• An underground economy of off-the-book businesses could account for trillions in commerce and employ nearly half of all workers. This gray market called "System D" could be worth $10 trillion per year, making it the biggest economy after the US (which itself has an underground economy estimated to be about 10-20% of its GDP). [url]
• A real-life heist involving about 8 men posing as police officers made off with about $50 million in diamonds from a plane headed for Zurich, Switzerland. It might be difficult for these robbers to sell these diamonds through legitimate routes, so the jewels will probably become part of an underground currency. [url]
• Surprisingly, Tide detergent isn't just soap; it's also used as a currency for buying drugs. Procter & Gamble hasn't seen much of a negative effect on its brand, so bottles of liquid Tide will likely continue to be part of the black market. [url]

Here’s the Taylor Swift line:

“And I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to”

Here’s Matt Nathanson’s:

“And I’ll forget about you long enough to forget why I need to”

Throughout the hour-long show, he repeatedly attacked pirates as though they were some monolithic mob, rather than readers, librarians, professors, students, and even creators. (Maybe someone should have told him that Loz was a composer & musician.)

Richard Mollet bypassed the victims copyright. He went for the jugular, ignoring his opponents’ points – libraries being crippled, and culture stagnating without copyright reform. Every time – every time! – one of these points was brought up he got defensive, shifting the focus away from the issue, saying things like “this is classic Pirate Party tactics!” as in the quote above. The irony was palpable, for as a great defender of victim-authors, one would expect him to at least show compassion to the victims he himself has helped to create. But there was not even a charade of sympathy.

[PA chief executive Richard Mollet] attacked organisations such as the Open Rights Group, research councils and the British Library, who he said all to varying degrees wish to erode copyright, and the tactics of lobby groups, who have "the temerity to appropriate the language of freedom of expression as a cloak for their tawdry theft". He said it was "a grotesque attempt to draw moral equivalence between stealing someone's work and the struggle for political representation".

"We're in a transformative period with an explosion of technology that's going to need content... We're going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented.... We're on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery."

The infringement of copyright in Dowling parallels Aleynikov’s theft of computer code. Although “[t]he infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone[,] . . . he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use.” Id. at 217. Because Aleynikov did not “assume physical control” over anything when he took the source code, and because he did not thereby “deprive [Goldman] of its use,” Aleynikov did not violate the NSPA.

When Industrial Age Bob and Joe started inventing less tangible things, like electricity, stocks, bonds and licenses, however, things got more complicated. What Bob took, Joe, in some sense, still had. So the law adjusted in ad hoc and at times inconsistent ways. Specialized doctrines were developed to cover the misappropriation of services (like a ride on a train), semi-tangibles (like the gas for streetlights) and true intangibles (like business goodwill).

In the middle of the 20th century, criminal law reformers were sufficiently annoyed by all of this specialization and ad hoc-ness that they decided to do something about it.

In 1962, the prestigious American Law Institute issued the Model Penal Code, resulting in the confused state of theft law we’re still dealing with today.

In a radical departure from prior law, the code defined “property” to refer to “anything of value.” Henceforth, it would no longer matter whether the property misappropriated was tangible or intangible, real or personal, a good or a service. All of these things were now to be treated uniformly.

Before long, the code would inform the criminal law that virtually every law student in the country was learning. And when these new lawyers went to work on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department and elsewhere, they had that approach to theft in mind.

Under the “theft” conception of copyright law, what, exactly, is the deprivation when someone makes illegal copies? It really boils down to just one thing: money. Copyright infringement – renamed copyright theft — deprives the copyright holder of some of his or her expected profit from exploiting the copyright.

What are other, similar kinds of “theft” by depriving someone of expected money? Failure of a tenant to pay the agreed rent to a landlord is one. Parking in a parking space without putting money in the meter is another. Jumping the turnstile to ride on a subway without paying the fare is a third. (And, of course, failure of a studio or record label to pay artists or actors the promised contractual royalties for their work on a record or film is a fourth. But something tells me the studios and labels sponsoring the current bills won’t go near that topic. The bills don’t include rogue studios and labels in their scope.)

How do the civil damages or penalties for the different types of such “theft” compare? Failure to pay expected money under a contract doesn’t trigger a penalty: contract law usually says that a party can recover the money she expected but not punitive damages or attorneys fees (unless parties have specifically bargained to pay attorneys fees for a breach). Failure to pay rent usually requires payment of rent to cure the default. Failure to put money in the parking meter prompts a ticket for $60. In New York City, failure to pay the $2.50 subway fare results in a maximum fine of $100.

Copyright “theft” is a very different story. Copyright infringement statutory damages in civil litigation can be as high as $150,000 for infringement of a single work. Yes, a single work such as a single song with an iTunes download value of $1. A copyright holder can claim such statutory damages without needing to prove a single penny of damage or loss. Think such sky-high damages aren’t realistic? Think again. In the RIAA’s case against single mother Jammie Thomas, a jury awarded $1,500,000 for the download of 24 songs, with no proof that she had transmitted songs to others. The federal judge thought that was ridiculous and reduced the total award to $54,000 – and the RIAA and MPAA are now arguing strenuously on appeal that the jury verdict should return to the original figure, $62,500 per downloaded song.

