Hey.... I never said *I* support the antivaxers for a second.... only that I can see one or more of them crying foul about this in the not-too-distant future, and because it allegedly challenges the US constitution, may even end up having to face a supreme court decision on the matter. I predict that the next couple of years cold be *very* interesting with respect to the impact it may have on people with such beliefs.

... the constitutional right to freedom of religion. If you are required by law to do something that your religion actually prohibits, then you are not free to really practice your religion in that country at all.

Copyright infringement reduces the value that copyright has in the first place... so you are not just depriving them of something they *may* have otherwise possessed, but something that they were supposed to actually have already had... the exclusive right to control who can make a copy. That exclusivity is where copyright gets its value from, so depriving them of that lowers its value to the holder.

If you steal $20 from somebody, in actuality all you've really stolen is paper that is worth a few cents... it is the *value* of that paper that is determined to have actually been stolen, however. It is similar with copyright infringement... you take away the right holder's exclusivity and its value is diminished, just as certainly as if you had siphoned money out of their bank account, but not actually transferred the money to any other account. Still theft, even if you don't profit from it.

Theft is nothing more complex than taking something that you have no lawful permission to take. Trying to qualify it with notions of tangibility, intent, objective measure of value, or who apparently suffers for it are all wholly irrelevant.

I haven't alleged a darn thing about morality.... all I said was that copyright infringement is theft because it amounts to the taking of something that one has no lawfully recognized permission to take.

But theft itself is not necessarily immoral. For example, stealing something from somebody who himself has previously stolen in violation of recognized law, but has gotten away with it, in order to give the property back to the rightful owner is still quite clearly theft (and one may find themselves criminally responsible for such), but especially if they do not expect compensation for said return, one can hardly suggest that it is particularly immoral to do so.

Except that those worst cases are exactly the kinds of non-emergencies that people call 911 about... really stupid stuff that people should genuinely *know* better than to call 911 over. *THOSE* are the ones that can and sometimes actually do end up getting fined for such abuse

Of course, I could just assume that my friend was exaggerating, or maybe simply lying about his experiences on the job, but I really have no reason to do so.

The aforementioned example of a heart attack of unknown severity would never be considered to be a non-emergency, and would thus also never be fined.

Where did I suggest that copyrighted works should not be affordable to the general public? However, retaliating against such unaffordability by ignoring the law and making unauthorized copies anyways is not the appropriate response... what is appropriate is to vote with your wallet and not endorse that right-holder's works in the first place. Anything else comes from nothing less than, or any more complex than a simple sense of self-entitltement.

I think you are completely misunderstanding the kinds of non-emergencies that people call in to 911... here's a big hint, they are *never* related to situations where someone's life or long-term safety could be reasonably believed to be in some kind of danger. Heart attacks, even though they can often not be fatal, are well within the domain of emergency. Examples of what are *NOT* emergencies are calling 911 to get driving directions, or finding the nearest liquor store, or complaining that the stores are closed and you need to buy a present for your friend for their wedding tomorrow morning (that's an emergency, right?). These are but a sampling of the kinds of the actual non-emergencies that people call 911 about, and the caller is fined appropriately (although in many cases, they are given a warning if it is their first such infraction, and if it happens again, then they are fined). A friend of mine that used to be a 911 dispatch operator always had some really funny stories to tell about some of his more memorable callers. What is less funny, however, is the fact that such calls can and sometimes do interfere with their ability to properly handle real emergencies, and it is why the behavior needs to be discouraged. I don't advocate disallowing 911 calls from non-activated phones personally, because I think it may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were... but I can completely understand the reasoning behind why it may be desirable.

Copyright is an extension to the *entirely* natural right to exclusivity that would exist if the creator had never published at all... After all, if nobody else even knows about it, then how an they copy it? To encourage creators to publish in the first place wen it s possible for others to copy e work (before the printing press, copying was sufficiently labour intensive and error prone that those barriers were considered to be adequate disincentive) copyright was invented to give such people some measure of such assurance.

If publishing without such assurance were genuinely a common trait, then why are even most freely distributed quality works *explicitly* copyrighted? That is simply that they may bother to expressly claim such a copyright... Even though they may have it implicitly, if it were not of some value, the creator of such a work would generally not bother to even mention it, or they may even try to explicitly donate their work to the public domain. But no... The vast majority of even freely available works are explicitly copyrighted. Copyright is therefore of value to creator, but it is that value which is harmed by copyright infringement.

Guile or trickery are not required. Theft is simply the taking of something tat one does not have any lawful permission to take. Period. Anything more than that is just specious rationalization . If you reallywant to bring up deprivations, I have already explained what copyright violation (for many practical pulses irrevocably) deprives for the rights-holder: The *value* of those rights which is maintained only so long aas people voluntarily respect them.. Of course if you want to argue that people ought to have no obligation to respect such rights, then you are a copyright abolitionist, which is another matter entirely.

If 30% of the calls to 911 were legitimate emergencies, what percentage of those emergencies would have been reported as promptly if there had been a requirement that a phone used to call 911 only be from a registered phone? If that percentage is not very high, then it's my opinion that they may have to simply factor in such non-emergencies into the "cost of business" as it were.

Of course, if that percentage actually works out to be something quite high, then I don't really see a huge problem with it.

Kind of like how back before cell phones were ubiquitous, you couldn't generally run down who the heck made a call to 911 from a pay-phone, you mean?

True... but with a phone with an active account, the caller can be held accountable for making a non-emergency call to 911.

Those rights, however, have a value to them.... a value which is diminished each and every time those rights are deprived. It is that value they are *actually* losing, and in fact can never fully recover. That this value happens to be valueless to the pirate is irrelevant.

I'm not "sneaking" the word theft in there.... when somebody takes something that they have no lawful permission to take, it *IS* theft... plain and simple. Some people don't like that word because theft implies a sense of morality to it, and because most people like to think of themselves as moral, and of course doing immoral things would make an otherwise moral person feel guilty. Since they don't really feel guilty about piracy, they conclude that it can't actually really be theft in the first place. There's a name for that... It's called circular reasoning.

1. I copy a CD borrowed from a friend. The studio still has as many copies of the album as they had before.

What the studio does *NOT* have in this case is precisely as much exclusivity to control who is allowed to copy that content as they would have had if you had not made the copy... since in this case, you would have done so without permission, costing them a measure of the exclusivity of control that they were lawfully supposed to possess. It's a right they may still technically always have, buts its value is still measured in what amount of control they have to actually exercise they right... and again, "exclusive" means nobody else is doing it, so it stands to reason that if anyone else is, then they don't really have that exclusivity... even if they still supposedly have that right on paper. In practice the only exclusivity that the consumer can lawfully deprive the copyright holder of is in the realm of copies that would be considered fair use, or fair dealing, which are typically for the personal and private use of the person that made the copy, and not for any form of public usage, whether it is commercial or not (publicly shared folders on one's personal hard drive, for example, particularly if they are shared outside of one's own household, would qualify as public use, even not commercial use, and copyrighted content in such a location may well be infringing if one has not received any permission to make copies for public use).

And if the cable company did not disconnect the cable after I cancelled the service, then I sure can watch TV without paying.

I was referring to if you take it upon yourself to hook up your own cable, actually... which is how cable theft generally occurs... or else using a neighbor's paid cable line, either with or without their knowledge.