[Aurornis]

If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?

If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?

[tmerc]

"they haven’t stolen anything from you" correct by the legal definition as my non lawyer brain reads it. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft

"so you have nothing to complain about" incorrect. Copyright infringement is it's own crime with it's own penalities.

The terminology section of this Wikipedia article is quite informative on why copying is not theft according to the US Supreme Court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

A big difference in theft vs copyright infringement is if you go to jail or not (criminal vs civil). Again, not a lawyer.

[JuniperMesos]

Yes this would be one of many consequences of a world where copyright was actually killed or seriously ganked.

[BeFlatXIII]

Good. Bacteria have the right idea about plasmid-swapping. Information is meant to be collective.

[kube-system]

Of course, if you give people fewer incentives to share their information they can and often will simply keep it private. You can't copy information that people never gave to you, regardless of the law.

[BeFlatXIII]

Make industrial espionage legally forgivable, but only if it is shared to the public.

[hamdingers]

I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.

[kube-system]

It isn't sarcastic. Copyleft depends on copyright law.

[Telaneo]

Copyright infringement isn't theft. It's illegal, but it's not theft.

[kube-system]

It does not qualify as the legal offence of "theft" in many courtrooms. It may be theft in colloquial English.

[Telaneo]

A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened, other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand where you're coming from.

This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.

[hamdingers]

It's not worth the effort. Anyone pretending not to understand the distinction is being deliberately obtuse.

[kube-system]

> A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen.

No, colloquial English doesn't require this. e.g. "Identity theft"