File “sharing” or “stealing”?

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‘Invoking the metaphor is a shield against thinking,’ William Patry, the chief copyright counsel for Google, wrote on his blog a couple of years ago. The topic was ‘technical protection measures,’ but he’s argued that bad metaphors are also behind the entertainment industry’s rhetoric that unauthorized downloaders are thieves. I give my own take today on the question of whether infringement should be viewed as a form of theft in a latimes.com column, which you can read here. I’m not completely in sync with Patry on this issue, so you should take my views with more than the usual grain of salt.