I don’t know how serious it is. As intellectual property it is stolen, but it only brings harm if there is a material loss to the one party and an unearned material gain to another.
For instance if the artist or author was deriving revenue from the work, and the other party appropriated the revenue. It’s sort of like bootlegging.
One can argue that such activity always results in harm done. For instance, if I forget or deliberately omit to give proper credit to something I quote, then that other entity (the author or website controller) loses recognition, and therefore traffic. This might be important if the source is seeking donations or is collecting fees for ad space. That makes the intellectual property shareware, I suppose, but the price asked is really nothing more than proper attribution.
If the damage is minor, can we agree that the infraction is also minor?
Another point I should like to make is that dwelling on one another’s flaws (as I am prone to do on occasion, regrettably) is spiritually harmful to us.
Michael
an example that I have used before, (maybe even here on this forum) is the following:
Two men, in adjoining apartments, are seen picking a woman up bodily and throwing her through a fourth story window. Both women land in a giant airbag and are safe and unhurt. One of the men is proclaimed as a hero. The other is convicted of attempted murder and spends the next 25 years in prison.
One of them, in other words, committed a very serious sin, and the other performed an act of courage—and they did PRECISELY THE SAME THING, with precisely identical results.
The difference/context? The building was on fire; the first and second floors were fully engulfed, and the only way out of the building was through those windows; that’s why there was an airbag. The first man, the hero, was a fireman who had run into the building in order to save lives; that was his purpose in tossing the woman out the window; he knew the bag was there; his intent was to save her life.
The second man was not aware of the fire; he was angry, and when he threw a woman out the window, he expected her to fall to the street and die. Even though his action actually saved her life, his intent was to kill her; it wasn’t
his fault that there was an airbag waiting to save her.
Sin, I think, is all about intent and the attitude of the sinner. Knowledge, attitude, intent. Someone who steals another’s work has no control, really, over the consequences to his or her victim…and it doesn’t matter whether those consequences are large or small; the sin is in the intent.
Last year I saw a bully steal lunch money from a child; the child just shrugged, called his mom and she delivered a pizza to him and the class just before lunch. Another time I saw the same bully steal lunch money from another child. That child did not shrug it off, and calling his mom would do no good; school lunch was the only meal he got during the day. I think you can understand that the consequences to the victims were very different, even though the act was the same. The consequences to the bully were pretty much the same, too–he was suspended for precisely the same number of days whether his victim had to call for pizza to replace his lunch, or went hungry for the day.
Do you think that this bully’s sin was greater when he stole from the hungry child than from the merely inconvenienced one (if you can call pizza instead of a school lunch an ‘inconvenience,’ that is…)?
(Don’t worry, we fed the hungry child–but if I hadn’t seen the theft, he would have gone hungry)
Makes one wonder about these things, doesn’t it?
