Some time ago a website stole some work from dA.(secondary digg) Recently, the website apologizedand dugg the article.

Cue some guy named "nepawoods" wanking all over the post how it wasn't stolen because it was IDEAS and ANYONE who posts IDEAS on the INTERNET deserves to have them redistributed without permission and they have no RIGHTS to protest even though RIGHTS are granted by LAW and he doesn't follow the LAW if he doesn't WANT TO. But not in so many words.

People like you deserve it. You post your work to a site like deviantART which allows anyone to download it without agreeing to any terms whatsoever, and then you start whining about "copyright violation". You're no better than the RIAA.

It's INFORMATION. Once you make it public (in the sense of not secret), others can copy it, and you have no right to control information - i.e. you have no right to control the states of bits of memory in physical hardware that I OWN. Wouldn't it be nice if you could ... yeah, yeah, yeah - I know - but you can't. Get over it.

If you could only defend the notion that it is "stealing". When you steal physical property, someone suffers a loss - they are deprived of that property. When you copy information (be it art, music, whatever), the original remains intact. NOTHING is taken away from anyone. NO ONE has less of anything than they had before.

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Re: Gah.

confluence
2007-03-22 07:20 am UTC (link)

I know of a fair amount of actual people, not faceless 'companies', who use the word thusly.

Yeah, I know it's a common usage of the word in some fan circles, and I see the rationale. I still don't like it, and I can see how people from different internet communities can misunderstand each other over the usage of this word. I get the impression that when artists use it they are usually referring to plagiarism (e.g. someone tracing or Photoshopping over someone else's art and passing it off as their own -- so credit is what is being "stolen"). When companies use it, they are complaining purely about copyright infringement (and their usage of the word attempts to evoke an image of tangible and unambiguous material loss). Then there's the separate issue of whether the perpetrator is making money off the infringed or plagiarised work (something else which could be considered "theft"). And there's the problem -- saying "this art has been stolen" does not say which aspect(s) of the infringement you're actually objecting to.

...oops.
*mops up*

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