[Wolves] Episode 8 LugRadio and the elections

[Steve Parkes]

On 6 Jun 2004, at 19:57, Peter Oliver wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Steve Parkes wrote:
>
>> Having said that piracy is theft
>
> Absolutely not.  It is breach of copyright, which is a quite separate
> civil offence.

when breach of copyright deprives an artist of royalties then it is 
theft ;-)

>
> The reason that theft is wrong is not because you gain possession of 
> some
> item.  It is because you deny its rightful owner full enjoyment of
> that item.  It's easy to loose sight of this because with property 
> these
> two things are equivalent, since real-world objects can only exist in 
> one
> place at once.

You can't deny the artist the right to licence works in whatever means 
they wish.  Like many people I frequently copy works that I have no 
rights to.  This is theft and I am guilty of it ;-)  There is a 
difference in downloading a BBC program I missed (and presumably paid 
for) so I can see it again and repeated copying an item for profit.

That profit is directly related to a reduction in the income of the 
artist.  I would prefer it if more works where made available under 
open licences, I would prefer it if more artists used the internet to 
give them an independant form of distribution that would give them a 
larger proportion of the profit and reduce the cost to the consumer but 
the simple fact is when you copy the output of a relitively small 
number of international companies you reduce the income of millions of 
artists.  That is not good.
>
> -- 
> Peter Oliver
>
sparkes