
When is it stealing? - fekberg
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhenIsItStealing.aspx
======
spindritf
Never. It's never stealing. It may be infringing, douchey, objectively wrong,
illegal, despicable, plagiarism but, unless it deprives you of your copy, it's
not stealing.

While I understand the rhetorical usefulness of calling copyright infringement
stealing, it's simply not accurate and nitpickers will be right. Again, they
may also be annoying, myopic, or outright stupid, but they will be correct.

However, the article is much better than the title would imply so if you were
just irked by the headline, don't skip it.

~~~
smacktoward
In an economy where attention is the currency, someone takes your work and
uses it to gather attention to themselves -- attention that would otherwise
have been yours.

How is that not stealing?

~~~
bad_user
This argument is the same as the one MPAA makes about lost revenue due to
piracy, which in general is bullshit, because there is no guarantee that those
people pirating stuff would have ever paid for it if pirating wasn't possible.

So the answer is easy - you can't talk about stealing "attention", when the
"attention" you're talking about never existed in the first place.

~~~
JWLong
And you can't sue someone for lost wages when those wages have yet to be
earned.

------
ap22213
Stealing exists at a culturally-defined threshold. One must be brought up (or
assimilated) with an understanding of what is 'property' and what is not.
Then, one has to also understand what is 'ownership'. Most of us learn this
stuff implicitly, from the people around us, but in a globally connected
world, this is much more difficult.

I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There,
property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in
metropolitan Virginia where I live now. Even though we were under the
jurisdiction of local, state, and national laws regarding such things, we
followed the norms of the people around us. But, as I became assimilated into
the urban 'middle-class', I had to re-learn these things.

I think this is why file sharing in the US became so popular in the 90s/2000s.
Kids (and adults) who were otherwise raised with an understanding of US
'property rights' were nonetheless stealing media. The media that was being
shared just didn't have a cultural foundation as property, to them.

Anyway, there are a lot of people on the internet that don't necessarily have
the same understanding of property and rights and ownership than us. Some
people just don't know that what they're doing is bad and/or illegal.

~~~
rjbwork
>I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US.
There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than
in metropolitan Virginia where I live now

This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate on some of these differences?
Both from a real property (land) and object property (trinkets, devices, food,
etc) perspective?

~~~
ap22213
It was more of a shared, collective kind of property model. People generally
knew which things that people had and who currently had it. Generally, one
would 'borrow' a thing indefinitely, until someone else 'borrowed' it. It
wasn't uncommon for someone to 'borrow' a car, for example. You would just
take it, if you needed it.

It worked well, in that small culture of people. But, it certainly presented a
lot of challenges for me as I left that area. It took me a long time to learn
that that wasn't accepted behavior for middle-class urban people.

For example, in college, people would come to my dorm, and I'd give them my
stuff, not expecting that I'd get it back. Tensions would flare up when I'd
'borrow' other kids' stuff and then lend their stuff out to others. It took me
awhile to understand that that was frowned upon. I also had to learn that I
couldn't just take stuff. I was used to going to other people's houses and
just eating their food, taking video games, music, etc. - Yeah, the middle-
class urbanites didn't like that very much.

Even now, I have strange understandings of property. I'm very likely to just
give my stuff away, to even people that I don't know very well. Most people
who witness this think it is very, very odd.

~~~
jofer
It's quite common in rural areas. I grew up in west TN, and the exact same
sort of situation exists there. I've lived in Alaska for a bit, and it's
ubiquitous there. (e.g. you _never_ lock a cabin, as someone might need to get
in)

A good example is chainsaws. Where I'm from, you heat with wood. Therefore,
having a functioning chainsaw is a necessity. New chainsaws (or good ones,
anyway) are fairly expensive, so you invariably have several ancient ones
around that you're coaxing into functional shape. When you don't have anything
working, you just go to a neighbor and borrow one. If someone asks for one,
you loan them one that's working, even if it's the one you borrowed from your
neighbor. The point being, you owe someone "a functioning chainsaw", not "that
particular saw". It's effectively a communal pool of tools.

To this day my parents usually don't pay when they buy groceries. They just
write their name on the back of the receipt and pay the accumulated bill
whenever they get around to it. Just a few years ago, nowhere took credit
cards, so the stores all extended credit that way. People need to eat, and
often don't have cash until the end/start of the month. Similarly, it's
changed now, but growing up, the gas station left its pumps on at night. If
you needed gas after the station was closed, you just pumped it and dropped in
the next day to pay the bill.

At any rate, you're very aware that you're a part of a community, even if your
nearest neighbor is several miles away. People are fiercely independent and
individualistic, but resources are treated somewhat communally.

