| Slimebeast said: "copyright infringment" is not a lay-mans term. Pretend you are going to describe piracy to an immigrant from the third world. He wouldn't understand if you say 'copying games is wrong because it's copyright infringment'. I prefer 'copying games is wrong because its a form of theft'. I didn't mean exactly a synonym, but something in the same ball-park (sorry, my English is rotten). |
But piracy is the lay-man term for copyright infringment. If we are talking about communicating with non-native english speakers, then this whole argument becomes completely moot because we're dealing with people without the necessary grasp of the language to understand definitions correctly. While in that case I may refer to copyright infringement as "kind of like theft", that's only because they lack the understanding of more correct terminology. My girlfriend is Japanese, and quite often when describing things I tend to say "It's like x, but not really" because certain words are in themselves complex concepts that require either a complex definition or don't necessarily have another equal within the English language.
To quote the judge from the Dowling vs. United States (1985) case:
"Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."
The original argument is that piracy is pretty much identical to stealing. While I may possibly agree that certain forms of piracy have 'features' that overlap with features of stealing, piracy is too complex for the words to be freely interchanged within every day english.
