Taking someone else's car illicitly is theft, because theft means taking with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. Copying can never be theft, only moving can be theft, because only moving it could deprive the rightful owner of it. An illicit copy is merely copyright infringement or a breach of contract or various other concepts that are not theft despite people sometimes using that word as shorthand. It's YOUR illicit copy, not the rightful owner's illicit copy.

I didn't "steal" your passwords, I just "copied" them. I don't know what you're getting so upset about, you still have your list of passwords, and the fact that my changing all your accounts' passwords rendered that list worthless did nothing to move it.

If someone steals my passwords and then does nothing with them, or just uses them for their private purposes, then there's no problem. The problems only occur if my passwords are used to take control of my accounts or identity, which would deprive me of my accounts or money etc. So your example actually reinforces that the relevant ethical distinction (the harm) is indeed in intending to deprive someone of something they possess/control

I don't think this is the case legally, it might depend on the facts, but usually passwords are stored on your systems, and an attacker would have to not only access your system, but to exfiltrate that data.

It would constitute computer fraud and abuse by most definitions. This is relevant because it is sufficient to prove someone has your passwords in order to convict them, you don't need to prove they used them maliciously. (Provided of course they are a third party with no legitimate reason to have your passwords)

Stealing has a much looser definition than theft; notably, it can include ideas unlike theft. You deprived me of my accounts, but not of my now-obsolete passwords, therefore it's a theft of my accounts, but not theft of my now-obsolete passwords; I suppose you stole both. I'd be upset despite lack of password theft because I'd be the victim of your CFAA violation for example.

You copied his password? *******?

(I really hope that was an intentional reference or this won't make any sense.)

See, you typed hunter2 but all I see *******.

> theft means taking with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.

That doesn't sound right my man. If I take your car and return it so you never knew it was taken, wouldn't it still be theft?

What if my intent isn't to sabotage you but to enjoy the car for myself and your deprivation is merely collateral damage, not my intent, is that not theft?

> The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen.

That's incorrect. A license violation isn't theft. Theft deprives others of their property, that's not what's going on here. Intellectual property is a fictional "ownership" that provides value to society, but it is much newer and different than the actual ownership of property.

No one actually owns a collection of words or ideas or thoughts.

The tricky bit is that while it's impossible to deprive someone of their idea (i.e., commit theft of an idea), it's possible to steal someone's idea (i.e., copy it and use it illicitly), because only the word theft, but not the word steal, has that "deprive others" stipulation.

So with that in mind, circling back to whether possession occurs in such a way to make possessive language appropriate (being able to say "my data" after stealing data but not depriving the author of the data), my opinion is that the copy of the data that the author still controls is the author's data, and the copy of the data that the stealer controls is the stealer's data. It's the author's idea, but both parties separately possess the data (the data is a record of the idea).

Yet the main holders of this position were caught saying "our data". Don't you see the irony?

> If you steal my car, no who knows it's stolen would say it's "yours".

The chop shop well might.

Or, if I steal your car, and then go on to use it daily for the next 10 years, at some point everyone I know will refer to it as "my" car even if they're all entirely aware it was stolen.

> they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this

I'm not sure why you're expecting the operators of a pirate site to use legally rigorous terms to refer to themselves in a blog post. This is an error in your expectations, not their terminology.

I am totally with you in this line of argument.

However, I think there might be a legal framework in which the stolen good might locally be yours within the context of a single transaction or dispute.

E.g: if I buy a car from you for X$, and you deliver it, that's your car for the purposes of that deal. If it later turns out it was stolen, that changes the facts and is an additive change not a transformative change to the original transaction. If we imagine a chain of transactions, you might analyze the dispute as it spreads through the contract chain through a centrallized birds-eye doctrine, or you might analyze the matter contract by contract, in a sort of distributed algorithm.

In that latter sense, it makes sense to refer to the asset as property of one party independently of whether it will truly be deemed as theirs. Under this frame, for the purpose of that contract, there is an implicit claim of property, and an implicit risk of the asset being stolen. If the car is later found to be stolen, it isn't parsed as the car being property of someone else, much less always having been of someone else, but rather there would be a new fact: of there being a competing claim of ownership over the asset, which might or might not have legal and ethical grounds, and might or might not be successfully defended in a court, resulting in an obligation to return the asset, devaluing the ownership claim to 0.

Mathematically the asset being traded is no longer the subject of the contract, rather it'd be about a legal and ethical claim to the asset itself, which has a subjective value p between 0 and 1, which when multiplied by the value of the asset yields the Expected Value EV. There is a market for ownership claims where p<1 all the way to p>0. Theft and criminal charges need not always be the reason there is uncertainty over ownership, succession disputes, bankruptcies, ongoing litigation over the asset, patents, ip claims, wars, etc...

It means whatever is convenient. If you are looking to monetize knowledge you would use it like "your car", half way your books are just books you've purchased a copy of, at the other end your car is now mine.

I found an abandoned bicycle 10 years ago. I have since replaced nearly all parts of it. I would give it back if you can prove it is yours but who owns the bicycle of theseus is more of an opinion.

I refer to it as my bicycle.