alt Hacker News> Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not.
that seems like an overly narrow definition… what about identity theft, or IP theft?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/superseding-indictment-...
Replies
foresto • last Saturday at 11:57 PM
Mitchell & Webb's take on "identity theft" is worth a listen.
See my other comment. Identity theft is the bank being defrauded and passing the problem onto you. They are the victim, not you and it is their money that’s gone, not yours.
IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the knowledge, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.
Moreover discussions of IP gets into whether it even makes sense to be able to patent algorithms which are at their core just mathematics. So before you can talk about stealing the quadratic formula you need to prove that the quadratic formula is something that can be property.