Thank you for the links! I am generally familiar with the scholarship regarding internet piracy, though I have not been following the discussions on techdirt.com.

A few quick points in response…

Just to be clear, you can have a market problem and still have someone steal products within that market. I’m not sure if you are saying that by calling it a market problem this then prevents people from using the word “steal” when describing certain events, but if you are saying this then I very much disagree.

I also want to make sure that we are both in agreement that Wortham could have acquired authorized access to HBO GO if she were willing to pay for a full HBO subscription, as pricey as that might be. In many of the criticisms of HBO that i’ve read online, the arguments seem to pretend that HBO is preventing people from paying for HBO by not offering a GO-only option. This is obviously not the case. HBO is merely overpricing their product, but when companies do this it still means that acquiring the product illegally is a form of stealing. Otherwise, there are some university press hardbacks that I’d like to acquire through some “crafty workarounds.” 🙂

Finally, the core of our disagreement seems to be about the concept of subscription access, specifically if subscription access can ever be stolen. I say it can and you say it cannot, and I’m not sure we will ever convince each other that one particular ontology of the concept is more accurate than the other. For instance, I agree with you that an unauthorized access does not prevent another person from accessing the website, but such prevention consequences are not essential to the act of stealing, at least not in common or legal parlance — think plagiarism.

It will be interesting to see if scholars like yourself will succeed in changing the discourse on internet piracy by substituting another word for “steal.” Even if you were to take out of the equation a more obstinate person like myself, this does seem like an uphill battle.

No worries! I didn’t take your reply as snarky, just under-informed. 🙂

Hope some of this info will convince you (and other readers) to reconsider using the word “stealing” when discussing these issues.

Nina Paley’s humorous cartoon might provide comic relief:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

The copyright industries use the loaded terms “piracy” and “theft” and “stealing” in order to elevate unauthorized copying or access into a crime. Unauthorized copying and access does not actually remove content or make it unavailable to others. Jenna Wortham has not “stolen” anything from HBO by getting access to Game of Thrones with a friend’s password (BTW, that friend paid a subscription fee). Instead, HBO has lost a potential subscriber because of its refusal to detach its service from cable operators’ packages: yes, this is a market problem, one that HBO itself acknowledges since it does not plan to litigate against its own fans like Jenna Wortham.

For an interesting discussion of the problems of these business models, see:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130114/18442221671/dear-hbo-disney-netflix-et-al-fragmenting-online-tv-lets-piracy-keep-its-biggest-advantage.shtml

To explore the differences between copying and theft, check out:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110721/11295315199/absurdity-comparing-copying-to-stealing.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110303/02203613336/minecraft-creator-says-no-such-thing-as-lost-sale.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100814/05220610625.shtml

Mike Masnick points out that because the CFAA may be employed to criminalize the sharing of passwords, the CFAA is clearly ridiculous because it would criminalize nearly every internet user:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130406/22004022615/which-ny-times-reporter-jenna-wortham-accidentally-reveals-how-she-violated-both-cfaa-dmca.shtml

Rather than reify the copyright companies’ insistence that unauthorized access to their content is a form of “stealing,” perhaps it could be pointed out that the refusal of HBO Go to allow non-cable subscribers to pay for access results in such password swapping. Wouldn’t it be better to characterize this as a market problem, not a criminal problem, which could be solved with a different business model?