Fritz Feger wrote:

I should have said something about this, yes. Those you quote are (see my last mail) caught up into a false disanalogy between material and intellectual property, and their trial to distinguish intellectual property and copyright suffers from this.

Well if there's a "false disanalogy," than this is so under American law, not the passage:

"There is another problem with ``intellectual property'': it is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. For instance, if you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it is notthe same for patent law, since that is almost always true."

I shall try to define copyright: To state that the copyright for the music on a CD you buy remains mine is to specify the utilisation contract (dunno the correct legal term in English...) between you and me. It means to restrict the rights on my intellectual property which you purchase in buying my CD to putting this CD into any CD player you like and play it as often and as loud as you want and to whomever you want, but not to multiply the medium and thereby to further broaden the circle of people using my intellectual property. The contract says that if a second copy is required, it has to be purchased again from me or my agent, e.g. my record label. The same with software and single vs. multiple user licenses. And there are further restrictions which are part of the deal and thus subject to copyright. If you like to broadcast a track of my CD, this also requires you to purchase a separate license because, again, this broadens the circle of possible users of my property.

Well, the passages I quoted (and didn't quote) argue that you shouldn't equate copyright law with "intellectual property rights." In your definition above, you did.

"Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic overgeneralization. Any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. The term ``intellectual property'' leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish various abstractions that can be bought and sold, and ignore the important aspect, which is the restrictions they place on the public and what good or harm those restrictions cause."

the GNU page notes further:

"According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ for a counter-WIPO campaign."

And I define plagiarism: theft of intellectual property in the special case that I claim or imply that someone else's intellectual property is mine. To be distinguished from copyright violation where I do not make such a claim but distribute someone's intellectual property further than my contract with the owner allows for. To add my 5 cent to the question if copyright violation is theft: it is not taking away property from the legal owner, and thus not exactly theft, but it is still a violation of property rights, which implies that any moral differences between theft (of material or intellectual property) and copyright violation are hard to argue for.

There's a significant moral difference between copying a book from the library for one's own personal use without buying it, and taking a text from such a book and publishing and claiming it as your own. there's a huge moral difference actually. Note this also:

"If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing."