Petty Thievery: It's Everywhere You Go>Act Two

As you well know, there’s plenty of petty thievery on the Internet too, which is what inspired me to write to write this particular essay to begin with.

A lot and I mean a lot of criminals are safely harbored within the electronic superhighway, but to use an example to illustrate, I’ll use this one, provided to me by the strange logic of a moderator within a Freecycle group I belong to.

It stems from a misunderstanding of mine from a post that was made, but of course it got me to thinking and I asked the moderator how anyone could give away free items like priority boxes that are already available at FedEx Kinko’s copy shops and local post offices?

And here’s what the moderator said, verbatim: “As for the priority mail boxes, yes, they are free, but free things are definitely allowed on Freecycle. The point in this case was that she got more than she needed and was offering them to someone else who might need them rather than throwing them away. I believe this is a perfect example of the purpose of Freecycle. If she just put them in a recycle bin, energy would be needed to process them to create new boxes. By offering them, she was preventing a waste of resources.”

Well, as I could see by that answer, the moderator was telling me how okay it was to do such a thing; I mean the poster could have returned the boxes to wherever she got them; they were created for free to use for a specific purpose and the poster took advantage of the purpose and gave them away without giving back what she didn’t use. It was not the poster’s choice to do whatever she wanted to do; she took more than she should have and should have returned them as such, but since she didn’t and decided to dump them online under the cloak of Freecycle, this makes her a true petty thief!

Just imagine if everyone followed that philosophy; it would be total anarchy. People would be stealing free stuff in droves and dumping it online under the cloak of Freecycle (or Craigslist) without total respect for the law. Whatever happened to the old adage, “Take what you need and leave the rest for others?”

For all that “energy” that the poster supposedly saved, did the poster realize that she’s a petty thief in disguise? Probably not.

The very idea that Freecycle is saving the world from creating more landfills is applaudable, yet advocates the dumping of other companies knowingly free property onto unsuspecting souls, is just plain wrong! Don’t want to be caught or be responsible for the crime? Well, then just don’t do it!

Freecycle’s main purpose is to peddle off one man’s crap to another for free, not to peddle potentially stolen property! Call it what you will, but with rules like these, it won’t be long before Freecycle becomes what law enforcement agencies used to call pawn shops and that is "fencing operations."

All it takes is just one chance to steal and boom! You got yourself a thief! So keep on Freecycle, keep on advocating and condoning petty thieves. I sure hope that someone notices what Freecycle is condoning and that Freecycle will have all that “energy” to take the consequences responsibly like everyone else does when they steal something that isn’t theirs.

And where does it stop? People steal ideas form each other all of the time! Corporations rip-off their shareholders and their employees constantly; Enron is a classic example of that.

So you think petty thievery is okay? You think no one will notice? Think again and think again and then after a little more time, think again.

And if after all this time you've thought about it and you believe that rules, regulations, ordinances and laws can be bent, broken or loop-holed, well then, you’re probably a thief!