I think it’s easy enough to tell the difference. If the thing that you’re giving away belongs to you it’s sharing, if not it’s stealing.
But the file sharing era has forced us to reconsider things. We’ve become used to downloading and redistributing copyrighted content without a second thought. I’m starting to reconsider my position, though. Recently I featured a link to “free” vector icons on this blog, and one of the commenters pointed out that those icons were copyrighted and did not belong to the guy posting them. Googling a little, I found this thread that says the same thing.

Now it’s hard to know the truth in a case like this, but except if the guy spends his life designing icons just to give them away, I’m tempted to believe that he took them from somewhere else. Why should that be a problem ? We do this all the time, right ? It’s not stealing if all you’re taking is a bunch of 0s and 1s.

But when you download Spiderman 3, there’s little chance that you’re gonna pass it off as your own movie. Even if the viewers didn’t pay for the right to see the movie, at least they still know that a studio invested in it, and that actors played in it. Down the line, you might even say that by raising interested in the Spiderman brand, pirating that movie also benefited the big studios.

That guy provided these icons for free and didn’t link back to their creator, probably so that they would have a harder time tracing him back. That’s where you have to draw the line, because now he’s robbed them of one of the most important things in this Information Age, recognition.

I’ll end by noting that I don’t have a single proof for all the accusations in this post, but here’s my message for that site’s owner (taken from his own site): “if you are the author of any shared resource and can prove it, you can request to delete the post“.