• HenchmanNumber3@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.

    The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.

    It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.