests of free expression, as the administration may claim. In November, the president issued a similar veto threat about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for the detention of American citizens determined to be threats to national security and public safety on the domestic (U.S.) battlefront. He flip-flopped on the issue just a couple of weeks later, and signed the bill into law over New Year’s weekend to complete silence from the mainstream media.

It is our view that SOPA, in one form or another, will return with a vengeance.

Regards,

Mac Slavo

SHTFPlan

Someone forwarded to me this speech by Manuel Barkhau, presented May 23, 2010 at the SIGINT 2010 Chaos Computer Club [CCC]. It’s in German so I can’t follow it, but it appears to be a criticism of natural law defenses of intellectual property, based on work by me and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Update: I contacted the Barkhau on facebook, and he said:

there is no English version, but the talk is based mostly on the argumentation ethics of Hoppe, followed by some examples to illustrate how wide ranging it is, including abortion, draft and of course your arguments against intellectual property.

Since this is a laymen audience as far as philosophy is concerned, I also spend some time on the difference between positive and natural rights and the purpose of rights as rules to avoid conflict.

The associated website is http://imaginäreseigentum.de/

Blogged here, from O’Reilly’s Google-plus post (h/t Geoff Plauche):

 

[Tim O’Reilly] I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about #SOPA and #PIPA

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet

and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the world, began with piracy. (I have a post coming on that subject on Monday.)

Congress (and the White House) need to spend time thinking hard about how best to grow our economy – and that means being careful not to close off the frontier, or to harm those trying to settle it, in order to protect those who want to remain safe at home. British publishers could have come to America in the 19th century; they chose not to, and as a result, we grew our own indigenous publishing industry, which relied at first, in no small part, on pirating British and European works.

If the goal is really to support jobs and the American economy, internet “protectionism” is not the way to do it.

It is said (though I’ve not found the source) that Einstein once remarked that if given 60 minutes to save the world, he would spend 55 of them defining the problem. And defining the problem means collecting and studying real evidence, not the overblown claims of an industry that has fought the introduction of every new technology that has turned out, in the end, to grow their business rather than threaten it.

P.S. If Congress and the White House really want to fight pirates who are hurting the economy, they should be working to rein in patent trolls. There, the evidence of economic harm is clear, in multi-billion dollar transfers of wealth from companies building real products to those who have learned how to work the patent system while producing no value for consumers.

P. P.S. See also my previous piece on the subject of doing an independent investigation of the facts rather than just listening to the appeals of lobbyists, https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3VjFR8gx.

***

source: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r

Important agitation from WordPress:

You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it.

Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all.

Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that change, whether you are posting canny political insight or a cat that makes you LOL. How would you feel if the web stopped being so free and independent? I’m concerned freaked right the heck out about the bills that threaten to do this, and as a participant in one of the biggest changes in modern history, you should be, too.

You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).

Some thoughts:

• In the U.S. our legal system maintains that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and that people are innocent until proven guilty. This tenet seems to be on the chopping block when it comes to the web if these bills pass, as companies could shut down sites based on accusation alone.
• Laws are not like lines of PHP; they are not easily reverted if someone wakes up and realizes there is a better way to do things. We should not be so quick to codify something this far-reaching.
• The people writing these laws are not the people writing the independent web, and they are not out to protect it. We have to stand up for it ourselves.

Blogging is a form of activism. You can be an agent of change. Some people will tell you that taking action is useless, that online petitions, phone calls to representatives, and other actions won’t change a single mind, especially one that’s been convinced of something by lobbyist dollars. To those people, I repeat the words of Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

We are not a small group. More than 60 million people use WordPress — it’s said to power about 15% of the web. We can make an impact, and you can be an agent of change. Go to Stop American Censorship for more information and a bunch of ways you can take action quickly, easily, and painlessly. The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard.

*Yes, the latest episode of Sherlock is good. Stephen Moffatt + Russell Tovey = always good

Read more>>

Another example of why patent and copyright, and even trademark, are not the only bad types of IP: trade secret is also bad and should be abolished, along with the others, and newer and non-traditional forms of IP as well. (Other trademark and IP horror stories here.)

 Two cases of social media as trade secrets may affect one another

Do employees or employers own social media accounts?

By Julie Beck

January 12, 2012

There’s a case currently making the rounds that has drawn a lot of attention to the question of who social media accounts really belong to—employers or employees. The mobile phone website Phonedog.com is suing a former employee, Noah Kravitz, alleging that the 17,000 Twitter followers he gained while working there was the same as a customer list, and therefore did not belong to the employee.

