Thieves by any other name...

As I write this, it has been less than five minutes since a man walked into my room and asked me to help him steal something. He asked me if I owned Final Fantasy IX and I answered, honestly, yes. He then asked me how I felt about other people copying it. The response was swift, simple, final - "No." It was something that took no thought, no deliberation. I am not a thief, copying games is stealing, and helping others do precisely that is stealing. And thinking otherwise is an act of extreme naivete. The same can be said for downloading songs without paying, downloading software that is not freeware or shareware, or any similar action. If you do this, do not delude yourself: what you are doing is no different than breaking into another person's house and stealing their wallet. Yet for reasons that remain unclear to me, these actions have somehow entered the acceptable social norms, as if stealing only involved breaking and entering.

The arguments I have heard for stealing are weak in the least, ludicrous at the worst. If you want to save money, don't buy the CD or the game or whatever it is that you're stealing. If you aren't willing to pay for it, then you obviously don't want it that badly in the first place. And if you don't have the money, then you just have to deal with not having it. I own a large number of Playstation games, and I worked hard to get each and every one. I own a fair number of CDs, and I worked hard to get each and every one. They were things that I wanted, so I worked for them. The fact that I could have gotten them free didn't make it all right to do such. You do not "deserve" to have access to these things simply because you want them, you "deserve" them if you work for them. I deserve what I own because I worked for it and put in an honest effort. Maybe it's a shallow and archaic view of the world, but I can't think of a single person who would otherwise note me as archaic or shallow.

Simply put: Stealing is not all right. It is not a forgivable crime, and while it may pale in comparison to other crimes, that hardly justifies it. Beating a man senseless pales in comparison to mass murder, but that does not make assault justified. It makes it a lesser crime, but still a crime. Illusions about driving down prices for overpriced goods by stealing are just that - illusions. Nor would even that justify such actions. You do not correct wrongs by doing wrongs. And stealing is wrong, simple as that. The problem, of course, is that what is and is not stealing is becoming increasingly hard to determine. By pure copyright law, everything that goes on with Napster is perfectly legal, yet I would consider such actions stealing. On the flipside, copying an NES ROM to play on your computer is stealing according to copyright, but I find the idea of such an act truly being stealing ludicrous. It's difficult to define what is and isn't stealing when so many things can be accessed easily, without thought or effort. In minutes, I can have a world of digital information at my fingertips, and like the proverbial kid in a candy store, it is difficult to see what is and isn't free for the taking.

So how do you define stealing? My personal definition is simple yet functional: stealing is the act of taking from another individual that is their personal property, or taking from a corporation something that is a source of revenue or a required resource. The key is the second part of the definition - more accurately, "a source of revenue". The Nintendo Entertainment System has not been produced for quite some time, and neither have any cartridges been released for it. Squaresoft may still own the rights to Final Fantasy, but it is certainly not making money off of the original game. Copying that game is not denying the company a cent of revenue. You might really want to have a copy of the new Barenaked Ladies song, but that is a source of revenue for the record company, an immediate one. Warez sites are easily defined as stealing, and you can't argue otherwise. Downloading N64 ROMs is stealing. And so on. You get the idea.

Of course, I don't delude myself into thinking that I have an ounce of influence over what people on the Net do. I can't stop people from downloading illegal software, stealing songs, and otherwise making themselves into theives. Heck, I can't even stop some of my friends from doing precisely that. The extent of what I can do is to not do the same myself, and not to promote it. I read an article not long ago decrying Napster "cleaning up it's act", decrying the act as "the loss of the greatest champion of alternative interpretation of copyright". I wasn't aware that stealing was up for interpretation. Just do me one favor - the next time you steal something over the Net, assuming you do, think about what it would mean to you if somebody walked into your room and stole your computer, with you powerless to stop them. Just think.