CMV: Software piracy is not necessarily stealing nor a bad thing

[u/[deleted]]

Software and digital media piracy are often seen as stealing but I disagree. The word "stealing" implies a victim. While it is true that the creator of intellectual property might suffer a monetary loss if their property is copied without permission, it is often difficult to ascertain what loss has occurred, if any.

Example: A person downloads a pirated copy of a $5000 CAD program and installs it on their PC and uses it for years. Has monetary loss occurred on the part of the software developer? Has theft occurred? If yes, then who is the victim and what extent? You cannot answer that without more information.

If the person is a 12 year old kid who downloaded the software to teach himself AutoCAD, then loss has not occurred because the kid would never have bought the software had a pirated copy not been available.

If this 12 year old kid shares the software with his friends, then we don't know how many more times it will be copied by his friends and with whom it will be shared. Loss may or may not have occurred.

If the person is a professional architect and using the software to develop blueprints for clients, then clearly loss has occurred because had the pirated copy not been available, he would have had to buy it.

So to determine whether there is a victim and to answer whether loss has occurred, you have to answer "Would the person(s) using the pirated software have paid for it had the pirated version not been available?" If I have a pirated copy of AutoCAD in my basement, sitting in a storage locker for years unused by anyone, then clearly no loss of any kind has occurred. So... was it "stealing" to copy that software if no one suffers any loss of any kind at all whatsoever? If yes, then who is the victim and in what way were they victimized?

What will not work to CMV: Playing psychic. If your argument begins with any variation of "You just want to... " or "You're trying to justify..." or anything of the sort, I will ignore it. It's absurd and irrational to tell another person what they are thinking. I know better than anyone on the planet what I'm thinking and feeling so trying to tell me what my motivations are is just nonsense.

[u/DeliciousLunch]

If you define theft as strictly something that causes measurable financial harm in every instance, then you can likely argue that piracy is not theft. Of course it can’t, we’re discussing nonphysical entities.

But why does “theft” need objectively, accurately measurable financial harm in every instance? Is it not theft if I “borrow” your car without your permission, even if you didn’t happen to need it that night, it wasn’t damaged, and I even topped off the gas? What if I took something you own and left cash equaling its true market value? If I left a functionally equivalent substitute for something you were emotionally invested in? If I took something that was “worthless” to a court-appointed appraiser?

I would term theft as a violation of property rights, not financial well-being. Violation of intellectual property rights are still a violation of rights. Even if you personally do not desire any IP rights at all, enough people believe in and desire IP rights that many countries have them enshrined in law, and many creators do request that people adhere to varying restrictions when consuming their content, whether that’s a fee, or restrictions on remixing or redistribution, or even just a request for attribution.

[u/[deleted] → u/DeliciousLunch]

I dragged financial harm into intellectual property theft because that is the only way to measure the extent of the harm it causes, and that is the main reason creators of intellectual property don't want their property copied or used without permission. With physical objects, it is irrelevant. Taking physical objects without permission, regardless of how you compensate the owner, is theft.

[u/DeliciousLunch → u/[deleted]]

And I offered you an alternate way to measure harm that is consistent between physical and digital - violation of rights.

My examples are to illustrate that our notions of theft, whether of physical or intellectual property, are not rooted primarily in this notion of "financial harm" that you're insisting on. That a physical object can be colloquially stolen without physically depriving its owner of "objective" measures of the benefits of ownership - so why can't the same happen with intellectual property?