Thursday 31 January 2008

Downloading is not Stealing

If you follow the debate about filesharing in the news, you will inevitably hear: Downloading music/movies is stealing.

This argument is wrong in several ways. Firstly, if you are charged for downloading, the crime is copyright violation, not theft. This is merely a definition but still valid. Furthermore, if you download a song the original file will still be there. Hence, you have copied it, not stolen it.

This should be easy to understand, but apparently it is not. Maybe this is because of the general generation gap between the younger pro-downloading side and the older anti-piracy side. I guess the older side just has a lack of understanding of the technology used.




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