@David: Interesting article!

@Eugene: One positive feature of all that might be that the general public, and the judges of these competitions, might learn better standards in the end — they just have to go through a transitional period of "a lot of junk churned out all over the place" on the way.

The last vinyl album I bought had an inner sleeve with a tape cassette skull-and-crossbones warning that "home taping is killing music!" But far from killing music, home taping was bringing more and more people into a wider and more diverse music scene who previously couldn't afford to buy lots of albums. The eventual result is that standards of musicianship have improved hugely. Far from "killing music", home taping was just annoying a lot of big-shots in record companies and super-mega-stars who couldn't be bothered to play live gigs. 

@Jongware: I'm not saying "piracy isn't stealing, therefore it's OK". Piracy is often worse than stealing. For example, if you lend me a book, and I don't give it back to you, then I've stolen it, and that's pretty bad. But if you write a book, and I dishonestly present myself as the author of what you wrote, that's much worse. You yourself were the victim of a really awful example of that sort of piracy (of your excellent InDesign Object Reference). Action should be taken against that sort of thing, and I think it probably could be more effectively taken if stop pretending it's exactly same thing as theft, that's all.

If we label every case of misappropriation — piracy, plagiarism, extortion, common theft, etc. — as "stealing", then we won't be able to take appropriate steps to control it, and deal with appropriately, in proportion to its severity.

Unfair pricing isn't the same thing as "stealing" either — but it's still unfair!

"My boss paid for InDesign; not once, but for all of our 4 or 5 active computers"

Ah, well, that's your non-problem right there — you have a boss. I have to make the choice myself. As I recall, I have pre-ordered the upgrade on every occasion since CS2, then spent a bit of extra time trying to persuade local publishers that they should upgrade to the new version too. As "the best friend Adobe ever had", I'm entitled to grumble occasionally — it's a necessary ingredient in a happy marriage. I wish they would introduce some sort of customer loyalty point system for those of us who have a good record, though. By this stage, I should count as an honorary American.

"1. Using pirated software, you can produce the same stuff cheaper than honest people do."

That's true, and I think everyone here condemns that sort of commercial piracy. I certainly do. But there are grey areas as well. Using pirated software, a learner can become much more familiar with a product — as David said, he might be more likely to buy a legitimate version of it or become an evangelist for the product. I know a couple of people who misspent their youth in a round-the-clock hypnotic trance with Photoshop, eventually to become talented and fully legitimate web developers/designers.

"2. You steal from the software developers as sure as you were taking the money out of their wallet, because they expect to get paid for their work, calculated their prices upon that, then see everyone use their programs and not getting any money back from it."

But if they actually make more money through piracy, they're not losing money but gaining it. It's a funny sort of "theft" that leaves its "victim" better off!

"3. If the developers don't get paid, they won't make updates or a new version. Why should they?"

Having a lenient attitude to petty forms of piracy is not the same as allowing all forms of piracy, nor will it turn everyone into a pirate. As long as the bad forms of piracy are prevented, as they should be, developers will get paid. But anyway, creative people are not creative in proportion to the amount of money they get paid. They're creative as long as they can make a living out of what they're interested in. Public libraries did not kill education, home taping did not kill music, and lack of DRM in ebooks will not kill writing.

"4. Oh but not everyone is dishonest? Well, the honest (paying) users get to pay for stolen copies as well, because if only 5 copies are paid out of 20 actually used copies, those 5 paid copies have to bring in the same amount of money."

We're all against large-scale commercial forms of piracy. But it costs money and time to pursue pirates. Presumably, there's a trade-off between spending a lot to pursue small-scale misdemeanors and just writing off the loss. Analogously, big department stores expect to lose an amount to customers returning unsellable items, and so on, and they have to make similar judgments about how strict they are with them.

"5. You are not "stealing property", only a copy thereof. My standard answer to that is: in that case give me your credit card number and expiry date. That in itself has no monetary value; it's just a string of digits. Oh and it's fully ensured, so even if I took advantage of it (imagine!), you still won't have lost a penny."

Getting someone's card details is not in itself theft. Before proper electronic security measures were introduced, it used to be the standard way of doing business. It becomes theft when it is used to take someone's money (including those who pay the insurance) without their permission. But that's theft of money, not theft of details. Analogously, using someone else's ideas with their permission, acknowledging their authorship, etc. is fine, but using someone else's ideas without their permission, not acknowledging their authorship, etc. is fraudulent. Whether we call it fraud, plagiarism, or whatever, it's very bad, but it's not exactly the same thing as theft. As I said yesterday, I actually think it's worse than theft.

I just think it's sensible to take account of circumstances, and to treat things for what they really are, rather than pretending they're something else. Advancing technology makes it increasingly easy to detect plagiarism, and pursue plagiarists — but let's prosecute them for plagiarism, rather than pretending it's theft!

