Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Tyler Owen asks, “why are people willing to steal music but not food?”

He puts forth some hypotheses, but misses the most important one (or at least the one that justifies it the most to me).

Here’s a hint. People who wouldn’t steal food also probably wouldn’t lift CDs from Virgin Superstore.

Here’s the critical difference. When you steal food, or a jewelbox with a CD in it, you’ve effectively transferred the property from someone else to yourself. You are richer, and someone who once had a physical object no longer has it, and is thereby made poorer. This is clearly ethically wrong.

On the other hand, when you “steal” information, you’re depriving no one. He still has the property that you “stole.” The only loss to the owner is the actual value of the song to you (i.e., the amount of money that you would have been willing to pay for it if you weren’t able to “steal” it).

The problem that the music industry (and much of the software industry) has is that it values its products much higher than many of its customers do. With material objects (which CDs, and earlier, records were until the digital age, and yes, I’m ignoring the old analog recording for the moment because it wasn’t nearly as convenient though bootleg tapes existed even then), those industries were much in the same position as grocery stores. If the product cost too much, customers either went without, or stole them, and everyone recognized that the latter was a crime, because it left a strong evidentiary trail (i.e., the item was missing from the shelf).

But once it became possible to get it for free, without depriving the original owner of the property, it made sense to do so, and it clearly seemed to be in a different ethical category than knocking over a bank, or even filching an apple.

People don’t necessarily demand that the music be free–the success of iTunes shows that they’re willing to pay for it as long as the price is reasonable–they just don’t think it’s worth what the record industry thinks it is.

This critical difference between intellectual property and physical property will become more important in the future, as molecular manufacturing blurs the difference between hardware and software.

What will a furniture manufacturer say when someone puts a bedroom dresser into a 3-D scanner, puts the results up on a web site, and people start downloading them and cranking out copies, almost literally out of thin air?