I never said they were sales. I explicitly differentiated them from sales. They are potential sales, valued at YX and potential sales are what you lose. A sale has a value of X dollars.
That's what makes it not theft. Theft deprives the person of the original. If I have two books and you take one I have one book. If you buy one of my books and give it out, I did not have any of the books I had stolen from me.
You can't deprive someone of something they may or may not have had. Copyright infringement is legally not defined as theft for this reason.
Where it gets really muddy is whether copyright infringement causes any harm at all. We've had interest groups claiming millions of dollars worth of potential sales lost and we've had studies showing that actually piracy may be a net benefit to creators due to increased market exposure.
All of this pontification can be put aside though. China does not enforce copyright or most other IP laws, and yet has a thriving entertainment, engineering, literary, etc. industry. So clearly IP protection is not critical for innovation or a healthy industry, as interest groups here would have us believe.
No it doesn't. You can't steal something that hasn't happened yet.
E wry game I've bootleggedI've eventually gone and bought When I had the dosh and the terms were right. You can't claim you "lost me as a potential sale." Otherwise, you'd have grounds for counting everyone who didn't buy your game or whatever IP as a loss.
Until it materializes, it isn't yours to account for. Just as I can't sue a chicken for the egg inlaid, it makes no sense to allow for the legal recognition of "potential sales lost".
Especially nowadays more than ever, where one isn't even largely acquiring the thing anymore, but signing a contract to host an entertainment experience on hardware they supposedly own,but which has been in reality co-opted at the manufacturing and design level by rights holders to put in place the means of extortion from society their perceived pound of flesh with no recourse.
In fact, I'd say if it's fine for you to keep track of and argue the harm of lost potential sales, I should have a matching valid claim in potential buys I was never able to make because industry colluded to ensure that proprietary anti-features in the form of DRM were included in all the hardware I haven't subsequently purchased.
Fair's only fair after all.
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer the law stick to matters of the actual rather than hypothetical.
And before you argue there is a difference between not making something for purchase (hardware platforms sans DRM mechanisms) and not realizing a sale because of privacy, I would advise you to consider the dual nature of transactions. Value is not created, merely exchanged via fungible means. Just as I'm cheated out of DRM free hardware by collisions with industry by rights holders, so too are rights holders plagued by those who find ways around things.
I'd rather live in a world where useful information could flow freely. I'm still willing to compensate for something that genuinely entertains, enlightens, or helps me. That magnanimity goes down the hole once it turns into extortion.
And make no mistake, it always does. I've yet to see a significantly cheaper ebook than a paperback. Instead, I see them treated as roughly equivalent despite the sharp loss of utility of a DRM'd artifact.
Until that madness resolves, and I stop running into people who feel entitled to hypothetical sales, I see no reason to take rightholders as arguing at all in good faith.
I regret joining this topic because I think it invites arguments that are only philosophical and people are generally unlikely to change their minds from what they already believe. For example, when I read your comment I already know I disagree with you, and have but to set my fingertips to the keyboard to let the disagreement flow. In the same way, I know you'll disagree with me, and it's hard for me to see how there is anything productive here.
Violating copyright takes potential sales. Those have value. For example, if you had a product worth X dollars, and people had a Y chance of buying it, you could sell the rights to your product based on that value.
Our society respects the concept of potential sales or potential value in many ways. If I lie and say that your restaurant is filled with rats, what am I costing you, if not potential sales? I could sell options contracts that have potential value. If I break the fingers of a master pianist or a surgeon I may be sued for a greater amount of damages than if I broke the fingers of any professional who doesn't need manual dexterity.
Potential value is the basis for lots of business and productive endeavors. It's why society respects intellectual property rights, to give creators a chance to earn something from their work, which, without the supporting legal framework, would be hard to monetize.
I went to Amazon and looked at a top 10 list. The first five books available in paperback and Kindle format are:
Kindle is, on average, 64% the cost of a paperback. Combine that with greater functionality and ease of use, and I think the Kindle format is a winner.
What everyone is saying is exactly the opposite of philosophical. This is an argument of semantics.
The existing supreme court rulings are crystal clear that they treat infringement as a different type of crime than theft, as they have different properties. No one is arguing with you about IF loss of sales can occur. They are telling you the legal definition of theft does not cover loss of potential. Hence the use of the word infringement. You are trying to redefine the word theft from its existing legal usage. Use a different word than theft.
Dowling v. United States (1985)
>interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
This isnt about what we believe. It's what the law says and how the courts have told us they choose to interpret it. It's (interpreting their interpretation) is not really a debate or an argument open to interpretation, as they were so clear there really arent multiple ways to read it. This isnt about any of us changing our minds with regard to what theft means, as its not an opinion.
If you own a taco stand and I open a pizza place next to you, I will deprive you of some potential sales. Clearly, that condition isn't sufficient to indicate theft.
This is what separates IP theft from physical property theft.