There’s a perpetual argument, among people who care about intellectual property law, about whether unauthorized copying (downloading MP3s, say) is properly called “stealing,” and whether it’s morally equivalent to taking a physical object from someone. There are powerful forces that want to draw an equality between copying and stealing, as we recently saw in comical style in the Aaron Swartz case. The contending positions in this debate reflect fundamental differences of opinion about how we should view the circulation of immaterial goods like musical recordings or software; I want to draw out some of these differences by contrasting three recent posts from three different authors on the copying-versus-stealing issue.

Matt Yglesias recapitulates the standard argument of intellectual property critics, which is the one I’ve always been most sympathetic to: copying and stealing are totally different things. This position turns on the distinction between what economists call “rivalrous” and “non-rivalrous” goods. A good is rivalrous if you can’t give one person access to the good without reducing someone else’s access to it. If I walk into a store and take a pair of shoes, for example, then I have more shoes than I had before, but the store has less shoes. With non-rivalrous goods, on the other hand, you can expand access without reducing anyone’s ability to enjoy the good. So if I copy an MP3 file, then I have one more MP3 than I had before, but nobody else has less MP3s. The upshot of this argument is that it doesn’t make sense to restrict the distribution of non-rivalrous goods unless such restrictions are necessary to encourage people to create the non-rivalrous goods in the first place. That latter rationale is the one written into the part of the constitution that permits copyrights, but IP critics today hold that copyright has expanded far beyond this original purpose.