From the Telegraph (h/t Skip Oliva):

Student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited over TV website

A British student can be extradited to the United States for running a website that provided links to pirated films and television shows, a court ruled.

Read more>>

Outrageous. Expect this kind of thing to get worse if laws like SOPA pass… I’d have to say copyright/IP has risen a notch or so on the ranking list of the the most evil and dangerous state laws, institutions, and policies.

As Rob Wicks told me, “Evil as hell. After a while, it’s hard to consider some of these businesses to be anything but branches of government.”

Update/Related post: Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?

But then, aren’t we all?

See The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator, from vice.com.

Cory Doctorow has a great speech up, The coming war on general computation, delivered at the the 28C3, the recent Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. (He’s also written an article based on the transcript.) Doctorow explains that how the copyright interests want general purpose computers to be regulated, or hobbled, so that people cannot evade copyright restrictions and copyright circumvention prohibitions. (Why Doctorow is not yet a complete copyright abolitionists is a mystery to me.) He has an interesting point at around 45:00 about how the Internet and technology only provides an incremental benefit to the state, since they are already organized enough to be in charge, but can provide a more qualitative change–a “phase shift”–for the subjects of the state, in helping them to better organize and fight the state.

His summary of the talk:

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

[TLS]

It’s important to distinguish between plagiarism and copyright infringement, because neither implies the other, and defenders of copyright often ignorantly or disingenuously conflate them. Here’s a little Salon discussion about it. [Update: see also KOL207 | Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Are Not About Plagiarism, Theft, Fraud, or Contract]

As noted by Andy Duncan:

Max Keiser devotes an entire programme to the medieval guild horror that is the demon squid of the copyright industry, which wants to destroy the Internet and jail people for years because they refuse to prop up $20 million dollar Hollywood actor fees.

There is nothing wrong with incrementalism. Advocates of private property and free markets want patent, copyright, and other forms of IP to be abolished, but we are also in favor of measures short of abolition that move in the right direction–shortening terms and penalties, etc. Still, it’s frustrating when some commentators identify real problems with IP law but fail to make a more fundamental diagnosis. A case in point is free market economist Alex Tabarrok, who has good criticisms of the existing patent system but who nonetheless resists calls for patent abolition and advocates other statist measures to supplement or replace the statist patent system, like multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded innovation prize systems.

In the field of copyright, we have Google attorney and copyright lawyer William Patry, whose recent book is How to Fix Copyright (see his recent Volokh post, How to Fix Copyright, Part I). Our mutual publisher, Oxford University Press, sent me a copy a while back. Unfortunately, although Patry makes some useful criticisms of the existing copyright system, his diagnosis and prescriptions are confused (though not as bad as those of Dean Baker, who, like Tabarrok in the field of inventions, recommends taxpayer funded multibillion-dollar “artistic freedom vouchers” to promote artistic creation).

Patry realizes the current copyright system is rife with problems. But he is not willing to support copyright abolition. It is not for failure to understand the law. He is a renowned copyright scholar, author of the seminal Patry on Copyright treatise. Legal credentials are not enough, however. One must have a firm grasp of economics, and one’s political views must be rooted in the propertarian principles that inform libertarian analysis. Given a grounding in Austro-libertarian analysis, it is easy to see that the only legitimate laws are those that enforce individual property rights, and that the purpose of property rights is to permit productive and conflict-free use of scarce resources. The function of law is to make peaceful, productive use of scarce resources possible, by assigning owners to these resources based on Lockean homesteading principles. Copyright law, like patent law, is a grant of monopoly privilege–the remnant of mercantilism and censorship regimes of the past and is antithetical to the free market, competition, and private property.

In the end, Patry’s latest book is not much different than his previous Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, which I criticized here. On p. 5 he says copyright law is “necessary”; on p. 11 that “copyright laws can serve valuable purposes” (whatever this means); on p. 262 he says that “Going after the very small number of those who are doing most of the harm is entirely justified.”  Why? Elsewhere he derides the proponents of stronger copyright for failing to provide evidence that stronger copyright law is needed. Where is Patry’s evidence that any copyright law is “needed”? Where is his normative argument that these laws are justified? He has none, and does nothing to produce such an argument other than repeat commonplace bromides. And so his recipes for change are tepid: reduce the term, but not to zero!

