Quath said:
It sounds like you don't believe in theft of an idea or intellectual property.
Sorry, I lost track of this thread. No, I don't particularly believe in IP.
1. A coworker came up with a great marketing idea. You read his notes and present it first to your boss. In that case I would say you stole his idea.
You would say that, but it's just a figure of speech. Ideas aren't objects that can be owned. In this situation, what I did wrong was deceiving and/or lying to my boss in order to falsely take glory for myself.
2. Microsoft comes up with a new OS. Someone copies it and gives it away on the internet for free. Microsoft loses millions of dollars from this. I would say this copying is equivalent to stealing millions of dollars and passing it out to people around the world. But it was still stealing.
If Microsoft loses millions of dollars, it's their own fault for bad financial problems--it is not a theft. No more than the guy selling cheap knockoff purses on the corner is stealing from the original manufacturers. Some people are willing to save money by buying copies of the originals. Other people will pay more money and only settle for the original, generally because the original is of higher quality. If Microsoft develops a long string of binary data, and foolishly makes it so that copies of this data have near same quality as the original, then they should expect that many people will not pay for the original. They aren't truly "losing millions" though, because it's unlikely that most of the people who are using the copies would have bought the original if copies did not exist.
3. You find your daughter's diary. You photocopy it and sell it to a publisher. You daughter still has her diary, so nothing material was lost to her. But her secrets were stolen.
Once again, this is a matter of dishonestly taking credit, and money, for something that isn't yours, not stealing. Secrets can be revealed, not stolen.
So patent and copyright laws are designed to deal with theft on the intellectual side instead of the physical side. The morality is that taking something from someone (idea or property) without permission is theft.
Patent laws and copyright laws both prohibit others from profiting off the patent/copyright holders ideas for a fixed period of time. They do not prohibit others from copying either the physical object, or the copyrighted material, if the use is not ofr profit.
