The idea is stealing is not a black and white concept. Stealing something digital generally has very different effects than stealing something physical.
For example, if someone the software I own without my permission and doesn’t give it back; I loose out on revenue I would have otherwise received from them.
If someone uses the car I own without my permission and doesn’t give it back; I am out thousands of dollars, I have no means to get to work, and no means of purchasing groceries.
Stealing is not black and white and rules and regulations should reflect that.
What?! Stealing is a super simple concept: what the owner will not give, the thief takes anyway.
You could try to argue theft in contexts where the owner's willingness to give is ambiguous is not clear-cut (eg taking one piece of candy from the jar is fine but taking all the candy is theft), but that's ambiguity in communication and cultural convention, not in the concept of theft itself.
Really it isn't stealing in intellectual content period - it is infringement. There are many groups conflating the two but they have very distinct meanings.
In order for something to be stolen it must be taken away. If you make an award winning painting and hang it on your mantleplace and I paint a perfect copy of it that doesn't mean that it is suddently missing from your house. I may have devalued it and I certainly would have infringed but not stolen anything.
Even ownership has such radically different meanings between the two they probably shouldn't have the same word. There is a vast space of things that nobody owns called the public domain. Saying you can't own a chair would be a bizarre invasion of rights. It doesn't matter how long chairs have been around - the fact it existed in the wood age doesn't mean you can no longer own one.
Saying that you own the concept of all chairs and all must pay tribute is a downright bizarre megalomania. They have existed from the wood age and long before any current civilizations were even alive - to claim exclusive ownership of something so universal and ancient is absurd.
Intellectual property isn't a natural right by any means - it is a pragmatic policy granted by governments meant to serve a purpose. It operates based upon treaties in the first place.
A hypothetical newly discovered underwater civilization copying from our airwaves would not be cause for military intervention. The same underwater civilization robbing freighters for cargo would be cause for intervention.
You’re right—the use of the term “intellectual property” has muddled public discourse on this important issue.
Society as a whole benefits from a robust system of copyright, trademarks and patents to incentivize art and innovation. But just as too weak a system will slow innovation by making it less financially viable, too strong a system will slow innovation by making it harder and more expensive to build new things out of old ones. We need to strike a balance, but the popular notion that ideas and expressions are strongly analogous to real property will likely lead to policies that are, on balance, harmful.
That IP law in the U.S. was conceived of as an economic incentive issue—and not an ethical one—is strongly suggested in the “copyright clause” of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” [0]
Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his own views on IP in a letter to Isaac McPherson in 1813 [1]:
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”
To reiterate a bit of what you said, if “intellectual property” is not property at all, it cannot be stolen—only infringed upon. And the difference is important because whereas theft is a violation of natural law, infringement is a violation of the rules of a specific society.
China is a different society and it has different rules. If we want to make respecting our country’s copyrights, trademarks and patents a precondition of trade, that seems like a good idea—but we should just say that. The drama of calling it “theft” is unnecessary and wrong.
By the way, I recently read and recommend “Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction” [2] by Siva Vaidhyanathan for an all-around introduction to intellectual property.