For example, in his blog post noted above, about his new book, he writes:

The title indicates that the book is both prescriptive – offering solutions (this is the “how to” part) – and attempts to be constructive: I want to fix, that is, improve copyright law’s effectiveness. I believe laws are tools, not ends in themselves, and that we should measure, empirically, their effectiveness against their stated objective.

Note the scientism and legal positivism of this approach. It poses as if it’s “scientific” because it is urges looking at the empirical evidence to see if the law is effective at meeting its “stated objective.” There are a number of problems with this approach. First is the unstated (and unscientific, scientistic) assumption that the only scientific approach is to look at evidence. This is the confused approach of monism and positivism (a better approach is the dualistic methodology of Mises; see his The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method; and my post C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” and Misesian Dualism). In fact it is impossible to sum up the utilities of such a law, as Rothbard explained in “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics.” All we know is that copyright violates some people’s property rights, even as it enriches others. Why does the later justify the former? In any case, to assume it does justify it is not a neutral, scientific approach but a value-laden, normative one.

Further, why does Patry assume that what matters is the law’s “stated objective”? Some laws are evil, such as laws ordering Japanese Americans to report to concentration camps or the Nazi laws aimed at Jews. The objectives or purpose of legislation, whether “stated” or not, may themselves be wicked. So why would the law’s legitimacy be based on how “effective” the law is at fulfilling the goals of its enactors? I, for one, would prefer that copyright law, like the drug war, to be as ineffective as possible. Further, legislated law is not organically developed like common law is, in response to real disputes and aiming at a just solution. Legislation is simply the decree of a group of politicians, each with often conflicting stated and private agendas. To speak of the “objective” of such a statute as if it can be objectively determined is naive. (See, on this, John Hasnas, The Myth of the Rule of Law; also my Legislation and Law in a Free Society and Another Problem with Legislation: James Carter v. the Field Codes.)

Patry goes on:

We do not inherently need strong laws or weak laws anymore than we inherently need strong or weak medicines. We need laws and medicines that are fit for their purpose. What are copyright laws supposed to do? The most popular things copyright laws are said to do are: (1) provide incentives for authors to create works they would not create in the absence of that incentive; (2) provide the public with access to those works; and, (3) in some countries, provide respect, via non-economic rights, for those who create cultural works.

The analogy to medicine is problematic. We humans acknowledge the value of medicine because of its usefulness at promoting human health and well-being, which we value. Those who discuss the efficacy of a given medicine already agree on the general goal of promoting human health. But here Patry takes for granted that people discussing the efficacy of copyright law will all agree on the enumerated “purposes” of copyright that he identifies. It is “said” that a main purpose of copyright is to provide incentives to create? So what if it’s “said”? Said by whom? Well some of us “say” that a main purpose of copyright is to enrich Big Media and to provide a means to certain people and companies that allows them to legally censor other people. Why do we want this purpose to be efficiently fulfilled by copyright law? I don’t.

Probably the most valuable part of the book is Patry’s argument that since the current copyright regime is so obviously broken, and since we have paltry evidence for extending the current copyright system, that no new copyright law should be enacted until further studies are done. If this advice were heeded, at least measures like ACTA and SOPA could be slowed down. But in the end, Patry’s 336 page book is 335 pages too long. All it really needs is one line: “get rid of it.” That’s how to fix copyright. Asking how to fix copyright is like asking how to fix taxes or how to fix slavery. The obvious answer is: get rid of it. Not to call for “more studies.”

Patry assumes that one reason copyright seems to be “broken” now is that it was designed for the pre-digital age. Thus, “To be effective, our copyright laws must be based on the world of digital abundance.” This misconceives the nature of the problem. The problem with patents is not patent trolls or software patents. It is the patent system itself. The problem with copyright is not that we now have a digital age–though it is true that in our digital age the injustice of the copyright system is more visible and has been magnified. It has been magnified simply because the Internet is the world’s biggest copying machine, so people are doing more copying now. A law aimed at stopping people from copying, emulating, learning, communicating, competing, and using information will of course come into conflict with the copying machine known as the Internet. But there is no way to “fix” an anti-copy law to make it compatible with the Internet and “digital abundance.” The Internet and digital culture and commerce will always be in tension and conflict with copyright of any form. Copyright should be abolished. But as noted, there is nothing wrong with incremental improvement, either. How should copyright be changed to make it less incompatible with property rights, free and open culture, and the digital age? Easy: stop enacting new copyright laws (as Patry says), stop increasing penalties for copyright infringement, don’t “crack down” on piracy; instead, reduce copyright penalties, shorten the copyright term, and require active registration instead of the automatic grant of copyright we have now. Here are a list of obvious reforms I proposed in  How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law:

