Piracy: At times we have seen copyright infringement confused with the terms "piracy" and "theft".
Why? Ask the copyright holders who launched campaigns that equate the above terms.
Piracy, lest we forget our Greek, refers to a robbery on the high seas, but it is also often used as a synonym for acts of copyright infringement.
The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills , for those who remember, aimed to combat online piracy on websites based outside the U.S. Essentially, the two bills allowed copyright holders to seek injunctions against websites that infringe or simply facilitate the infringement of copyright law.
The US Department of Justice (and not only, as we have recently seen) can request court orders that bind search engines and internet service providers (ISPs) to block any pages accused of violating the law.
The bills mentioned above give copyright holders every right to seek a court order to stop all advertising activity on websites that violate the law.
We will not refer to the above. However, we will look more closely at the use of the term “theft” or the term “piracy” which are clearly exaggerated. The term theft but also the term piracy emphasizes the potential commercial damage of each copyright infringement. However, not all cases of infringement necessarily mean commercial damage.
Let's talk about the term Piracy:
The term Piracy to describe any violation of exclusive rights began before the concept of intellectual property was legally established.
According to Wikipedia , before Queen Anne's first copyright law (1709–1710), the Honorable Society of Stationers and Newsagents of London had received, in 1557, a Royal Charter granting it a monopoly of publication and the responsibility of enforcing the charter. Violators of the charter were called pirates as early as 1603, while the term "piracy" was used from then on to refer to the unauthorized copying, distribution, and sale of copyrighted works.[
Article 12 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works uses the term “piracy” for copyright infringement, stating that: “Pirated works may be seized upon importation into those countries of the Union where the original work enjoys legal protection.
Article 61 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known as TRIPs (Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), provides for criminal procedures and penalties in cases of “intentional counterfeiting or piracy of intellectual property on a commercial scale”.
Piracy traditionally refers to acts of copyright infringement committed with intent and financial gain, although today copyright holders describe online copyright infringement as "piracy".
Richard Stallman and the GNU Project have criticized the use of the term “piracy” in these cases, stating that publishers use the word to refer to “cases of copying that they do not approve of” and that they “imply that it is the moral equivalent of attacking ships at sea, kidnapping and killing people on them.”
Is the term Theft actually valid?
Intellectual property rights holders, as mentioned above, often use the term “theft” for any violation.
Is this true? In copyright law, infringement does not refer to the theft of physical objects that the thief takes from the owner's possession. It refers to a case in which a person uses the exclusive rights of the copyright owner without their permission.
Earlier courts around the world have differentiated the concepts. For example, the US Supreme Court, in Dowling v United States (1985), ruled that pirated sound recordings are not stolen property.
The court stated: “interference with copyright is not easily equated with theft, usurpation or fraud.”.
The Copyright Law even uses a different terminology to define someone who abuses intellectual property and refers to them simply as: “[…]infringer of intellectual property”.
The United States Supreme Court ruled that, in the case of copyright infringement, the copyright owner's jurisdiction is violated, but no control, physical or otherwise, is exercised over the copyright, nor is the copyright owner entirely deprived of the use of the work or the exercise of his exclusive rights.
