I for one believe that there needs to be a victim in order for a crime to occur. The traditional notion of theft is pretty simple. Resources are scarce and therefore we have concepts such as ownership and value. If I have an apple tree that feeds my family, that tree can produce a limited number of apples. If someone steals a bunch of them, then there are not enough left over for my family and we go hungry. However, this has become much more complicated in the digital age. If my apartment building is wired for cable TV and I'm paying for it, but my neighbour taps into it without paying, is he stealing? In one sense, he is getting a service that he is not paying for and that could be considered theft. However, the signal is running through the cable whether or not he is paying for it. The cable company is not losing anything that they had before he began tapping into the line. The only potential loss is the opportunity cost of a lost customer, but there is nothing to say that he values cable TV enough to pay the high price that he would have to in order to obtain it legally.
Likewise, I have downloaded some really bad movies that I never would have rented or purchased. By downloading the movie, the movie companies are not actually losing anything, because I do not place any value on their product. With the kinds of profits that they make on these films, I do not feel bad that I have not paid for them. In the end, if the person who is using the service without paying can sleep at night and the producers of the content are not actually losing anything tangible, then I am not convinced that such things are actually crimes. Jesse _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
