I've come down kind of hard in a few instances recently on the Huey Lewis and the News fan board over sloppy uses of copyright rhetoric. The first time I took issue with the use of "pirate," used simply as a synonym for "copy." Most recently I objected to the term "ripped off" because I didn't feel there was enough information in the instant facts to warrant such a judgmental description. Maybe it's warranted, maybe it's not, but I think the larger issue is how these incredibly loaded terms have come to be used as generic synonyms for all sorts of activities that may very well be legitimate but whose legitimacy is completely masked by the connotations of these descriptors. I hope to encourage people to think twice before using these terms themselves, especially as a shorthand for any sort of copying. Some of these instances of copying are certainly subject to debate as to whether or not they are or should be legitimate, but it concedes too much from the outset to use words describing them that inherently presume them not to be.
What I said on the subject just now:
My original reason in posting earlier was to take issue, once again, with the unquestioning adoption of terminology that is neither accurately descriptive nor sufficiently neutral. "Ripping off" is quite a pejorative. It implies that someone is gaining advantage at the expense of another, which is not necessarily the case, even here. It's certainly not a synonym for copying. It's not even a synonym for unauthorized copying, which though unauthorized can still be legitimate.Rather, these are terms put into common parlance by people with an agenda to skew copyright policy in ways that are damaging to the public. It enables their mission when people use them casually and broadly. The relative merits of the activities they are meant to describe is certainly subject to debate, but the discussion requires using much less loaded terms to keep the legitimate from being lumped together with the illegitimate. When that happens, the legitimate takes on the palor of illicitness, and as a result, the rights we've come to expect as part of the copyright bargain disappear, to everyone's detriment.