• communism@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    I never stated what was or wasn’t moral; I stated what was legal, and stealing is a legalistic term. How can you enforce property ownership, intellectual or material, without law, and legal rights to property?

    For the record, I want the abolition of property and of law. I do not believe stealing to be wrong. “Stealing” can only be a legal category if you believe it to be morally neutral.

    That definition also makes no sense. If I gift you a laptop I worked hard to afford and you use it, no sane person would call that stealing, even to those to whom stealing is a moral category. That is the same thing as someone using MIT code according to the licence. The original coder gifted the code to the public and said “I explicitly want you to use this however you like, under the sole condition that you credit me.” Just like if I gifted you a laptop I’d be saying “I want you to use this laptop however you like.”