Of course, a lot of that is changing, but it's more true the more you move
towards the "fringes" of society, in my experience.

I knew folks who kept someone posted on the ridge to shoot at any car they
didn't recognize (the sheriff literally called first when they had to respond
to something or serve a warrant). At lot of methheads and a lot of folks on
the run, but you'd never think twice about loaning them your truck or saw.

~~~
angersock
That sounds really nice, actually.

So, where does it fall over?

~~~
jofer
It falls over as soon as people stop trusting each other.

As soon as you get to the point where you don't know everyone, folks get less
trusting. People function very well in "village-sized" groups, in my
experience, and there's a big change in behavior as soon as you get to the
point where you don't "know" everyone. (Behavior doesn't necessarily change in
a bad way, but there is a big change.)

Or that's my $0.02, at any rate.

------
mrtksn
When you use the word "stealing" to describe anything other than shoplifting
or burglary it instantly starts endless conflicts with each party with it's
own definition of what is stealing based on their own definition of what is
property and so on.

I would like to describe the situation as cheating in the game without trying
to going down into the rabbit hole that the digital goods opened(or expanded,
since before the digital era we already had goods that are valuable other than
it's material and building value. Books, Paintings, Designs, Blueprints and
more).

So, you are producing something with intention to gain money or maybe just
reputation but often you already use other peoples work to do that - nothing
is made out out of thin air.

Then somebody is building some other product with some intention like making
money, gaining reputation or something else and his product is using your
product and maybe many other people's products. Let's say a website with AI
that awesomely curates the content of other people.

In this situation everybody produced a valuable product but the other guys
product's success is on your expense.

Ideally you would have an arrangement where everybody wins. I will give an
example from the movies and music industries:

a)When you have the arraignment it's iTunes store. b)When you don't have one,
it's the Prate Bay.

or Defense industries:

a) When you have a contract it's joint venture and you exchange some
information to build some product. b) When you don't have one and you spy on
each other to create similar product its espionage.

or personal relationships:

a) When a couple are also seeing other people with the consent of the other
one, it's open relationship b) If there is no consent, it's called cheating.

It's not about stealing, it's about managing the resources in coordination
with other parties so that everybody wins. Otherwise often one party wins in
expense of the other, many time everybody loses in the long run.

------
lazyjones
> _What are your thoughts, Dear Reader?_

Honestly? Like you wrote, everything's going to be copied anyway, better don't
let it cause frustration. It's just information, something we've never
controlled successfully before the digital age and haven't given up trying to
control on the web _yet_.

If we didn't try to (pointlessly really) fight over attention from search
engines and revenue from annoying ads where we ought to put our content, it
wouldn't be such a big issue and the world would probably a better place if
people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for
ad revenue.

~~~
jeremysmyth
_the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because
they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue_

1: How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are
paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news
sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers)

2: How much of the content you rely on every day that _isn 't_ paid-for
content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there
wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? (like Facebook, Twitter,
Stack Overflow)

My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.

~~~
lazyjones
I have no idea how much of the content I read is paid for (and how). A large
part of it is certainly summaries written by people who aren't paid to do so
(copied, digested and filtered for me).

> _My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place._

It's funny that you named FB, Twitter and SO as important sources of content
you "rely on every day". Who actually writes the content and who gets paid for
it? Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of
content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity
provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)

~~~
jeremysmyth
_Do you really think it 's impossible to get the same amount and quality of
content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity
provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)_

Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so
let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not
answer: Are there _any_ such communities _today_? Your question seems to imply
that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no
doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained
by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created
by universities without profit.

However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where
it's _likely_ "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same
people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of
Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people
_couldn 't_ (or for whatever reason _wouldn 't_) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack
Overflow. That world simply does not exist today.

To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the
same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes
_anyone 's_ mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to
replace her use of Facebook today?

~~~
lazyjones
> _Are there any such communities today?_

Yes, there's Wikipedia and there are IRC channels (and to some extent still,
Usenet).

> _[...]the world would have to change to such an extent that those people
> couldn 't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack
> Overflow. That world simply does not exist today._

Why would the world have to change? Did it have to change for FB to exist and
siphon users off of myspace? We just need the product / the infrastructure /
the volunteer work to get some stuff done. It hasn't been done yet, but it's
not an otherworldly idea.

> _do you think my mother [...] would happily use bittorrent-based systems
> tomorrow_

Which part of it would make her unhappy? Would she miss the corporate entity
behind it? The decentralization? Or do you assume that FB's (highly complex by
the way) UI is something that cannot be replicated in a sufficiently
recognizable manner?

