DB's Pixnet

International Herald Tribune, Friday, March 30, 2012
Page 6, Views
When stealing isn't stealing
by Stuart P. Green

The U.S. Justice Department is building its case against Megaupload, the hugely popular file-sharing site that was indicted earlier this year on multiple counts of copyright infringement and related crimes. The company's servers have been shut down, its assets seized and top employees arrested. And, as is usual in such cases, prosecutors and their allies in the music and movie industries have sought to invoke the language of "theft" and "stealing" to frame the prosecutions and, presumably, obtain the moral high ground.

Whatever wrongs Megaupload has committed, though, it's doubtful that theft is among them.

From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and intangible. For Caveman Bob to "steal" from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe--say, his favorite club--and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it...

--Stuart P. Green is a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark and author of the forthcoming "13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age."

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
March 31, 2012, Saturday,
National Central Library,
Taipei City