While I feel you might be mocking the folks that use this when calling pirating a movie "stealing", your point is still valid. Saying "stolen" serves only to sensationalize what happened. Saying "rips off" or "copies" would be more accurate.
As to why some people apparently feel more comfortable saying "stolen" in this case versus people sharing MP3s: There's an obvious qualitative difference between people sharing files, and someone passing work off as their own, especially when profiting from it. From what I can tell, it's the whole plagiarism part that really pisses people off.
I think it's twofold. You've got it right that the plagiarism is probably the biggest reason, but the other reason is that they're using this "stolen" material for their own personal gain. If I download some MP3s and listen to them myself, there's no personal gain (besides the literal gain of having the MP3, of course). If I download some MP3s and put them in my product, now I'm illegally benefitting from someone else's work. I would be willing to call that stealing the MP3s even if I'm not trying to pass the MP3s off as my own creation.
Because if you copy my MP3 for yourself then you are a single person who is not going to pay me (ie one potential lost sale). Not a huge deal. You probably wouldn't have paid for it if you couldn't pirate it anyway.
If you then go out and sell that same MP3 then every sale you make is a sale that _I_ should have been paid for. The people you are selling to are willing to part with money and instead of it coming to me, the original author, it is going to a 3rd party.
Because the pirate that's selling the MP3 didn't go through any of the effort to make it. They are benefiting from the work of others, without giving them any credit.
When the copy is free, there's a non-zero cost associated with making that copy. 20 years ago, it was the cost of a cassette tape. Even now, there is a bandwidth cost associated with giving away a copy.
Because then I feel like I should be making that money. Also, there's the possibility (probability?) that in order to make money off of it, you're making it look like you made it, which my ego does not appreciate.
I'm not saying I wouldn't care. I would be a bit disappointed that you chose to pirate instead of purchasing. But I wouldn't be mad about it. Once you start trying to pass it off as your own, or trying to benefit from it, that's when it becomes something worth being mad about.
Based on your comment history you're probably just being sarcastic.
That said, I agree with your point even if you probably don't: using the wrong word in the wrong place is not a good thing. Conflating copyright infringement with theft is bad even if you empathize with the person whose copyright was infringed.
You could presumably define "theft" as owning something without paying the price that has been set for it (in this case, infinity). The bottom line is that you're using this word to talk about a type of ownership which you've judged to be a social ill. Despite what RMS may say, it seems reasonable to associate this with the historical judgments about ownership that are tied up with the word "theft".
Also, we need to expand the meaning of words by analogy, otherwise we're left with calling things Thing A and Thing B.
You could define it like that, but you wouldn't be entirely correct. Depriving the original owner of whatever is stolen is innate in the concept of "theft"[1][2]. That is the primary reason society has had laws against theft for so long--not because we're afraid of everybody having a pony, but because my stealing a pony deprives its original owner of it.
Since copyright infringement does not stop the original "owner" from using the property in question, calling it theft seems intellectually dishonest. All the historical judgments are based around this idea--the reason theft is inherently bad and punished by so many societies is that the person stolen from does not have use of his property any more. Extending these to something that does not deprive the original owner of anything is not reasonable.
Besides, the idea of "owning" information involves having exclusive control over its distribution. Given this parallel, somebody just having an unauthorized copy does not own the information as they have no exclusivity or control over it whatsoever. If somebody with such a copy could then enforce that others could not use the information, it would be akin to owning it, but it would also be a very different story!
So your definition of theft would probably have to be amended to "using something without paying the price..." since just having a copy of something confers no ownership. But then this definition suddenly becomes very broad--much more broad than the commonly accepted meaning of theft. For example, trespassing would fall under "theft" as you're using somebody's land without their permission or "paying the price".
Expanding words by analogy is a good thing, granted. However, this assumes that the analogy is reasonably accurate. There are clearly harmful examples of expanding words by poor analogy: the oft-repeated mantra that "evolution is just a theory" only exists because the analogy between the common use of "theory" and the scientific use is fundamentally flawed.
So expanding words' meanings by analogy is good assuming the analogy is not relatively misleading or clearly biased. The analogy between theft and copyright infringement is both, so this use should not be encouraged.
If I had my way the usage of analogies and semantic bickering would be strictly forbidden in threads pertaining to copyright infringement. There is a real discussion to be had about the situation at hand, but instead the top sub-thread is the exact same circle jerk that happens in every other copyright related thread.
I wonder how long we have until someone makes a car analogy?
I'm a game developer. I dream about the day the gaming industry could move forward these silly slap-fights and actually work together on reusable assets for everyone, free of IP. (in fact, that's one of the motivations behind my startup)
While I don't like that Armed Heroes used other's copyrighted work without permission. It's sad that these assets were not released under Creative Commons in the first place. Armed Heroes should've taken the "high road" and released their own assets under CC instead of using other's. IMHO, those who are hypocrite on this subject are simply missing the bigger picture.
I cannot think of a single good thing that would happen to gaming if every single game had creative commons assets from day one. You'd end up with endless identical looking games.
Now, releasing the assets under CC after 5 years or so I could get behind. Let the culture remix your work after it has had a chance to stand and be judged, appreciated on its own.
One nice thing about free assets is that you would be able to modify and remix them. So you could take some existing model of a car, change the dimensions a bit, change the shading, exaggerate some of its features and get a cartoon car that looks completely different.
Another thing is that you would not have to reinvent the wheel each time. Sure, you expect the important bits of each game to be unique. But do you really care that the wooden crates or doors from one game are reused in another? Being able to take an existing model of something unimportant and tweak it to match your atmosphere would save a lot of pointless work.
Just having access to such a library would not stop a good game development team for making a creative, distinctive game. It would just save them from having to make a whole bunch of boring models of limited utility. They would still make all the core models--characters, exotic settings and so on--for each particular game.
Besides, I think game studios already share assets between similar games in their own lineup. This would just make the sharing global, giving everybody access to more material to start from.
My main objection comes from the fact that I do both development and design, and I've seen a lot of developers act like art can be reused just the same as code, with no ill effects. But humans are excellent pattern matchers, and we do pick up on these things.
Personally I mostly enjoy games for their story and atmosphere, and the few times I've recognized a reused asset (e.g. a sound effect) it's been really distracting. It's like the Wilhelm Scream in movies... once you know about it, you can never stop noticing it.
A better idea would be to make an open library for procedural generation of assets, so that you can make infinite variations of every item, and tweaking is easy. We already have e.g. SpeedTree, but these things are so valuable they always end up being commercial rather than free.
> the few times I've recognized a reused asset (e.g.
> a sound effect)
The "pig farm" sound effect from WarCraft II... I've heard that one a lot. From tv shows to films to other games. The only one I can pull off the top of my head of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex Season 1.
But mods generally fall into two categories... those that take place within the existing game's world, and total conversions. In the case of total conversions, what's being reused is typically the engine, not the assets, and in the other case, you're deliberately trying to fit in.
Re-usable assets are not the answer. Procedural generation of assets using re-usable blueprints under creative commons to enable rapid generation of unique variants of an existing object are the answer. Combine this with more powerful editing tools with the ability to mold blueprints together, and the uniqueness, creativity and soul of an artistic vision can be preserved while drastically decreasing development time.
I think his comment is tongue-in-cheek - noting that when it comes to piracy we like to get pedantic about the difference between infringement and theft, but when we're holding the short end of the stick we'll gladly assign whatever label we please.