------
programminggeek
This is exactly why I came up with the idea of the Pirate License.
[http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html](http://retromocha.com/pirate-
license.html)

Not everything makes sense to put out as Creative Commons. Sometimes you want
to actually sell something like software or an ebook, but you don't think it
makes sense to go after people torrenting your stuff and giving it away for
free.

My philosophy is there can still be an exchange of value. So, with the Pirate
License, you make a version of your product explicitly licensed under the
Pirate License which calls those who steal your product pirates, and asks them
to pass it along to other pirates or potential customers.

I think it makes the expectations for piracy much more clear and should lead
to better outcomes.

------
ds9
For multiple reasons including those stated by mrtksn, "stealing" is an
unsuitable term - it invites an ideological digression on copyright, property
rights, law and justice.

However, the situation hanselman describes is certainly copyright
infringement, and in my opinion he ought to look at the possibility of legal
action. It might not be worthwhile, but might be satisfying and set a
precedent for control of ripoff sites (modulo jurisdiction and other practical
issues).

On the principles involved, IMHO copyright infringement can be justified and
even admirable and virtuous in some contexts - but commercial exploitation of
others' works, without the creators' permisssion, is not among them. In a just
world Hanselman would get the all the profit the infringer realized plus the
full cost of suing.

What's most egregious here is the relationship of economic power and
enforcement of rights. Big, evil copyright-hoarding companies, that do not
create anything but exploit the creations of others, are able to enforce their
legal rights to an extreme and excessive degree, including interference with
civil communications, taxes on blank media, false takedown orders and other
abuses - while individuals subjected to exactly analogous, or even worse
violations have no recourse. It's a two-tier system that deserves little
respect.

'Scuze me for ranting.

------
qwerta
It is never stealing, but unlicensed use or license violation!

Steeling would be taking away copyright ownership from author.

------
lukasm
The whole problem comes down to definition of property. What is it, really?

People don't consider content to be proprietary. We treat a blog post in the
same way we treat speech. Users ain't gonna pay for that. Period. Some of them
may, but no the majority.

~~~
pantaril
Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i
want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution
(i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but
that's all.

The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they
want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to
limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business
model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the
author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with
some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number
of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational
measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on
the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works.
Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears
because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of
his works.

~~~
chilldream
Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking
about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know,
_link to it_. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's
work.

------
Thiz
> When is it stealing?

Never.

A good read about IP:

[http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-
Property](http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property)

------
psionski
It's stealing when a company takes your hard-earned cash (not "copies", but
"takes") and doesn't deliver a product you actually enjoy using.

------
robinwarren
Call me non typically British but it's pretty obvious why they didn't ask.
Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he
is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their
startup instantly. "Better to do something now and apologise later than ask
for permission and not get it" as I think a saying goes.

Better attribution would have been good, and possibly reaching out to original
creators asking them to opt out if they'd rather not be involved. Offering
something in return (the embedded player for relevant articles) could have
helped grease the wheels. Ultimately, if they get bug they may not need
massive support from content creators like Scott but they do need not to be on
the wrong side of them.

~~~
reidrac
That's why creative commons licenses are useful. If the content they want to
use is under CC, they don't need to ask because the terms are perfectly clear.

There's also fair use, but IANAL and I think that they should definitely ask
(because of the "all right reserved" part).

~~~
chilldream
Copying entire works (even a blog post counts) is not fair use.

~~~
Amezarak
There have been several cases where courts ruled that copying an entire work
was fair use. Substantiality is only one of the considerations. For example,
in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, the court ruled that even though they had
copied the entire work, it was OK because that's how much they needed to copy
for their intended (otherwise legitimate, commercial, and transformative) use.

------
vrikis
I clicked through hoping this would be about physical objects... I've always
wondered, if I leave a bike unchained and someone takes it, it's considered
stealing, right? But what about littering a box of cigarettes on the floor,
and someone taking the last one in it, did that person just steal your
cigarette?

Totally off-topic, so I apologize, but I've always wanted to read into this
topic a bit more...

------
leephillips
I'm conservative about words. I object to using "literally" to mean "not
literally." When I do, I'm invariably taken to task: "words change!" "language
evolves!" "it means what people use it to mean!" "dictionaries are
descriptive, not proscriptive!" "get with it, you curmudgeon!". But the use of
"theft" or "stealing" here seems perfectly natural to me, even after reading
the legalistic objections to it. And, certainly, people use these words to
describe copyright violation, all the time. So why, in this case, does
everyone suddenly join the usage police? In not once place on this long page
of comments do I see the usual descriptivist lament. Where are my old friends
who should be popping up to explain that "stealing" means copyright violation
because people use it that way?

------
joshvm
This came up quite recently with the twitter account that posted historical
pictures without attribution. Arguably they're showing people wonderful
photographs that they would otherwise not see, however they were basically
lifting archive photos and publishing them without giving any nod to the
photographers or the institutes that provided them.

[http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-
co...](http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-copyright-
creative-credit/)

The attitude in most of these cases is innocent unless you can prove you own
it and complain enough.

Extreme example - is Google stealing from you because it aggregates your
content, stores it, makes it easily searchable and then serves adverts to make
money from it?

------
krstck
How does Umano make its money? Do they charge for the app or play ads? Sell
data?

I've always felt it questionable ethical territory to take somebody else's
work, slap ads on it, and pocket the money. "Aggregators" have been doing that
forever, though.

------
edw519
_When is it stealing?_

As soon as you have to ask, "When is it stealing?", it's stealing, simple as
that.

As much as people would like to believe otherwise, all the rest is hand
waving, semantics, and window dressing.

