![\"\"](\"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/copyburg.jpg\" "\\"Thinking")
<\/a>No harm, no foul!<\/p><\/div>\n
Whatever wrongs Megaupload has committed, though, it\u2019s doubtful that theft is among them.<\/p>\n
From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible. For Caveman Bob to \u201csteal\u201d from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe \u2014 say, his favorite club \u2014 and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it. Everyone recognized, at least intuitively, that theft constituted what can loosely be defined as a zero-sum game: what Bob gained, Joe lost.<\/p>\n
When Industrial Age Bob and Joe started inventing less tangible things, like electricity, stocks, bonds and licenses, however, things got more complicated. What Bob took, Joe, in some sense, still had. So the law adjusted in ad hoc and at times inconsistent ways. Specialized doctrines were developed to cover the misappropriation of services (like a ride on a train), semi-tangibles (like the gas for streetlights) and true intangibles (like business goodwill).<\/p>\n
In the middle of the 20th century, criminal law reformers were sufficiently annoyed by all of this specialization and ad hoc-ness that they decided to do something about it.<\/p>\n
In 1962, the prestigious American Law Institute issued the Model Penal Code, resulting in the confused state of theft law we\u2019re still dealing with today.<\/p>\n
In a radical departure from prior law, the code defined \u201cproperty\u201d to refer to \u201canything of value.\u201d Henceforth, it would no longer matter whether the property misappropriated was tangible or intangible, real or personal, a good or a service. All of these things were now to be treated uniformly.<\/p>\n
Before long, the code would inform the criminal law that virtually every law student in the country was learning. And when these new lawyers went to work on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department and elsewhere, they had that approach to theft in mind.<\/p>\n
Then technology caught up.<\/p>\n