[PurpleBoxDragon]

I do think we could benefit from having a unique terms to differentiate the taking of something that doesn't belong to you which deprives another person of their copy and the making a copy of something that doesn't belong to you which does not deprive you of a copy.

If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much.

If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy.

While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.

[Kadin]

There are actually existing terms, coming from English common law, for exactly these sorts of situations. They are not in common usage outside the legal profession, but perhaps they should be.

"Conversion" is a tort (so, not a criminal offense) in which one party deprives another party of control over the second party's lawful property. It can involve physically taking the property, but could also involve otherwise depriving the rightful owner of control over it.

Taking someone's proprietary data and passing it to a competitor strikes me as a fair example of conversion, since it deprives the rightful owner of control -- they cannot, once the information has been taken and passed on, exercise control over it by keeping it exclusively to themselves. The value of the information has been destroyed.

It also covers situations in which the property has not actually been removed, but access to it by its rightful owner has been denied. E.g., encrypting files on your employer's computer such that your employer can't access them, but not actually removing them. (This is sort of equivalent to going to a warehouse and putting a lock, that only you have the key to, on a container holding someone else's stuff.)

The intriguing thing about Conversion, which I've always thought was interesting, is that it's independent of intent. Unlike the criminal acts of theft, where there's an issue of mens rea, conversion can occur without any intent -- the deprivation can happen as a consequence of some other action, but you can still be liable for some remedies, under some conditions.

There's centuries of caselaw about conversion and the traditional remedies for it ("trover" and "replevin"), much of it designed expressly to discourage vigilantism in the premodern and early industrial world. I think we could learn something from this, particularly as cyber crime becomes more common.

[PurpleBoxDragon]

So this has me wondering, if I were to copy someone's car, would that count as conversion, and would the victim be the owner of the car, or the company who owns the right to make the car, or the dealer, or some other party?

[zaroth]

I was making a slightly different distinction; between taking a copy of something which is available to buy/rent publicly, and taking a copy of something which is a “trade secret” as in the secret sauce or secret recipe which makes your product special.

Taking a copy of something which is available to buy without paying is perhaps depriving the company of one sale, or not if you weren’t going to buy it but would happen to look at it for free. In some cases this free copy can even have positive net expected value, e.g. in the case where you read a book or watch a movie without paying for it and then tell people how great it is.

However in the case of stealing trade secrets it directly undercuts the entire value proposotion of the company, particularly since trade secrets are not patented so anyone is free to replicate the result and sell it in the marketplace, presuming that they independently invented the same process.

So taking a copy of a trade secret is considered espionage or corporate warfare and is a direct attack on a company in a way that personally ripping a copy of DVD doesn’t come close.

[PurpleBoxDragon]

Wouldn't this depend upon how it is used? If I take someone's copy of a game and make it available for all to download, it can deprive the company of many sales. If I take Coca Cola's trade secret formula and research it for my own curiosity, but then do nothing with it, they would lose nothing.

Would the ability of the company to challenge the sharing of the game really make a major distinction, especially since it would be possible to host the website in a country that doesn't care enough to take it down?

Of course, in the case in the linked article, I think it is reasonable to assume this wasn't done just for sating some curiosity.