@Alan:

First, I repeat, my aim here is not to defend piracy but to say that it's not the same thing as theft. Most piracy is bad, and most theft is bad. They're just not the same things. Occasionally both piracy and theft are justified.

"It's true that home taping didn't kill music, but pirate downloading has crashed the income of many recording artists. I have friends in the music business, touring musicians with well-known artists, who have had to take fairly deep salary cuts and loss of other benefits over the years because the artist's royalties from recording sales plummetted with the original Napster, and have only gone down since then."

I'm sorry to hear that these artists' lives underwent such a difficult change, but with or without piracy, this sort of change was bound to happen. Similar changes occurred with the invention of moveable type, which completely undermined the lives of monks who worked in the scriptorium; and the establishment of public libraries, which completely changed the way authors make money.

Many studio musicians had many "good years" after studio technology advanced to multi-tracking, but before the general public had access to decent taping equipment. Many made colossal amounts of money without doing much "treading the boards" of public performance — something musicians have been expected to do, almost throughout history. The tide was in their favor then, but it has turned against them now — and that's the way the ebb and flow of history works, with or without piracy.

"This isn't because the artists in question aren't popular (they still sell out concerts across the world), it's because for every album they sell, four or five copies are downloaded "free" or are "shared." Nobody can take an 80% loss of income and carry on as if nothing's changed."

Exactly — but the whole world is changing, and there are bound to be winners and losers, with or without piracy. The nearly-universal availability of cheap computers and the internet is a much bigger deal even than the invention of moveable type. Musicians, writers, academics, almost everyone — it's all completely different for them all. Including me.

"Piracy issues are easy enough to justify when they're cast in philosophic, abstract terms. But there are always real people involved, and real consequences."

I'm 100% in favor of thinking in terms of real people, real consequences — and real circumstances. I wouldn't dream of defending commercial profit-making piracy, but an impoverished learner geek is something quite different. Even a teenage learner guitar-player using Napster is probably adding to rather than subtracting from the wealth of human creativity, in my opinion, although someone much wealthier than the teenager loses.

Years ago I used to play in (very) minor band. We used to lend our practice amps to another, slightly younger band called U2. We played live performances, but never made a record, mostly because I left when I got interested in philosophy. It seems to me that those very modest live performances all those years ago are a proper calling for anyone who calls himself a musician. Real musicians can still make a living out of that, although it may be a less opulent living than what they grew used to when "the studio" was something they had, but the consumer didn't have.

Alan wrote:

'And really, "something valuable acquired for nothing, without the consent of the giver" is the basic legal and moral definition of theft.'

Well, I agree it has some remarkable affinities with theft, and that's the reason why the law currently treats ideas, patterns etc. as if they were "property" that can be stolen. But I think the time has come to re-think the law in this area. To put it in a single sentence, I think the law should respect and protect the authorship of ideas, rather than the supposed "ownership" of ideas. To treat authorship as if it were ownership is a conceptual mistake that does more harm than good.

Unlike real estate, money, or other things that can be owned, an idea or pattern is a "type" of which there can be indefinitely many "tokens". If these tokens can be replicated easily at negligible cost, as has now happened with all writing, photographs, music, computer code, etc., what matters is the link between the author and what he creates (i.e. the "type") rather than the physical embodiment of the creation itself (i.e. the "token").

If a musician writes a tune, someone else can hear it and whistle the tune. It would be ridiculous for the musician to have any sort of power to prevent someone else whistling it. The ease of computer replication is increasingly making many other kinds of patterns just like a tune that anyone can whistle.

Although some people will not welcome that, and it will definitely change lives and professions, overall it may be a good thing.

There are all sorts of ways in which the supposed "ownership" of ideas harms education. For example, academics routinely re-cycle their own writing (or occasionally someone else's writing) and then, under the guise of "owning" the copyright to what they have written, in effect prevent people from reading it and judging it on its merits (or demerits). It goes into a journal that only a university library can afford to "buy", and a handful of people at most read it or discuss its contents. Next, the "owner" of these supposedly "original ideas" (translation: unchecked ideas) presents an academic selection committee with all the "real estate" he has produced over the course of his career, as if this "real estate" were original thought. That sort of thing has to end. It's dishonest. People who want to be read know how to make their writing easily available to anyone who wants to read it. We are really very lucky to live in an age in which that has become a reality, at last.

By treating writing as something that can be owned, our antiquated laws give rise to some unsavoury types of business. For example, a writer's grandson can "own" his grandfather's writings, for no good reason other than an accident of birth. Then he can block scholarship and make a profit at the same time by judiciously "paying out" quotation rights. Until, suddenly, 70 years after the writer's death, the public "owns" it instead. That sort of thing strikes me as unacceptably anachronistic.

As an alternative to all that, I would suggest arrangements in which the "link" between the writer and the writer's work (i.e. the idea or pattern he has created, a "type" rather than a "token") becomes progressively more distant over the course of time and repeated replication, rather than being an exchangeable commodity that suddenly disappears at some arbitrary moment.