Is it morally acceptable to steal from a corporation, a robot, or A.I.?
Corporations are not human beings. They are artificial entities created by lawyers with all the Constitutional and legal rights of a citizen yet they have vastly more privileges and longevity then any human being.
Corporations are designed and legally obliged by their charters to take money, rights and property from people and to give back as little as possible in return.
We are taught that it is not right to steal from others and that there are certain boundaries of behavior and cooperation that are expected of us in society.
The same moral paradigms of honesty, cooperation and mutual responsibilities are expected of us when we deal with corporations as when we are dealing with a human being.
I.E. "It's not right to steal from the telephone company" Often heard when we were kids. (In other words, dump coins into the payphone when the operator demands it after the long distance call).
Yet the law protects corporations to a far greater degree than people. Corporations live forever, accumulate wealth forever, cannot go to prison or suffer the death penalty and are only subject to monetary fines which is often a tax deduction if and when they are ever convicted of a crime and thus are subsidized by real taxpayers.
Corporations receive massive amounts of subsidies and welfare and are not subject to any five year bar on welfare benefits as are humans.
Many of America's largest
corporations paid no income tax in 2020, and even got multimillion dollar
payments from the IRS.
https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-corporate-tax/
Citizens are duty bound to pay their debts and
honor their contracts under penalty of law and social censure.
Corporations can reorganize, declare bankruptcy, be bought and sold
and default on their employees' pensions and commitments to society
with impunity. They dump their responsibilities onto the taxpayers
who subsidize their private profits. Corporations
pollute everyone's environment with impunity, giving people
diseases, yet corporations don't get sick. In light of this, it seems perfectly correct to
treat corporations differently than one would treat a person or a
family owned business that respects its employees and serves the community.
Since corporations have no notions of honesty,
fair play or decency when dealing with people, we should have no
such moral obligations toward corporations.
If corporations cannot afford to pay decent wages and provide benefits to long-term loyal employees that have created corporate wealth because as they claim, it would "make them less globally competitive," then how can they raise prices to reflect infinitesimal losses from citizen economic activism? Raising prices would make them more "globally uncompetitive."
Stealing from corporations merely skims a very, very tiny thin layer of profit cream from those at the very top of the economic pyramid, if it even registers on their balance sheets.
A friend accidentally dug up a phone
cable in front of his property. He called repair to
report it-fully ready to confess his mistake and pay for it. After pressing
one for English and half an hour on hold listening to
advertisements for phone company services and being told that "your
call was very important to us," he finally got to speak to a low wage
slave in India who could barely speak English.
Remembering his neighbor who had been fired from his job as a telephone
service worker after decades of loyal service, he told the phone company subcontractor
Indian that his phone line had stopped working and they needed to come out
and fix it immediately. He gave his address and then he hung
up.
Mrs. Able was shopping in the Rite Aide store that had driven her neighborhood pharmacy out of business. She observed a couple of boys slipping candy into their pockets. "Don't get caught" she told them as she pointed out the security cameras somewhat hidden in the ceiling.
Billy bought a hose that ruptured after several years. Rather than return it to the local family owned hardware store where he had purchased it, he returned it to Home Depot and exchanged it using a tag torn off a new hose.
Mary Lou returned a broken tool to a major department store which offers lifetime guaranties...the only reason she shops there. She selected a replacement from the shelves and presented the broken tool at the register. Rather than allowing her to swap the broken for a new tool, something that was what she had done in the past, the hapless underpaid and overworked clerks spent 25 minutes trying to create a gift card to allow her to "purchase" the new tool.
Several supervisors were called over to complete the complicated transaction, designed by corporate headquarters to be "more efficient." Finally they told her to take the new tool and the gift card. She started to protest at the absurdity of the transaction and then just thanked them and walked out with both. (The gift card, later happily spent, turned out to be for the value of the new and old tool combined, including tax.) Mary Lou suspects the stinginess of the corporation underpaying their managers might have originated this error in her favor.Jason shares his online streaming password with as many friends as possible without interrupting the service. He also wisely signs up for 3 months at a time, shares his pasword, then drops the service for nine months. Each of his friends then sign up for 3 months and share their password with others. All four parties save 75% on their streaming costs.
Fran shares her guest account wifi password with neighbors who are living on social security. Is that legal? Is it legal to use the light shining in your window from a neighbor's porch? Wifi is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is owned by Americans. The internet was created and paid for by we taxpayers through D.A.R.P.A. as a means of government to continue after nuclear war.
The following is a synopsis of a brilliant commentary by Lune, posted on Wolfstreet.com This is The Best popular economics reporting site with clear and succinct charts and brilliant analysis of complicated issues focused on by Wolf Richter. The comments to articles are often highly educational.
"Despite Hollywood’s attempts to conflate the two, violation of intellectual property restrictions is not the same as theft, both legally and morally. What’s the difference? The concept of theft applies only to property that can be used by one person at a time."
"In contrast, violating IP rights is not theft. Because if I watch A Movie without paying for it, it doesn’t prevent someone else from watching it as well. There is no limit to the number of people who can enjoy the single piece of IP that is The Movie. Intellectual Property is not property, that’s why there’s a whole different set of laws surrounding it. Calling it property is just good marketing."
"What I do, by violating the IP rights of say, Disney, is deprive them of the opportunity to profit from their work. But it doesn’t restrict them from selling the work to other people, or using it for future works, etc. In contrast, if I steal someone’s car, I not only deprive him of the ability to profit from that car, but also his ability to sell that car on to someone else who might want it. See the difference?"
"Of course, both are illegal. But they’re not the same. Hollywood wants you to think they’re the same so that you think that you’re wounding Hollywood in the same way you hurt your neighbor by stealing his house. But it’s not the same. Just because Jackie's kids violated Disney's IP rights didn’t prevent them from still making $60 million streaming it to other people. It prevented them from making an additional $30 off of them for watching The Movie, (which they probably wouldn’t have made anyway because if those kids had to pay $30, they probably would not have watched it), but that’s a far cry from stealing your neighbor’s house, which would result in them becoming homeless."
"Even painting IP violators as “pirates” is just marketing; pirates actually stole real property. But when your “enemies” are just normal kids who are hard to tar as criminals, you look around for ways to demonize them regardless, because that’s vital to getting Congress to pass laws to continue protecting IP long after it should have passed into the public domain."