[free-sklyarov] Neutralizing the Stealing Meme

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from Peer to Peer Legal discussion list,
p2p-legal at lists.alt.org)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:35:06 -0500
From: "Lucas Gonze" <lucas at gonze.com>


To get anywhere in the ongoing political mugging over
intellectual property, the stealing meme must be
neutralized.  As long as the baseline is that MP3
filesharing is stealing, it's a law and order issue and the
good guys will keep getting creamed.

My goal here was to make something short that appeals to
common sense.  The following is close but not quite, so I
want to throw it out there for debugging.

Alice says that filesharing is stealing, implying that it is
wrong.  Bob asks why.  Alice says that it's against the
law.  Bob says that Alice is playing word games.  The word
stealing has two meanings.  Alice is justifying use of the
term based on one meaning, and framing conclusions based on
the other meaning.

The law doesn't define right and wrong, so if Alice means to
say that MP3 filesharing is wrong because the law makes it
so, that can't be true.  The law only defines a narrow and
technical meaning of stealing -- a violation of property law
-- that has no moral content.  This narrow technical meaning
is not the same as the most people's meaning of stealing. 
Most people mean by stealing something which is always
wrong, a moral axiom.

My hope is that "word games" is short enough to work against
"filesharing is stealing".  But I think that this is a FAQ
entry instead, because the explanation is too complex and
because it's not an aggressive counterattack.

Thoughts?

- Lucas

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