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FYI on "pirates" and "stealing"

FYI on "pirates" and "stealing"

Posted Feb 8, 2007 18:37 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: FYI on "pirates" and "stealing" by gvy
Parent article: Russian Schools to Switch to Linux After Microsoft Piracy Case (MosNews)

There are plenty of instances of intellectual property actually being stolen. For example, Viacom alledgedly just recently stole somebody's software tutorial video, in the sense of making false claims to be the rightful owner of it. Technically, it's slander of title rather than larceny (since it's not a physical item whose location could be on somebody's property or person), but "stealing" isn't a technical term.


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Just to get it straight,

Posted Feb 9, 2007 15:16 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

"Viacom alledgedly just recently stole somebody's software tutorial video,
in the sense of making false claims to be the rightful owner of it.
Technically, it's slander of title rather than larceny" -- no, it's
plagiarism. In law, slander of title is normally a claim involving real
estate in which one entity falsely claims to own another entity's
property. Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the
language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as
one's own original work.
To avoid any plagiarism accusations, the last two phrases are from the
current respective Wikipedia articles, as of 2006.02.09 13:15 GMT-02:00.

Just to get it straight,

Posted Feb 9, 2007 17:27 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

You're clearly not seeing the allegations in this event. Viacom evidently sent youtube a DMCA notification, falsely claiming to own the tutorial video and requesting that it be removed. They never used the tutorial video or anything like it themselves, and may never have seen it. Slander of title related to IP is rarely mentioned, because usually people falsely claiming copyright ownership can be more straightfowardly demonstrated to have infringed it by distributing the work or something related.

FYI on "pirates" and "stealing"

Posted Feb 15, 2007 17:27 UTC (Thu) by alext (guest, #7589) [Link]

No it is not stolen at least in a legal sense. It is a smear of terms probably with the (original) intent of big media companies to simplify things for convicting people in the minds of others.

To steal is an act of theft and that is defined as taking something with the intention to permanently deprive. Taking a digital copy does not do that. Which is why people like me and I suppose other "precisionists" (tossers might call them pedants) don't like the term property as you don't have possession of any property only a license (the terms of which are dependent upon amongst other things location) granted to you ultimately by the people including usually the person accused of infringing.

But the concept of a license and infringement is a lot more sophisticated for your average person to come to grips with. Hence returning to the probably cause being media giants wanting to make the obtaining of convictions easier. As theft sounds a whole lot worse than "infringement" and it is a whole lot easier to understand.

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