Hmm. It would be nice to assume that 49% therefore assume that copyright infringement is as bad as theft, but of course that figure could contain a number of “don’t knows”. But it’s still a reasonable assumption that a worryingly large proportion do think that the two activities are equivalent, which leads me to believe that either the music industry is better at brainwashing than I’d previously thought, or that people are pretty bad at logic.

It’s been stated thousands of times, but I’ll say it again: copyright infringement is not theft. Theft involves permanent deprivation. Infringement doesn’t. I steal a shirt from a shop, the shop can’t sell the shirt. I download some music, the copyright owner *might* have lost a sale, but is in no way prevented from making any more sales.

The law recognises this. The Gowers review recognises this. In the same way that it’s not criminal for me to use someone’s drive to execute a quick U-turn in a narrow street, but it’s still trespass, then it’s not criminal for me to download a song, but it’s still copyright infringement.

However, for the music industry to continually bang on that there is an equivalent, when there isn’t, in law, sounds dangerously close to “obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception” to me. And that is, undeniably, a criminal offence. 

Piracy is a crime. Of course. But only when it happens on the high seas and there are boats (and possibly parrots) involved. An interesting but totally irrelevant tidbit of information which is rammed through my cranium every time I try to watch a DVD or go to the cinema to watch a film. I can’t fast forward through it, and even though forcing people to watch irrelevant and deliberately misleading trivia isn’t techically a crime, that time has been taken away from me, permanently and for THAT, theft is an entirely valid parallel.