My position is simply this…”theft” and “stealing” refer to illegally depriving someone of something they own and that while this may be similar in some ways to infringement, they are not the same things and should be distinct concepts and therefore have different words.

When I was growing up, I was taught that taking something that was not mine to take was stealing, regardless of whether the person or entity from which I took was “deprived” of anything. Yes, this viewpoint is religiously based rather than legally based, but I have another comment on that later.

Attorney James Rogan refers to the theft of intellectual property in an interview with Religion and Liberty.

I fail to see how the statements of someone, even an attorney, prove that the legal definition of theft is the same as infringement. From that article…

This is a common mistake. People, such as myself, who make a distinction between theft and infringement, do not do so to justify infringement or not even to be pedantic. It’s to introduce clarity into the conversation about two related, but distinct topics.

Again, we are fighting over a definition rather than the legality of an act and whether the act of infringement is legally equal to the act of theft. As I will discuss further below, in the end all these arguments are beginning to sound like solipsisms.

Here is a nice summary of the general feeling among various religions regarding theft of intellectual property and the eighth commandment:

This may be a bit off topic, but in my opinion, I think that redefining the eighth commandment to include infringement is yet another example of how god’s immutable truths are adapted by the church to fit the whims of the day. If infringement is a sin, then Hell is full of people who were sinning and didn’t even know it. Presumably, when they appeared in Hell, the Devil had to take each one aside and explain to them that they’ll be spending an eternity suffering unspeakable torture because they didn’t understand the intricacies of intellectual property law.

First, I find it interesting that various Christian organizations are independently coming to the viewpoint that the eighth commandment covers the theft of intellectual property, considering that they frequently have problems in agreeing on much else.

Second, there is now a growing movement among Christian teens to abstain from making copies of songs and movies because, terminology aside, the wrongful taking of something is theft and is covered by the eighth commandment.

Third, Islam is beginning to take the same viewpoint. I have yet to see what the Jewish, Hindus and Buddhists think, but that would be interesting as well. If only Christianity was “twisting” infringement to be a violation of the eighth commandment, I might consider that “twisting,” but when other religions classify infringement as a variation of theft, I take notice.

Fourth, if you look up the history of “infringement,” you will find that the church decided that intellectual property could be stolen as far back as the Middle Ages. There are references to the Catholic Church’s position on this dating to the 14th century. Hardly seems like the “whims of the day,” unless the whims of the day equate to nearly 700 years.

Dr. Claude Mariottini has a nice discussion of the numerous ways to steal, including the theft of intellectual property, which he believes is covered by the eighth commandment.

I believe that the term “intellectual property” is a misnomer. It is not property. It is a set of rights. You can’t steal what isn’t owned.

It is more accurate to say “intellectual property rights.” However, we are human and intellectual property rights are often shortened to intellectual property. However, with some intellectual property rights there is in fact property.

Consider patents. A patent is a right to prevent making, using or selling. Thus, the right covers actual property resulting from the right, not some abstract concept that cannot be owned. In fact, you could create an entire set of drawings that, if turned into a physical product, would infringe the right. If the product was an assembly, you could even produce all the components and assemble them to the point just shy of what the claims in a patent covered, but until the property is established in some form the right does not exist.

You can justify depriving a creator of their constitutional rights all you wish

Please do not put words into my mouth. You’ve leapt to the conclusion that just because I make a distinction between theft and infringement, that I believe infringement is justified. This attitude is both misguided and reason for much of the conflict between the different sides of this argument.

Okay. I will cover this topic further at the bottom of this post.

I look at copying of someone’s intellectual property as a kind of intellectual plagiarism, which is defined as theft in the dictionary.

Well, actually it’s not. I hate to quote a dictionary definition, but here’s the dictionary.com definition of theft…

Intellectual Property is not actually property, so infringement is not the same thing as theft.

I offer the Merriam-Webster definition of plagiarize:

: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source
intransitive verb
: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

Also, from your reference, dictionary.com, the definition of plagiarize:

1. to take and use by plagiarism.
2. to take and use ideas, passages, etc., from (another’s work) by plagiarism.

Also from dictionary.com, the definition of steal:

to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.

If I type “theft of intellectual property” into Google, I get 131,000 hits. If I type “infringement of intellectual property” into Google, I get 112,000 hits.

You should have stopped before you got to this one. I disagree with your arguments above, but at least they were sensical. You can’t honestly think that something is true just because it gets more Google hits.

There was a reason I brought the Google search into this discussion, which also relates to a point I said I was going to make throughout this post.

I remember many years ago in an English class we were discussing living languages versus dead languages. We began to discuss the evolution of living languages, and that grammarians wanted the English language to be more fixed and static than it was (and continues to be). However, most grammarians have accepted the truth that English is a living, evolving language.

Why is this important? Because a huge percentage of our population equates patents, copyrights, and trademarks as property. A similarly large percentage of our population refer to “infringement” of intellectual property as stealing.

Is it “wrong” to do so? That question is silly. It is no more wrong for an average person to refer to “infringement” as theft than it is for an average person to refer to a doughnut as a donut or to refer to an automobile as a car. You may try to keep the definition of each separate, but people will determine the meaning of words by usage and the only place the distinction is important any longer is in court – and even courts, especially judges, are starting to refer to the “theft” of information and the “theft” of intellectual property. Yes, the actual crime with respect to intellectual property may be infringement, but it is quite common to refer to this crime as theft.

Are you right (a solipsist argument), or are the millions of people that equate the two right? I suspect it is too late to turn the tide on this one, but you can try.