Stuart Green, Rutgers Law School professor and author of the upcoming “13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age,” addresses emerging trends regarding copyright infringement and intellectual property in a recent New York Times op-ed.
In doing so, Green provides a compelling examination of the concept (and evolution) of “theft” in the digital age.
“For starters, we should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind,” writes Green. “Second, we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions.”
“But framing illegal downloading as a form of stealing doesn’t, and probably never will, work,” he adds. “We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation.”
“Treating different forms of property deprivation as different crimes may seem untidy, but that is the nature of criminal law,” suggests Green.
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