Quote:
Originally Posted by blackmonsters
Not exactly bro.
They define copyright infringement as being more than theft!
In other words copyright infringement could involve conversion, fraud AND THEFT!
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No, it's quite obvious that they mean copyright infringement is not theft.
"Copyright holders frequently refer to copyright infringement as "theft." In copyright law, infringement does not refer to actual theft, but an instance where a person exercises one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder without authorization.[5] Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft, holding, for instance, in the United States Supreme Court case Dowling v. United States (1985) that bootleg phonorecords did not constitute stolen property and that "interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright... 'an infringer of the copyright.'" In the case of copyright infringement the province guaranteed to the copyright holder by copyright law is invaded, i.e. exclusive rights, but no control, physical or otherwise, is taken over the copyright, nor is the copyright holder wholly deprived of using the copyrighted work or exercising the exclusive rights held."
And Gideon,
I know the courts define infringement as something else but I still call it theft.
1) Because you are steal stealing shit, by my definition of the word.
2) To piss off people that like playing semantics when we are talking about a serious issue.
I've told you before, you are right about a lot of things that you catch shit for here but there are no legitimate excuses for blatant theft / infringement like we see in the case of Mega Upload. I 100% agree that they shouldn't be punished for what their users do and they have not been. Their punishment is over things that they did, like making it look like content was removed after a DMCA when in fact they just played some linking games.
I also don't agree with how they handle cases like this. At no point should you have all of your websites completely taken offline *before you are found guilty of anything. They should have appointed someone to run the business (like they do in other Federal cases) and handled things correctly until the court case was decided. They've already been wrong once and ruined someones business over their own stupidity. I'm 100% sure that won't be the case with MU but we have due process for a reason and this is bullshit.