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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pedr" data-source="post: 4969007" data-attributes="member: 33464">Dannyalcatraz employs logic which is not as watertight as I'd expect from someone whom I think is a lawyer.1) Copyright infringment is not theft in the USA because neither a statute nor the common law declares that it is. Criminal copyright infringment is a crime in some circumstances in the US, just as siphoning electricity without authorisation is a crime in the UK in some circumstances. Neither are 'theft' even though they involve theft-like activity because they are not so described by the legislation. 2) The definition of theft in Black's legal dictionary is not authoritative, but even if we were to apply it, it seems inapt to apply to copyright infringement. "deprive[ing] the owner permanently of the ... benefit of his [intellectual] property" is impossible. You can reduce the value of the intellectual property, but nothing a copyright infringer does can cause the infringer to have any control over the intellectual property because the intellectual property is nothing more than a collection of rights against the world, unconnected to any physical thing. If I take a car, the owner of the car still has rights but is unable to exercise them. If I copy a pdf the owner of the copyright can still exercise them in exactly the same way. He still has the right to determine who is lawfully permitted to copy, he still has the right to assign copyright to others, to grant licences in whatever terms he chooses, and so on. My action 'only' had the potential to diminish the value of those rights. If, instead of taking the car, I smash its windscreen, I am not guilty of theft, but criminal damage. None of this is a comment on the morality of copyright, nor of its usefulness as a legal concept. But even if the definition is stretched to its extreme, theft has to relate to the taking of property in some fashion, and there is clearly no taking in copyright infringement. It is open to legislatures to add criminal charges for any act they choose, subject to constitutional limits, but in the US, and in the UK, non-commercial copyright infringement of the written word is not criminal (unless, in the US, it is willful and of a very high value). I think I've asked before: does anyone know of any non-commercial infringers of written works who have been prosecuted under the US Copyright Code?</blockquote>

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