The Ten Commandments of the Bible are quite clear: Thou Shall Not Steal.

What exactly is stealing? A simplistic definition is taking property that is not your own without permission of the owner. Yet, the simplicity ends there. Is it stealing when you take or utilize something that is not yours when it does not negatively effect the others in a noticeable or acute fashion?

Today’s Problem

In the old days, prior to the ease of digital copying, that allows one to copy software, music, and video with to the ease, it seemed simple. If you where stealing a physical medium, regardless of it’s actual value, you where taking something that physically deprived another individual. If your theft is a copy of something you are only depriving somebody of a theoretical payment for the right to use a product.

Illegal copying or piracy is largely theft in theory. There is no guarantee that any one person would buy a record, a piece of software, or a video tape if they had not downloaded it from the internet or copied it off a DVD from the library. You can look at numbers as a whole and see decreases, but we can never be sure that it’s because of illegal downloading, or because any one user illegally downloaded something, that he would have gone to store and bought it.

Likewise, theft of service is far from clear in our digital world. It clearly is a crime to break into somebody’s network when it is password protected. But what about all those open signals you can access on the street from your WiFi enabled laptop? Or those that come streaming into your apartment without out your approval, but are unencrypted and open? There is no way to even know if the user you are borrowing the signal approves of it. Moreover, with high-speed connections, one user’s connection high-speed is unlikely to take away from another’s users connection with more then enough bandwidth available.

This is again different from stealing a limited resource such as dumpster that the owner fully uses every week or a television from his house. Without the television to watch TV or the dumpster to dump waste, the owner is deprived from getting the full benefit of their money. Yet, if those resources where not being fully consumed, and therefore dividable, then the owner would be losing none by the division of his or her property.

Redefining Stealing

In today’s world with unlimited digital copying and expansive bandwidth, stealing must have the following aspects to it to be really stealing:

• Takes indivisible property from one individual or a significant portion therefore; that limits the owner’s use and enjoyment of a piece of property.
• Denies a significant degree of happiness from the lawful owner who is ultimately paying for the resource that they own.

Therefore, stealing isn’t about simply using somebody else’s property, but is more about depriving somebody of the full use of a property that they own. Stealing does not occur when sharing can exist without depriving the rights of ownership.