~~~
MichaelGG
You can assert that, but plenty of people have an over-entitlement and will
claim stealing for anything. Not saying that the author is being over-
entitled, but just asking if it's stealing shouldn't somehow elevate things.

For one, this completely destroys fair use, even for parody. Just claim
something was stolen. It'd kill any innovation driven by competitor
enhancements: stealing.

Heck, some people felt that Kindle's text-to-speech was stealing.

------
antonl
Full disclosure. I'm one of the Umano cofounders, I figured it's time to jump
in here.

There are many things mentioned in comments that I'm not going to try to
cover, but I will cover the basics. I'd be happy to answer any direct
questions.

The vision behind Umano is simple. We want to provide our users with a new way
of consuming content. Many times it's the content they wouldn't otherwise
read. How many times have you come across an interesting article that bubbled
up in your twitter stream, you added it to your Pocket, and you forgot about
it forever and ever. Reading is a heavy task. Reading takes time and your full
attention. You can't read while you are cooking breakfast, getting dressed,
standing in a crammed Muni bus, or riding on your bike to work. Listening is
passive. Listening is easy. Listening allows you consume longer pieces of
content with less effort, while doing something else. Umano is here to offer
great content in a different medium.

We started Umano with no licensing deals from any publishers (big or small).
Sure, having licensing deals would be amazing, but "Even if 100% of people
they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than
10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly." as
@robinwarren said above. Now that we are bigger and more mature, we have deals
with many large publishers. However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for
us to ask for permission from all bloggers that write amazing content that our
community would like to be voiced. If the content producer doesn't want their
content on the platform, we will happily take it down. As we grow and start to
make money, our mission is to do revenue shares with content owners. Until
then, the benefit that we bring to many bloggers is distribution. Popular
articles often generate a significant number of listeners. Finally, one
interesting point about Scott's article that was narrated - it was actually
requested by one of our users through a new "Submit Any Link" feature that we
recently launched as an experiment on Android.

Now to attribution. We never claim that the content we voice is original Umano
content, and we always provide attribution. We link to the original article,
and always include the name of the publisher and the author in the narration.
Scott mentioned that we do it poorly on mobile web and will fix that shortly.

~~~
shanselman
It's this part that concerns me primarily.

"However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission"

------
pbreit
With this line of thinking you'd never get things like YouTube or Uber.
Switching to opt-in would basically imply shutting down so that's not really
an option. I suppose they could default to computer-generated reads and wait
for content owners to request a human-read version. We're likely in a gray
area here but it's hard to get too objectionable (except for the part where
Umano claims some future ownership).

------
summerdown2
I think the problem is time, not the law. I read this article a while ago, and
it really opened my eyes as to how much, despite massive effort by the
copyright lobby, society is changing away from the idea that copying is theft:

[http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-
generational-d...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-
divide-in-copyright-morality/)

------
rjzzleep
my Facebook stream has lately been filled with people copying and pasting
27bslash6 posts to their buzz feed clones.

i don't know, is them keeping the real names, such as david thorne in them
without reference to the original fair use?

in academia this would be considered plagiarism i recon(but i may be wrong),
while quoting the source wouldn't.

at the same time someone below said by the definition of the word it's not
stealing because they don't take it away from you. but in a legal sense that
statement might be incorrect since if they're getting more buzz they could be
stealing the attribution. just like edison never really stole a light bulb,
but he very well stole the fame of the light bulb.

------
betterunix
s/stealing/copying/

~~~
jordigh
Because we need to hear this more often:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ)

Copying is not theft!

