Featuring
Stuart Green
Rutgers School of Law
Christian Barry
Australian National University; Ethics & International Affairs Editorial Board; Global Ethics Fellow Alumnus
Matt Peterson
The Atlantic; Former Ethics & International Affairs Assistant Editor
A meme about illegal music downloads has been going around the Internet for a few years now. It goes something like this: Piracy isn't theft. Theft removes the original. Piracy makes a copy. Is there something to this idea?
A meme about illegal music downloads has been going around the Internet for a few years now. It goes something like this: Piracy isn't theft. Theft removes the original. Piracy makes a copy.
Stuart Green, from Rutgers Law School, thinks that there's something to the idea that the strict legal definition of theft doesn't really capture what's going on in music piracy and other forms of intellectual property rights infringement. Green thinks revisions to the law that lumped together many different kinds of theft have resulted in a system that doesn't match people's intuitions about the moral distinctions between kinds of takings of property.
To read the interview transcript, please download the document below.