• Radically reduce the term, from life plus 70 years to, say, 10 years
• Remove software from copyright coverage (it’s functional, not expressive)
• Require active registration and periodic re-registration (for a modest fee) and copyright notice to maintain copyright (today it is automatic, and it is often impossible to determine, much less locate, the owner), or otherwise make it easier to use “orphaned works“
• Provide an easy way to dedicate works to the public domain — to abandon the copyright the state grants authors
• Eliminate manifestly unjust provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), such as its criminalization of technology that can be used to circumvent digital protection systems
• Expand the “fair use” defense and clarify it to remove ambiguity
• Provide that incidental use (e.g., buildings or sculptures appearing in the background of films) is fair use
• Reduce statutory damages

Requiring registration would make the copyright system “opt-in,” similar to how the patent system works now, where you get no patent for your invention if you do not actively apply for it. But an incremental step in this direction would be to first make the copyright system opt-OUT. As it is now, copyright is granted automatically, and you cannot get rid of it, as I explain here.

This is how to fix copyright law. Kill it, or weaken it. To understand this, one must recognize that copyright is censorship, it is anti-competition, it is anti-Internet. It is a bizarre and harmful state-granted monopoly which is now threatening to turn the US into a police state in the name of protecting “property rights” and to shackle the Internet, one of the greatest tools of freedom in human history. (See Down with Gatekeepers: Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration vs. Internet Freedom; Why We Must Stop SOPA.)

[From my Webnote series]

Related:

• Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off
• Lacalle on China and IP “Theft”
•  More of the “China is Stealing Our IP” nonsense
• All-In Podcast Concern over China and IP “Theft”
• Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Does China have “more fierce” competition because of weaker IP law?
• “To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense”—Chinese saying, and other posts under the tag China-IP-theft.

Copying and competing is not stealing or theft. The truth is that IP itself is theft.

• Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
• IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … 
• Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off
• Copying vs. Plagiarism: A Recent Illustration—Grau vs. Hernandez on Milei

The state grants monopoly privileges, and to justify it, it and the beneficiaries of monopoly use propaganda to try to justify it: they call it “property.”¹ They have no choice but to engage in propaganda, I guess, since all arguments for IP are absurd. State granted monopolies are not property rights. They undermine property rights. It’s not property. It’s monopoly.² So what if it “can be” treated like property? That doesn’t justify it.

Then they demonize innocuous activities like learning, emulating, copying, and free market competition as “stealing,” “theft,” “piracy,” “rogue” websites. And they engage in propaganda to push this idea. But copying is not theft. Stop calling it that. Stop. ³

Update: Gaius, Theft, and IP Infringement

See Who are You Calling a Pirate?: Shaping Public Discourse in the Intellectual Property Debates, by Christina Mulligan and Brian Patrick Quinn.

See also Falkvinge, Reminder 1: Copyright Monopoly Infringement Isn’t Stealing (Says The US Supreme Court), and MPAA Banned From Using Piracy and Theft Terms in Hotfile Trial. From the latter:

In the U.S. Supreme Court case Dowling vs United States, the Supreme Court explicitly valued whether copies could be regarded as stolen goods under the law, and held that they could not.

Instead, “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ‘[…] an infringer of the copyright.’”

See also Mark A. Lemley, “Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property,”  Texas Law Review, Vol. 75 (1997): p. 873, 897:  “Intellectual property cases and arguments are replete with references to infringement as “theft,” which it assuredly is not, at least in the traditional meaning of that word.” Also quoted in Michael H. Davis, Patent Politics, n. 147.

See also See Dale A. Nance, “Foreword: Owning Ideas,” Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990) 757–74, pp. 757–58: “intellectual property may be defined as embracing rights to novel ideas as contained in tangible products of cognitive effort. More narrowly, these rights are such that their violation does not necessarily entail physical misappropriation or fraudulent misuse of such products, or any breach of contract or fiduciary duty. Consequently, the special term “infringement” is used to refer to such violations.”

Update: the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA), which extends the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, does employ the term “theft.” See Grok’s summary.

1. See Intellectual Properganda; The State, Destruction, and Propaganda. [↩]
2. See Intellectual Poverty. [↩]
3. See Copying Is Not Theft; Don’t Copy That Floppy. [↩]

I’ve started a podcast on HuffDuffer (RSS; Subscribe in iTunes), which I’ll use for my past and upcoming media, and for occasional audio files by other speakers I find interesting.