vdrandom said:
Cartographer said:
That argument equates those two situations, which is demonstrably nonsense. You have benefited (lol, in this particular case) from someone else's work without paying them ergo you have stolen from them. Hence their statement.
First, stealing means not only benefiting from stolen items but also removing them from the legal owner.
No, I'm afraid that is a particularly antiquated view of ownership which, like most countries' laws, hasn't taken account of technology and is what copyright law attempts to rectify (badly). That view simply doesn't work in a world where electronic copies of data are so easy to copy/steal/distribute. There has to be some protection for the producer of said data, be they a multinational corporation raking in billions from the sweat of slave labour or a single person working every minute of their free time to scrape a living together. Their work is theirs and they have a right to seek compensation whenever anyone else uses/watches/whatever their work. The view that you have to deprive someone of an item for it to be theft belongs squarely in the last century (where it was out of date even then).
vdrandom said:
Like, if a woodworker gets some of the chairs he made for the shop stolen, it's a proper theft ? chairs are gone and he cannot sell them anymore. Not the case with Universal here: they still can and will sell as many copies as they can, therefore it is not stealing, not by definition. (Not arguing that it is not a crime here, just to be clear.)
Except your own reasoning falls down here. If someone has illegally obtained a copy of (in this case) a movie, there is no reason to assume they will seek to pay the producer for a legal copy. In other words, by taking a copy, they are depriving the producer of a sale. The notion that they will pay for a legal copy later, is irrelevant as it is functionally the same as "it's not theft if I intend to return it later". Similarly, the notion that they wouldn't have bought one anyway is, as I explained in the post you quoted, also nonsense.
vdrandom said:
Second, if I get an item that fails to fulfil the use I want it for, I will return it to the store or resell it to someone who finds it useful. Although... If I watch a bad film that was hyped in media and trailers? Can I, like, complain to the cinema or a company who shot it and get my money back? Wait, are you going to say that it's a service and I pay for the experience? But why on earth have you been telling me that it CAN BE STOLEN?
Strangely, if you attend a cinema and the movie is without sound, the picture is awful, the film skips and jumps, you CAN get a refund; you can and have every right to your money back. If you didn't like it, tough, that is simply life and not legislated for, you have no right to a refund if you simply don't like something (seriously, go look up statutory rights; unless there is an actual fault with an item, you have no right to a refund, retailers can offer them if they choose, but are under no obligation to bow to your changing whims).
Methinks you meant downloaded 700,000 times!
