Piracy is not Theft

For many years now groups like the MPAA and RIAA have tried to convince the public that piracy (that is, copyright infringement) is theft – and many people have come to believe this, but it’s not true. In reality, copyright infringement is far more analogous to trespassing than it is to theft in its core concepts – and even moreso in the digital world.

To make it clear, I am looking at this from a largely historical perspective, looking at the origins of copyright and how it was intended to be used. This gives us a better view than the current laws that have been greatly influenced and complicated by politics and money from those that have a vested interest in maximizing copyright protections and broadening its definitions.

First, let’s look at the legal definition of theft – this specific definition is from British law, from which many early American laws derived.

A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it…

Next, let’s take a look at this excerpt from the Copyright Act of 1790, the first copyright act at the federal level in the United States – which was heavily influenced by the 1710 Statute of Anne:

…the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, …, who halt or have not transferred to any other person the copyright of such map, chart, book or books, share or shares thereof; and any other person or persons, …, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the term of fourteen years from the recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office…

Copyright, in its origin and intended forms provides something very simple: the right to control how a work (primarily a book) is copied. That’s it, that simple.

So from a historical perspective, a copyright violation was to create a copy of book without the author’s permission – theft would have been to take a book that the author printed, permanently depriving him of that asset. These are clearly not the same thing – despite the assertions of certain powerful groups.

I’m not defending or down playing piracy, but let’s talk about it in the proper context – it’s a property rights issue, not theft.

Adam Caudill

IIN (BIN) Database

An Issuer Identification Number (IIN, more commonly called a BIN) is the first 6 digits of a credit or debit card, and it identifies the bank that issued it – and if you want to know if a number is a real credit card or just a bunch or random digits, it’s a huge help. While credit card numbers do use the Luhn algorithm (mod 10 check) to see if the number is valid, it still produces a huge false-positive rate.

Hugo & Content-Based Related Content

During my Christmas vacation last year, I converted this site from WordPress to Hugo; while I’ve been happy with the change, a couple of features are missing. One of these is that there was a section with related content at the bottom of each post. I wanted to get it back. Thankfully Hugo has native support for Related Content, so while I was hoping this would be a simple task, there’s a note that made things substantially more complicated:

Piracy: Modern Marketing

Piracy is bad, right? Maybe not, and it seems Microsoft figured it out. Piracy can be indirectly profitable, both by giving you additional customers that you may collect from at some future point, and it also serves to reduce or limit the market share of rivals. Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, acknowledged this back in 1998 while speaking at the University of Washington, saying: Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software.