You never had the money. I have not deprived you of anything. If you were intending to buy a lottery ticket but I went and bought every lottery ticket in town (for whatever bizarre reason) would you say that I’d stolen something from you?
Your question was ‘Isn’t it wrong?‘, now you’re going with ‘But it’s illegal!’
I don’t care much about my opportunity to by lottery tickets. If you want to be a nuisance, buy up a couple of my favourites packaged foods. If you want to be a menace buy up all available food, or all sources of a couple of vital nutrients.
I guess I wouldn’t call it stealing, but the fatal one I would say should be illegal, if it was likely to happen otherwise. The nuisance one, I would call monopolising, and maybe anticompetitive. That’s a good analogy, but with a few differences. Copyright infringement can be lots of people individually satisfying their requirements, leaving a publisher with no market for the product, and anticompetitive behaviour can be one company satisfying all of a competitor’s market, possibly deliberately to get rid of them, leaving that competitor with no market for their product.
We can discuss whether or not they’re evil (and in two of the cases above they very obviously are), but the discussion is bound to be pretty pointless if we group them together with theft (which is a different issue).
And I’ve seen a lot of pointless copyright arguments. The discussion here I expect to be better than most. I haven’t really made up my mind on what the law should say about copyright, and since I’m not deciding the law I’m not going to try too hard.
You never had the money. I have not deprived you of anything. If you were intending to buy a lottery ticket but I went and bought every lottery ticket in town (for whatever bizarre reason) would you say that I’d stolen something from you?
Your question was ‘Isn’t it wrong?‘, now you’re going with ‘But it’s illegal!’
I don’t care much about my opportunity to by lottery tickets. If you want to be a nuisance, buy up a couple of my favourites packaged foods. If you want to be a menace buy up all available food, or all sources of a couple of vital nutrients.
I guess I wouldn’t call it stealing, but the fatal one I would say should be illegal, if it was likely to happen otherwise. The nuisance one, I would call monopolising, and maybe anticompetitive. That’s a good analogy, but with a few differences. Copyright infringement can be lots of people individually satisfying their requirements, leaving a publisher with no market for the product, and anticompetitive behaviour can be one company satisfying all of a competitor’s market, possibly deliberately to get rid of them, leaving that competitor with no market for their product.
And yet, as you say, none of that is stealing.
We can discuss whether or not they’re evil (and in two of the cases above they very obviously are), but the discussion is bound to be pretty pointless if we group them together with theft (which is a different issue).
And I’ve seen a lot of pointless copyright arguments. The discussion here I expect to be better than most. I haven’t really made up my mind on what the law should say about copyright, and since I’m not deciding the law I’m not going to try too hard.