Is Filesharing Stealing?

I wrote a post for this blog back in 2007 in which I explained a litmus test for whether filesharing is stealing but I think it's important to explain now that my views have somewhat shifted since then. I explained my new view on the question in a comment on a GamePolitics.com post last year which today I think I ought to repost as it's own independent piece. I said:

"You can only consider file sharing "stealing" if you accept the premise that an idea, not a physical object but an idea, can be someone's property and that therefore copying someone else's idea is stealing someone else's idea. That's actually a fairly complex, developed and abstract philisophical position on ethics which not everyone agrees with.

When Moses brought the Seventh Commandment ("Thou Shalt Not Steal") down from Mount Sinai, the Statute of Anne (the first copyright legislation) was millenia in the future. Was the Statute of Anne really addressing the exact same thing that the commandment presented to the ancient Hebrews by Moses was addressing? If you think so, it should be supported by argument, not just assumed. Unless you think it self-evident. But many do not. I do not.

I think it is reasonable for the government to grant, in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, exclusive rights to control the mass redistribution of creative works to their creators for a limited time. And I think the copyright on StarCraft II is a legitimate one and therefore the law is justified and the people breaking it are guilty of copyright infringement. But not of theft. Nothing has been stolen. A limited exclusive right granted by the government for a limited time has been violated but nothing has been stolen.

I also think the perspective that the content industry has taken of the law is stupid and self-destructive. Culture always builds on the past and if you want lots of building going on, a healthy public domain and reasonable fair use protections are obviously necessary. In addition, they really ought to be changing their business models to fit the market instead of trying to use the hammer of government to play "whack-a-mole" with the freeloading moochers among their customers and fans, often missing and hitting the innocent by mistake. This is worse than violating abstract legal rights - it is simple naked evil, spun by the media into good. That's just horrible and despicable. No, they ought to be thinking about ways to get people involved, not to shut people out of their products. The capitalistic approach would be to charge for services that the pirates just can't duplicate, like the creator of Minecraft is doing. The looting approach is what they're taking so far, unleashing hoards of zombie lawyers to prey on the possibly innocent by inflicting punishment out of proportion to any offense and with no regard to any conception of justice but only a mere pretense of it which is assumed but never justified.

Let's get sane and 21st century and address sacred inalienable individual physical private property rights first. Then we can talk about abstract limited exclusive legal rights."
- Me (Yes, I just quoted myself)

The chief difference between this new position and my old position is the actual meaning of the word, "stealing." I am now convinced that "stealing" deals only with physical objects and you cannot "steal" an idea. You can illegally, fraudulently and/or unethically copy an idea, but since "stealing" is a physical act and since ideas are non-physical and since we don't have telepathic powers to literally reach into someone else's brain, you cannot literally steal an idea. It is a physical impossibility. All meaningful instances of the word "stealing" in relation to ideas are figures of speech, not literal.