This is certainly an issue that we 've probably done hundreds of times on this site over the years and emphasized that injury is different than "stealing" in some very important points. And yet, industry, people, politicians and law enforcement authorities continue to claim that one \ to make "other" from the others. We had already called the U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who 's at the top of the pursuit of Aaron Swartz for the manufacture of fake "nothing more than theft" statement about Swartz' s actions:

"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and if you take documents, data or dollars," U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said in a statement. "It is just as harmful to the victim, if you know what you have stolen away or sell."

Jjmsan reader points us to Matthew Yglesias 'two wonderful paragraph debunking this absurd statement, and the fact that U.S. law enforcement authorities, such apparently make false claims on equivalence:

This is absurd. I once wrote a book titled Head in the sand . I own both physical copies of the book and the copyright on the contents of the book. It is obviously not equally harmful for me if you break into my house and steal my physical copy of the book, as if you somehow go to the library and a photo copy of the book. The difference is not subtle at all, is that if you know anything about me (it was my book, my iPad, my shoes, my money, my immersion blender, or whatever) to steal, I did not. If you have something that you must not copy without my permission to copy, that's a whole other question. Perhaps you will take me about income, I would if you had not, or maybe you did not anything from me. As I said before, I sometimes have to beg for someone to me a copy of a scientific article that I did not get free access to online. It is never the case that my fallback option is to purchase in this situation, an extremely expensive scientific journal subscriptions. No one is hurt when this kind of copying occurs, and even in those cases where there is a disadvantage to the nature of the damage are quite different than the damage incurred in actual cases of theft.

I'm not really sure why the man accused in the enforcement of copyright disguise this fact, obsessed. Laws against theft are not the only laws on the books. It is a perfectly sound public policy justification for requiring cars have license plates, but no one would say, "theft is theft, whether you drive one car or just your own car without license plates." The provisions against copying to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." That's a good reason to have a set of rules , but there is a reason that has nothing to do with "stealing." The question is whether the rules we currently have really good ways to achieve this goal.

It 's that paragraph, that' s really the crux of the problem here. We 've all too often argued over the issue in the first paragraph. But there 's easy no good reason even for the officials to use such language when it comes to copying, because copyright laws are totally independent and a very different purpose, than laws against theft.

Of course, it's also worth pointing out a key point that Yglesias seems to skip over which makes Ortiz's statements here even more ridiculous. For all the "stealing" talk regarding Swartz's attempts to copy JSTOR documents, he wasn't even charged with copyright infringement. The "stealing" claim rings even more hollow than usual because he's not charged with either "Stealing" or "Copy." It 's with breaking into a system, calculated against their terms of service. Well, I guess someone could try to claim that that 's a kind of "anti-theft service," but also claim that doesn' t up too much control, because who had access to the MIT network - allowing guest access, as Swartz was with - had free access to JSTOR.

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