joe.monti

By Joseph Monti

– Dec 2005

Theft, as defined by the Marriam-Webster Dictionary is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.” The byproduct of theft is thus that the thief has the property and owner does not. In the digital world this is quite different.

If someone hacked into your personal computer and copied your music collection on to their own computer without your consent, and you later found out about this, would you care at all? I know I wouldn’t. Nothing was taken from me; I still had my music. Now this would be quite different if they had not only copied my music, but deleted it from my computer. I would be pissed, and if I hadn’t done the same thing in my first example to get my music, not that I did, but it is possible, it would be worth reporting to the authorities. Somebody now had my music while I do not, satisfying both outcomes of theft.

Now take for instance the big corporation. When somebody “hacks” into their computers and copies data from them, they get pissed. They, and everyone they get involved in it (law enforcement, judicial system, etc), considers this theft. And the thief is punished to the full extent of theft law. Now what if that “hacker” not only copies their data, but erases it from the corporation, satisfying both outcomes of my initial definition of theft. Can you imagine how much more pissed they would be? I think they would try to push the punishment beyond simple theft. But in reality they did nothing more than simple theft; the rightful owner is deprived of their personal property and the thief is now the sole possessor of the property.

This not only shows that “theft” in the digital world is not quite the same as “theft” in the physical world, but it demonstrates that the environment of the digital world allows us to do things not possible in the physical world. It has different constraints and it requires different consequences. When you steal in the digital world, according to what has been accepted by law as of late, you are not depriving the original owner of their property, you are performing two acts separate from theft for which the original owner is not happy. These acts are distorted by the owner to be construed as theft and thus punished according to theft law. And the sole motivation is to get revenge on the thief, and not get their property back so they are now the sole possessor.

The two motivations for pursuing a digital thief are dependent upon the interests of the parties from which the property was supposedly stolen. The first is to punish the thief for not properly purchasing the property. This is the case with digital music, movies, and other items for which the original owner wants you to have a copy, but for that copy to be appropriately financially compensated. The second is to punish the thief for having something the original owner does not want you to have. This is the case with confidential or secret information, which is the more common way of classifying this act as theft.

An often misappropriatley used term to refer to a digital thief as a “pirate.” A pirate is a person who rapes and pillages at sea. They are dirty, poorly dressed, are often missing a leg or a hand, and are among the most feared and unpleasant human beings. A pirate is not a mother of three who downloaded a song off Napster that she hadn’t heard in ages and couldn’t find in any music store or a 12 year old who downloads the new Brittany Spears song and doesn’t have the slightest idea of what she is doing beyond actually downloading the song.

This is just one of the many instances where the digital world is being treated unfairly and erroneously associated with real-life parallels. The core problem is that ideas and information in the digital world is considered property, often incorrectly referred to as “Intellectual Property.” This phase is destructive and misleading. Yes, ideas and information can be protected under various laws like copyright, patent and trademark, but lumping these into a single phrase that implies it can be owned is ludicrous.