My Journal

I have made known my stand on this in several entries here before. This shall hopefully be the last entry with capacity to be expanded, to avoid confusion of multiple postings on the same subject.

The crux of the problem is: Do we distinguish theft from lying? That is, should we not conflate the 8th and the 9th commandments: Thou shalt not steal & Thou shalt not bear false witness, respectively.

I once asked Pak Tong the last time he was here in the States, he did not give a clear answer but recognizing that there are people promoting against intellectual properties; however, he also stated that his ministry STEMI does not allow people to copy their materials without permission. I cannot say that he supports Intellectual property rights in the common way because of this, because I believe even if someone pirated their materials, I highly doubt they would sue that person. 1 Timothy 5:18 comes to mind, which is not the same as the principle operating behind today's copyright law.

I would attempt to start by arguing from the fact that in the 8th commandment, God's physical material blessing must be recognized, and thus must be distinguished from the other commandments such as the 9th and the 10th. Though I'm not saying all these commandments are mutually exclusive. Therefore, to fail in recognizing material blessing, or to conflate material blessing with another kind of blessing such as talent, is to risk the same error as the Gnostics: diminishing the value of material, which is of the world, which God created.

Therefore, though it is true that the 8th commandment does not specify that the object of theft is a physical material one or not, what I shall investigate here is whether the notion of theft must only link to a physical object or can it also be associated with the non-physical such as the product of the mind or talent. Because after all, when we use the word "product", one can easily associate that with the physical, even though it doesn't have to be so. In the same way, we use the word "steal", for "someone else's idea". So the question is, is this meant the same way by God?

Though we must distinguish the two commandments (8th & 9th), we cannot deny that these two generally apply together to the crime of theft (of physical things). A thief who stole a car, if asked, would lie about how he got the car, generally. "Generally" being an important keyword here, because someone who steals may not lie about it and thus it borders robbing, which I think is aptly covered by the 8th commandment since there's no separate commandment that says "Thou shalt not rob". However, in the case of intellectual "properties", if we want to really call it that, there's no distinguishing of robbing and stealing.

For the sake of argument, robbing is always stealing, but stealing is not always robbing. Stealing is a bigger circle encompassing completely the smaller circle called robbing, in the Venn diagram. Stealing is taking without permission, robbing is to do so bolding in broad daylight so to speak.

But in the case of intellectual properties, there is no such thing as robbing, because when I copy someone's idea in "broad daylight", that's just simply copying, which is not a sin in itself. Only when I tell people that someone else's idea that I copied from, is mine, then have I broken the 9th commandment. But the West came up with this idea that we can "buy" someone's ideas (thus, intellectual properties) and subtly call it ours. Which is absurd, even if one works hard to not break the 9th by carefully calling it "ownership" of the rights, rather than "authorship". Because by calling it ownership, one inadvertently conveys authorship. The only reason to distinguish these two terms is to have monetary power, otherwise it's not true ownership nor authorship.

I can and should say more here, but it will be continued next time. This is an ongoing investigation of the subject.

The proponent of Copyright Law has this chief reason: To encourage creativity or sharing of it, which is pathetic. As if I need to pay a child to behave or not seek vengeance. What then, shall we oppose the government because of this? No. Here give unto Caesar is apt.