If we take copyright law’s maximum-penalty-to-price ratio as applied to an illegal download, and apply that same penalty-to-price ratio to the New York subway, the maximum penalty for jumping that turnstile and avoiding the $2.50 fare would be $375,000 instead of $100. Copyright industries are on to a really good thing under current law. One could say it’s a steal.

What is it about copyright that doesn't work in the digital society? Why do millions of people think it's OK to break the law when it comes to file sharing in particular? Sociology of law researcher Stefan Larsson from Lund University believes that legal metaphors and old-fashioned mindsets contribute to the confusion and widening gaps between legislation and the prevailing norms.

Our language is made up of metaphors, even in our legal texts. Stefan Larsson has studied what consequences this has when digital phenomena, such as file sharing and downloading, are limited by descriptions intended for an analogue world.

"When legal arguments equate file sharing with theft of physical objects, it sometimes becomes problematic", says Stefan Larsson, who doesn't think it is possible to equate an illegal download with theft of a physical object, as has been done in the case against The Pirate Bay.

Using the compensation model employed in the case against The Pirate Bay, the total value of such a site could be calculated at over SEK 600 billion. This is almost as much as Sweden's national budget, says Stefan Larsson.

In Stefan Larsson's view, the word 'copies' is a hidden legal metaphor that causes problematic ideas in the digital society. For example, copyright does not take into account that a download does not result in the owner losing his or her own copy. Neither is it possible to equate number of downloads with lost income for the copyright holder, since it is likely that people download a lot more than they would purchase in a shop.

"The problem is that these metaphors make us equate copyright with ownership of physical property", says Stefan Larsson.

In other words: movie and TV theft is inevitable. Why? Because it’s easy to steal something that, in physical form, exists only as data, and easy to justify stealing it as a result? Because information wants to be free, no matter the cost it took to produce or its creators’ judgments about how best to disseminate it? Because anything is fair game once it’s on the Internet? Because if I rip a movie file off of a DVD or camcord a showing at a theater, I have created that movie with my own labor and can do whatever I want with the file, including posting it online and making money from ad sales or subscription fees? Because by stealing films and TV, or watching stolen films and TV, I’m just exercising my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech? All those are arguments we’ve heard before.

Mike Masnick wrote that we need to “adapt and deal with reality,” and actually, I think he’s right – depending on which reality we’re talking about. Is it the reality that the Internet and the explosion of mobile technology have opened up vast new ways for us to communicate with one another and for film and TV-makers to offer their work to people who want to watch it? Because as Julia blogged last month, there are “more options than ever before to get movies and TV shows online safely and legitimately” – we have a list on MPAA.org here, and the creative minds in our industry are working on even more as we speak.

Is it the reality that some people do steal content online? Unfortunately, it’s clear that’s true – otherwise we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But do “many, many people” really intend to engage in theft just to watch a movie or TV show cheaply or for free? We doubt it, particularly if legitimate, better alternatives are available; if they know it’s wrong; and if they understand it’s not a victimless crime.

But if what Masnick means is that we need to throw up our hands and look the other way while people who had nothing to do with making a movie or a TV show steal and profit from it, that is a reality to which we do not care to adapt, period.

Why? The very nature of music piracy is likely the largest obstacle to curbing it, the authors say. There is no risk of physical harm to a victim and no physical object as a target -- making it easier to deduce that digital music theft is harming no one at all. Also, there is widespread social support for the behavior within the internet community and on college campuses.

It's technically correct that "copyright infringement" and "theft" have distinct legal meanings, but so what? The idea that the legal distinction between the two terms forecloses any colloquial comparison is invalid. "Theft" in the legal sense has always meant something far narrower than "theft" in the everyday sense. In early English common law, for example, the crime of theft only included the taking of another's property by force or by stealth. It didn't include the taking of property by deception or trick, and it also didn't include the taking of property by someone in whom the property was entrusted. While today we would have no problem saying a delivery truck driver engaged in "theft" if he kept a package instead of delivering it, earlier courts had to jump through several hoops before reaching the same conclusion.

The debate over the labels we give to copyright is interesting in an academic sense but largely meaningless in the real world. Creators often use words like "theft" to reflect how they feel about acts of infringement. Shifting the focus from the colloquial meaning of the word to the legal meaning accomplishes little more than arguing for the sake of argument, while misusing language from case law only forecloses a fuller understanding of the law.

One of the patent employee's tasks was to process requests for funds from customers who had completed the application process, documents said. In his guilty plea, Reid said the patent office employee identified accounts that had gone dormant. She then changed the name on the accounts to Redeemed Music House and wired the cash to the company's bank account.

Court documents show that the patent worker stole a total of $534,338 over 32 transfers, 27 of which were to Reid. It is unclear from documents where the other $80,000 went.

"These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft."