Property, Theft, and Thoughts Thereof (Part One)

Theft is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

Theft (also known as stealing) is in general, the wrongful taking of someone else's property without that person's willful consent.

File-Sharing cannot be theft, because the file is not taken away from anyone - it is only replicated. Of course, it's done without the consent of the record labels - though file-sharers themselves do consent by their very actions. Therefore, it is not theft.

Now let's look at the physical world:

What really needs to be sorted out, is a definition of property. John Locke, inspiration of the Founding Fathers, says that we firstly own ourselves - by extension, anything we put our labour into, must be our property. Did you make your TV? Did you make the clothes you're wearing? By law, your TV and clothes are your 'property'. Locke was writing before the Industrial [r]Evolution and mass production, so his theories have only limited application today (though not completely irrelevant).
Benjamin Tucker wrote that objects become property when they become scarce. Thus, anything you paid money for, is your property.

However, neither Locke nor Tucker's theories can be applied to digital 'objects' - and there is no one theory on 'property' that could ever be solidly applied. The record label has copyright over the music it distributes - corporations are 'limited persons' in law, but quasi-people can't make things. Digitised music is not scarce, otherwise iTunes couldn't offer downloads for 99p when a shop on the high-street charges upwards of £2.99 for a physical single. Indeed, mass production should have meant the end of property because the objects on the assembly line are not scarce - they are massively available.

So let's take shoplifting (Wikipedia):

Shoplifting is theft of merchandise for sale in a shop, store, or other retail establishment, usually by a would-be patron or customer.

As I've already stated, there is no single view on what constitutes property. Rather, I want to raise some questions... Most readers would agree that their CDs are their property (regardless of licensing and copyright) because they bought them.

If a shop buys a shipment of CDs, does that shop own those CDs? The 'consumer', after purchase, does not own the CD (hence why copying is illegal), so presumably the shop does not own them. If we go down that path, theft does not exist. Another point of note, is that retailers and customers are inherently different: the customer intends to keep the item, whereas the retailer has no intention of keeping it at all - all its efforts involve getting rid of them for money - worthless in all other respects.

Perhaps then, property is about the object's relative value to the 'consumer'...

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