| > Theft only applies when the item being obtained is unique and belongs to someone else.
...
> Once you share something
...
> Any copies that are made that are not made by you are not morally yours Sorry, that's a really twisted view of reality. Let me use a hypothetical example to illustrate this: You hire a bunch of developers and invest a cool million dollars to develop code for an amazing new online browser-based CAD tool. It's a membership site. Members can use this CAD tool behind a login. The tool, which took the bulk of one million dollars to develop is nearly all client side JS based because that's the only choice available. Again, it took you and your team a whole year and a million dollars. Let's spice this up and say that you had to sell your home to raise a big chunk of that money and have been homeless for a whole year. You've been sleeping on friend's couches during this time. A year and a monumental effort later you launch this site and start signing-up free and paid users. The site is featured in all CAD-related blogs. It's going great. Now someone gains access to your site through one of the free promotions and proceeds to copy 100% of your JS code. They use that to then launch a competing site within a couple of months. They charge 1/4 of what you charge because, after all, they just spent a few thousand dollars spinning-up their site because they STOLE the million dollar effort you made in the form of a CAD tool written in JS. The code wasn't "shared". It is the operating code for an online business. Nobody says "Hey world, I share my code code freely. Here's a pink unicorn to go with that. Enjoy!". No, in fact, there will probably be terms of service as well as comments within the code establishing copyright. The code isn't given away for anyone to copy and launch their own business bypassing all of the effort, financial and time investment. That's ludicrous. So, your site/service goes down in flames. You have no money to bring legal action. You can't, they are in China. It's impossible. You are broke. Lost all your money. Lost your home and now have no business. And, yeah, nobody wants you on their couch any more. In what alternate reality is that not theft? |