I'm pretty sure that, legally speaking, copyright infringement is not theft -- it's a civil offense, not a criminal one; you can be sued for infringement, but (at least until the last decade or so) you can't go to jail for it. "Intellectual property" is a not-very-accurate catch-all term for three very different bundles of rights; trademarks are, arguably, the most like actual property.
Another commonly misunderstood point is that a copyright license (CC, for example) is not a contract -- you don't have to sign anything in order to have rights and responsibilities under a CC license; you just have to abide by its terms when you redistribute the content. (The law may differ in other countries, and there are special interests trying to change it here, but they haven't succeeded yet.)
Copyright really does, literally, mean "copy right" -- a bundle of rights for different kinds of copying (which precedes distribution). Part of the problem with digital media is that, unlike physical media, the data can be copied exactly, at essentially zero cost, and indeed it has to be copied (off the media and into the computer's memory) and a derivative work made (converting it to analog) in order to use it at all.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the RIAA does not represent either the performers or the songwriters: it's an industry association whose members are music publishers. The crime in publicly claiming to "speak for the artists" is fraud. They don't give a damn about the artists; they're just trying to protect the publishers and their outmoded business model.
Re: Ummm... Not Quite
Another commonly misunderstood point is that a copyright license (CC, for example) is not a contract -- you don't have to sign anything in order to have rights and responsibilities under a CC license; you just have to abide by its terms when you redistribute the content. (The law may differ in other countries, and there are special interests trying to change it here, but they haven't succeeded yet.)
Copyright really does, literally, mean "copy right" -- a bundle of rights for different kinds of copying (which precedes distribution). Part of the problem with digital media is that, unlike physical media, the data can be copied exactly, at essentially zero cost, and indeed it has to be copied (off the media and into the computer's memory) and a derivative work made (converting it to analog) in order to use it at all.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the RIAA does not represent either the performers or the songwriters: it's an industry association whose members are music publishers. The crime in publicly claiming to "speak for the artists" is fraud. They don't give a damn about the artists; they're just trying to protect the publishers and their outmoded business model.