When Stealing Isn’t Stealing http://t.co/yY49iqEF
The problem is that most people simply don’t buy the claim that illegally downloading a song or video from the Internet really is like stealing a car. According to a range of empirical studies, including one conducted by me and my social psychologist collaborator, Matthew Kugler, lay observers draw a sharp moral distinction between file sharing and genuine theft, even when the value of the property is the same.
If Cyber Bob illegally downloads Digital Joe’s song from the Internet, it’s crucial to recognize that, in most cases, Joe hasn’t lost anything. Yes, one might try to argue that people who use intellectual property without paying for it steal the money they would have owed had they bought it lawfully. But there are two basic problems with this contention. First, we ordinarily can’t know whether the downloader would have paid the purchase price had he not misappropriated the property. Second, the argument assumes the conclusion that is being argued for — that it is theft.
So what are the lessons in all this? For starters, we should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind. Second, we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions.Before that, there’s a nice history of how we got there by through a 1962 change to the Model Penal Code.
It’s not a long article but it’s worth reading.  Mike Masnick has his take NYTimes OpEd Explains Why Infringement Isn’t Theft if you can’t get through the NYT paywall. This from his take:
Falsely lumping all of these specialized areas into the “theft” bucket leads law enforcement and politicians to take easy mental heuristics that have them assume that even if infringement is not exactly like theft it’s “close enough” that you can treat it like theft and respond to it like theft. And that’s exactly what we see happening. The legal proposals and constant changes to copyright law are all about treating infringement more like theft, and believing that greater enforcement leads to less infringement, and that greater “education” does the same. But that assumes that individuals intrinsically believe that making a copy of something is bad, even though in many, many cases they do not feel that way. Calling it theft when they know it’s not theft doesn’t convince people to stop file sharing. It just makes them respect copyright law even less, since it’s clearly completely out of touch with the times and the technology.