Theft is a concept that originates from our definition of "property". I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property; I agree that a reasonably short copyright term can encourage the creation of art, but what we have now is outrageous and I don't think the trade-off makes sense for the public.
>> "I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property"
How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?
Why should the person who first arrange a series of words in a particular order have the power to prevent other people from arranging words into the same order, in perpetuity?
Copyright prevents the free speech of others. There's some justification for it doing so. But it's not a natural, or absolute, right.
The power to prevent others from copying the arrangement is an incentive to arrange in the first place. But it should be limited. Property rights allow me to restrict your speech when your literally on my government sanctioned land. I don't see much difference when it comes to IP.
Edit: copyright should be more limited than physical property rights, so I'm in agreement. But neither can be absolute when the government only has a piece of paper to abide by that prevents them from being revoked.
There are exceptions to copyright to minimise the impact on free speech (satire, news for example). I guess people's opinions on this will ultimately come down to their views on free speech and that varies throughout the world.
The US Constitution does not recognize ideas as property. Copyrights and patents are limited-time incentives which may be granted by the government to encourage creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Your "right to profit" only exists in so far that you can try to profit from it, but naturally that might fail if someone takes your idea and implements it cheaper.
Copyright is only a government-granted, temporary monopoly on that idea to incentivize you to live from creating them in the first place and to create more.
Once you have given your idea to someone else, where does your natural right come from to control what they do with it?
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
The very idea of idea ownership is a dangerous one. Because most ideas are compositions of other ideas; should you pay if you write a poem because someone else invented the concept of poems?
>Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term?
This is a much broader question about the rationale behind copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. It is really beyond the scope of the question posed (is copyright violation theft?).
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.
So if you make an apple pie, you don't mind that I come and steal it from your windowsill? You don't own it, after all.
What if you spend a year making a beautiful cabinet? You didn't invent the tree, or the saw, so it's okay if I come by and cart the cabinet over to my house, right?
> That's an argument against the entire idea of personal property.
It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.
In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.
Why should you have that right in the first place?
Note that I agree that you should (or, rather, that as a society we should make sure that it's possible under reasonable conditions), but my reason for agreement is not able to justify perpetual copyright.
My reasoning happens to be similar to what the U.S. Constitution says, but I can imagine others having different reasoning for the same idea.
