[Question_Assumptions]

Potential value was lost, yes, and copying of an IP has taken place, but nothing has actually been removed from the owner.

My point is that theft does not consist solely of depriving an owner of their property. Theft can consist of not compensating a laborer for their labor. If someone mows my law with the expectation that they will be paid when they are done, and I refuse to pay them, I've stolen their labor. If a band records an album with the expectation that they will be paid for their performance and I enjoy the album without compensating them, I've similarly stolen their labor. Yes, the fruits of a bands labor is not so obvious as a cut lawn since the sole fruit of a musical performance is the sound, but I think the theft is the same. They've done something. They've exerted effort. And they aren't getting compensated for it. Technically, that may not be theft but there is no economic difference between an audience crashing a concert and listening to it for free and an audience downloading an illegal MP3 and listening to it for free.

As for selling a CD, a CD or book is essentially a payment to play the song at a single location over and over again, as often as you want. The compensation for the CD is set accordingly, just as the cost of a concert ticket is set to make sure that the band will be compensated accordingly by each concert goer. You can frame this in the context of potential and future earnings if you want but the fundamental point remains that the band peforms with the expectation of future compensation and the people who enjoy that peformance do not compensate them and make it impossible for them to recover the compensation for their investment of time, effort, and money.

[Hajman]

My point is that theft does not consist solely of depriving an owner of their property. Theft can consist of not compensating a laborer for their labor. If someone mows my law with the expectation that they will be paid when they are done, and I refuse to pay them, I've stolen their labor.

I agree with you.

If a band records an album with the expectation that they will be paid for their performance and I enjoy the album without compensating them, I've similarly stolen their labor.

The law disagrees with you (see: pawn shop reselling of music CDs. More people enjoy the CDs without direct compensation to the owner. This kind of thing has already been hashed out in court. The RIAA didn't like it one bit. 'A secondary person was enjoying the music, and the artist wasn't getting compensated for it', was their argument. It was rejected). Neither a goods, nor a service, is actually removed from the owner in the case of file swapping. The example you gave, there was (the owner moved the lawn, and their service was taken without compensation). In the file swapping case, the song (or rather song copy) has already been paid for. It moves from the song IP owner's hands, to the song copy owner's hands. The song copy owner desides to copy the song. It's his copy, his material, his time. He doesn't, however, get completely away with it, as it falls under copyright infringment (he didn't have permission to create another copy). It doesn't fall under theft permission, because the copy from the owner had already been compensated for (the same argument for the pawn shop reselling). The first is the song IP owner's copy, and the song IP owner decided to sell it. The second, however, is not the song IP owner's copy. It's the song copy owner's copy. (Hope that isn't too confusing with all those copies and owners in there :).

-The Hajman-