Senate bill bans P2P networks (News.com)

Senate bill bans P2P networks (News.com)

Posted Jun 28, 2004 12:40 UTC (Mon) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)
In reply to: Senate bill bans P2P networks (News.com) by ccchips
Parent article: Senate bill bans P2P networks (News.com)

It's not hairsplitting.

Theft and copyrigth-infringement are two different crimes, with different laws, different results, different punishments and so on.

Infact they have pretty much nothing in common whatsoever except for the fact that they are both illegal. If *that* is enough equality that you insist they should both be refered to as "stealing", then I must ask why you don't instead insist on calling it "rape" ?

Fact is, those who refer to copyrigth-infringement as "stealing" very frequently either deliberately want to confuse the issues by making people think in analogies of physical property for something that is clearly different, or they are themselves confused about what the differences are.

It doesn't get better when the same people commonly start blabbering about IP, without any distinction as to if they're talking about patents, copyrigth or trademarks, all of which are different in important ways.

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