Pirate Bay dropping torrents after magnetic attraction

Theft

The repeated comments here that it isn't theft because making a copy doesn't deprive the owner of the original are disingenuous. The situation is called *copy*right not because it affects the original, but because it affects the right to make copies of that original. It is theft of those copies which is at issue.

When a band plays a song live at a concert, it is clear that no amount of copying of that performance is going to detract from the experience of those who paid to see it live. The original has indeed arguably lost nothing.

However, copyright allows the band to make THEIR OWN COPIES of that performance, and to distribute them for money. The availability of unauthorized copies will obviously reduce the number of copies that the band will sell, and could depress the price of those copies. In that sense it is very much theft, since making 500 unauthorized copies and selling them yourself is the same as breaking into the band's warehouse and stealing 500 legitimate copies to sell. Just because there are a potentially unlimited number of copies avaiable doesn't make stealing them less of a crime.

There is the argument that someone who takes a pirate copy isn't necessarily someone who would have bought a legitimate copy, so the losses cannot be equated to 100% of the unauthorized copies. That is true, but it is equally true that *some* of those pirate copies will correspond to a lost sale of a legitimate copy, so the loss is not 0% either.

The garden analogy

Both sides seem to have missed the point. On the one hand, taking physical items really is theft, it's not the same at all. This should be utterly obvious to anyone who can be bothered to actually think about it for a moment. On the other hand, the analogy of letting people see your garden isn't accurate either, because there's no loss incurred whatsoever.

It's far more like you spending ages preening your garden and making it look lovely, and then charging a tenner for people to wander around and look at it. If someone then visits your garden, and makes an absolutely perfect replica of it somewhere else and lets people visit for free, that's more in the ballpark. People who might have visited your garden decide it's easier to go to the free one instead, or that it's just too expensive to visit yours.

The difficulty is that this is a very simplistic view of human behaviour, in reality people might decide that they want to view your garden because it's the original. Or that they want to pay to view yours because they feel guilty about just looking at it for free. Or they decide to pay to visit your other gardens because of the experience of the free one. That is a little closer to the truth of it. Then imagine that with every person who visits your garden they also get far better service, they're taken around in a golf cart by you, explaining every inch of it, so the experience is actually better, but not everyone places that high a value on the experience (I would equate that to buying a physical album with box art etc.).

Let's also say that in order to stamp out these other gardens you screened a large presentation to the people who DID pay to go to yours all about how the other gardens were hurting yours before letting them in, and then you randomly picked some of them and threatened to hunt them down for stealing your ideas.

It's not a clear-cut argument either way, whatever some people would like to think (people who are on the freetard side who think it is tend to be doing so to justify their own actions, and those opposing it tend to like the idea that they are morally superior to someone), and that's why important questions about the way that music is distributed and the way that copyright law works have to be answered, rather than just taking one viewpoint and arguing it until you're blue in the face. I download things, as I've said before, and I don't do it that often. 90% of the things I download are things that I wouldn't pay money for (either I can't really afford it, or it's not something I would consider buying. Say about 40% of that I buy at a later date when things change (i.e. I can afford it, or I realise it's worth it after all), mostly because I like physical goods. The other 10% are things that I intend to buy, but want sooner, and there's no digital distribution service for them available, and usually I buy all of these things eventually. I accept that what I'm doing is technically wrong, but by doing this I really do buy more things at the end of the day.

So can we all just grow up a bit, and admit that it's a fuzzy issue, instead of trying to be all tabloid about it?