Obama Administration: Piracy Is Theft
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 31st Aug 2010 22:09 UTC
Legal Despite doing what I think are some great things for the American people, the Obama administration has a dark side. Joe Biden and many others on staff come straight from the RIAA camp, and it shows. Today, the Obama administration disregarded every US law relating to theft and copyright by stating that piracy is "flat, unadulterated theft".
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axilmar
Member since:
2006-03-20

What if I walk into a library and make a copy of a book rather than checking it out to read it for a week... that's also copyright infringement, and no revenue is technically "lost".


What if the library charges for renting books? then revenue is certainly lost.

What if they check out/borrow the book, and make a copy out of convenience in the future to reference it (when they could just borrow it repeatedly any time they needed anyway)?


It's still theft: the next time you reference the book, you wouldn't have paid the price to read it.

Your suggestion that revenue is lost when someone makes an unauthorized copy of a work is a weak argument in the first place - as there was no requirement that they purchase it in the first place. That doesn't make it any less illegal, but there is no guarantee of revenue to the content owner to begin with - nobody is forced to purchase a book, and there are already plenty of ways to legally read a book without actually paying for it.


I am sorry, I don't understand your above quote. What do you mean by "there was no requirement that they purchase it in the first place"? if a library lends books, and charges for them, then borrowing the book and copying it denies the library revenue, which is clearly theft. If a library lends books, but doesn't charge for them, then it means the author and the library has made a deal that suits both, so copying the book is not theft: neither the author or the library expect to make any revenue after this deal anyway.

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