Piracy and Theft - Is there a difference?

It is often claimed that "piracy is theft".  For example, it has been claimed that illegally downloading music is the moral equivalent of stealing a CD from a record shop?

The image above makes an important point.  Theft, in law, is the taking away of another person's property with the intention of permanently depriving that person of possession.  Music piracy apparently involves the duplication of property, not the removal of it.

However, it does need to be recognised that authors, musicians, movie companies, software companies, and so on, rely on royalties for their living.  Surely widespread piracy involves the removal of those royalties.

It gets even more complicated though.  Many people buy some music legally and illegally download other music.  For many people, if illegal downloading were not available, they would simply have smaller music collections.  It is not true to claim that every illegal download represents a loss to the copyright holder because people who illegally download music would not necessarily legally purchase it if illegal downloading were not available.

My conscience was not particularly troubled when I download music illegally that I have previously purchased legally on vinyl or cassette.  Should I really be expected to pay the artist again simply for changing formats?

Does it matter if I illegally download a movie that has been shown on TV?  I could legally watch it for free at a scheduled time and it is also legal to record it from the TV and skip past the adverts.  If the movie is shown on the BBC, haven't I have already paid for my viewing by obtaining a TV licence?

On the other hand, some piracy clearly is damaging.  In some countries, most computer software is pirated and even large business organisations rarely pay for their software licenses, causing a significant loss to the software producers.  There are also some people who never pay for any of the music they listen to or for the movies they watch.  This is unfair and it does represent a loss of income for those who hold the intellectual property.

"Piracy is theft" is probably too simplistuic a slogan but it is probably also too simplistuic to argue that piracy is mere duplication.

Opening up an Internet browser is like opening the door and going outside

"Unsupervised surfing is like letting them roam the streets, says No 10 adviser"

Professor Tanya Byron, who is investigating the harmful effects of video games and websites, has used an analogy to warn parents of the potential dangers.

"A lot of parents don't realise that it's the same as opening the door and going out into the street, opening that [internet] browser."

In order for this analogy to work, I think we have to agree that the risks of using websites are similar in scale to the risks of children roaming the streets.  She is effectively telling parents that it is irrational to allow children to surf the Internet when they don't allow them to roam the streets.

One important difference would be that there are several risks associated with allowing children to roam the streets that are not associated with surfing the Internet.  Children can't, for example, get run over indoors.

Many people would be concerned with "stranger danger" i.e. the risk of children being abducted.  We are told that predatory paedophiles operate on certain websites visited by children and then arrange to meet those children.  However, in order to meet these paedophiles, the children would have to leave the home.  So, it would seem that allowing children to "roam the streets" is a more dangerous activity, although it might become more dangerous if the children have previously surfed the Internet.

The Telegraph article is at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/6554101/Internet-as-dangerous-as-letting-children-go-out-into-the-street-says-Prof-Tanya-Byron.html

Adolf Hitler was a German football coach, say one in 20 children

I know that today's children know less about History than we would wish but I really think the claims of their ignorance in a survey in today's Daily Telegraph are going too far.

According to a charity called Erskine, which provides nursing and medical care for veterans, one in six children think Auschwitz was a theme park and one in 20 think the Holocaust was a celebration at the end of the war.

The article continues: "...one in 10 thought the SS stood for Enid Blyton's Secret Seven, and one in 12 believed the Blitz was a European clean-up operation following the Second World War."
 
2,000 children between the ages of 9 and 15 were surveyed.

As always, we should think about who has carried out the survey to suggest a motive for misrepresenting the true picture.  Clearly this charity have a vested interest to exaggerate.

I think the problem probably lies in how the survey was conducted.  My guess is that they used either multiple-choice or true/false questioning to elicit these responses.

The Telegraph article is at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6507969/Adolf-Hitler-was-a-German-football-coach-say-one-in-20-children.html

Smacking children makes them less intelligent

A researcher who has "spent 40 years studying the effects of corporal punishment" has concluded, according to the Daily Mail, that smacking children makes them less intelligent, and that the more children are smacked, the less intelligent they become.

The full Daily Mail article is here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1215985/Smacking-makes-child-intelligent.html

The argument seems to be as follows:

• Smacked children are less intelligent than those who are not smacked.
• The more often a child is smacked, the less intelligent s/he is likely to be.
• Therefore smacking your child makes the child less intelligent.

 
On the other hand, this could simply be an example of correlation not proving causation.  It may well be that children who are smacked tend to be less intelligent than those who are not smacked, but there are other ways in which this could be explained.
 
It is possible that parents who smack tend to be less intelligent than those who do not.  If so, their children are likely to be less intelligent too, since intelligence is strongly hereditary.

A less kind explanation is that the children who get smacked could be the less intelligent children.  Maybe they are getting smacked because they have done stupid things.  Maybe there is a connection between low intelligence and bad behaviour.