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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. |