Contracts

[otjm]

While you’re right that this is a diversion from the original question, which I think has been answered fully already, I really must take issue with your statement that the gravity of theft is related to whether the person stolen from has a lot or a little.

The Catechism states that grave matter consists in the moral law and that law is such that human reason alone is enough to perceive it.

While theft may be the only possibility in extremis - that is to say when a starving man sees food that he cannot afford he may purloin enough of it to meet his needs since in the cases of ultimate need all necessary goods may be deemed to be held in common - nobody could say the copying of a computer program is normally intrinsically linked to the protection of the life of a person. Since legitimate possession of commercial computer programs or most music would normally require payment in order to do so, it doesn’t need a genius to work out that then copying to allow someone else to possess that music or computer program is wrong, therefore your example is wholly incorrect.

You are right in saying that there are people out there who claim to not realise that copying something is wrong, but that doesn’t mean they’re free of guilt. It just means they’re lazy in their thinking or making excuses because, as I’ve stated above, it should be completely obvious to anyone that looks that it IS wrong to do such a thing.

Copying something for a friend is wrong. It’s theft on the part of the friend who uses the product of someone else’s labour without adequate recompense as well as theft (or accomplice to theft) in respect of the party which copies. Whether or not the originator of the product is a one-mand-band or a huge corporation, one still derives illicit benefit for something that, in the case of software, may have cost several hundreds of dollars to obtain legitimately. And that means the theft is in the order of that same amount of money. Microsoft Office may cost, say, $400. I think that any priest would consider the theft of $400 a considerably grave sin. It is NOT a trivial matter.

Some programs cost $400. Some cost $19.95. Whether or not it is a trivial matter is going to be determined between the thief and the confessor. There is a marked difference between stealing a ream of paper from a business, and stealing $10,000, and that is an established issue in moral theology - and was so before Vatican 2, before anyone chimes in from that direction.

I am not proposing that stealing is something anyone should engage in, whatsoever. However, there are people who think that stealing a pen from work is a mortal sin; most confessors would not treat it as such. It is still a sin, but the gravity of a sin is determined by more than just the nature of the act itself (in this case, stealing).

As far as stealing if one is literally starving - that may carry no moral wrong at all. May, not necessarily will carry.

If I was not clear before, stealing, subject to some minor exceptions, is wrong. The gravity of the wrong is going to be determined by the confessor, and value and circumstances are going to weigh in on that.

And as an aside, if one confesses the sin and is forgiven, and there is no discussion of the gravity of the matter, situation solved, but little education necessarily applied. Most confessors (and I have known more than a couple) often do not get too deeply into the matter; it may well be the confessor considers the matter minor but wrong, and the penitent considers if major and wrong. I am not suggesting that anyone steal, nor if having done so, that they not confess. I am suggesting that many people’s concept of what constitutes a mortal sin is at best simplistic.

And as to anyone who lazy in their thinking, one of the issues in moral theology is that one must know that something is seriously wrong in order to actually commit a mortal sin. Whether they are guilty of a sin of moral and intellectual laziness may be another matter, but as to the theft by copying, if they do not know that it is morally wrong (due to laziness), they have committed no sin of theft.

And by the way, it is an interesting question in moral law as to who is wronged by copying. If one bought the copy from, say, the local computer store, Microsoft had already been paid by the computer store (or possibly a distributor between the computer store and Microsoft). Microsoft has an interesting in not having the program duplicated, but their loss is not $400, as the program has been marked up at least once, and maybe several times, from whatever cost Microsoft charged originally. So the question is, what is the actual loss and who lost? Microsoft? The distributor? Both? The retailer? All three (or more)? A different retailer (whom the recipient of the copy would have bought from)?

 

[wjp984]

The terms are all common sense that has to be put in there since people will sue for anything and everything. Or people will claim they didn’t know that they could get in trouble for plagirizing or resaleing, pirating etc. I mean, they knew but if the rules didn’t say specifically they could not do it then there is legally doubt.

You don’t need to read the entire thing; just glance over it. Anything that is relevant has to be labeled in a conspicuos matter. So if a company wants to exclude certain things from a warranty, they cant just hide all the terms in the fine print that you won’t read; it has to be conspicuously labeled.

So all the fine print is material that you already know you need to agree to and if anything relevant that has legal implicatons that need to be read is in there hidden, it more than likely is not going to be valid. Therefore, why read what you already know and a simple glance is sufficient to check for the disclaimers.