Last week, I found that an article I wrote about the England cricket team had been copied word-for-word and republished without permission by an Indian website. What’s the right way to respond? Call it out and take legal action? Or just shrug and let it go? I was mulling this over while walking through my local supermarket, where mackerel fillets are wrapped in security chains and dishwasher tablets have to be requested from the back like a secret little indulgence.
On the way home, I took a screenshot of a news article, cropped it, and shared it in a WhatsApp group. In another group, a relative had posted an AI-generated video—marked “forwarded many times”—showing Donald Trump getting his head shaved by Xi Jinping while Joe Biden laughs in the background. I watched this mindless clip on my phone as I walked down the main road, instinctively tightening my grip on it.
Little by little, almost without noticing, we seem to be living in a world defined by petty theft—not petty in scale, but in the sense of entitlement and impunity behind it. A joke, a phone, an article, Greenland, the entire body of published literature, a pack of dishwasher tablets—everything feels up for grabs. How did we get here, and where does it lead?
Maybe we should start with the internet, where technology has effectively normalized and built stealing into our digital culture. Aggregator sites, viral meme accounts, screenshots, copy-pasting, the endless scroll of feeds—all of these blur the line between creator and creation, turning our ideas, thoughts, and images into a communal buffet. It feels frictionless, victimless, even empowering. The rewards for going viral are huge, and the penalties are nearly nonexistent.
So when the first generative AI models began training on billions of pieces of scraped content—copyrighted writing, music, and art—in a way, they were just continuing an established tradition. As Karen Hao writes in her book Empire of AI, there was “a culture among developers to view anything and everything as data to be captured and consumed.” John Phelan of the International Confederation of Music Publishers calls it “the largest intellectual property theft in human history.”
But there are no police on the scene, no sirens, no bounties or wanted posters. If big tech wants your work, and governments are willing to let them have it, there’s no emergency number to call—just a fog of excuses and plaintive appeals about business models. Please, my family is starving. My family loves to eat private photos and personal data. Also, my family is allergic to copyright law.
Of course, the internet didn’t invent this. Theft itself is ancient, perhaps one of the oldest human behaviors—a strategy of adaptation and imitation driven by imbalances in power, wealth, and opportunity. Often, it’s justified in similar terms. Inequality creates thieves on both sides, not just one. It makes theft a defining principle of how society operates. The street thief and the colonial empire-builder are united by a shared understanding of the rules—a kind of anti-honor code where taking is rebranded as victorious conquest.
Maybe it’s no surprise that this culture is embodied most vividly by a U.S. president who boasts about grabbing whatever he wants—from a Venezuelan oil tanker, to classified documents, to a frozen Atlantic island, to a woman’s body. Donald Trump treats coercive acquisition as a founding principle. His plan for a Vegas-style reconstruction of Gaza, unveiled by Jared Kushner at Davos last week and full of AI-generated imagery, reads like a kleptomaniac’s fantasy.
He’s been helped, of course, by the fact that on a global scale, the taboo against naked land grabs—from Crimea to the West Bank—has largely faded away.In a world obsessed with security, stealing land can be framed as a matter of survival. For Trump and his fellow autocrats, this new era of neocolonial expansion is just the natural order—the reward for being strong in a world of weakness.
Through these small, gradual shifts, the world is reshaped along stolen lines. On a deeper level, this age of theft reveals something essential about how we view others as fellow human beings, and how we treat rules and conventions when our leaders seem to find them increasingly irrelevant. When entire nations are built on stolen labor, when whole populations are driven from their land to make way for something like a casino, watching a pirated stream of a football match suddenly feels like a relatively harmless offense.
In my more idle dystopian daydreams, I used to wonder what would happen if Google or WhatsApp simply decided one morning to hold all your emails and messages hostage, demanding a life-changing ransom for their return. Does that still sound so far-fetched? If personal boundaries are now an illusion and ownership is just another form of power, when does mass theft start to look like an irresistible business opportunity?
“A great embarrassing fact haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.” A brilliant line, though stolen from David Graeber—who, I imagine, would have appreciated the irony. For now, all we can really do is hold our phones a little tighter, put watermarks and firewalls around our creative work, and vote for parties that will tackle inequality rather than make it worse. And, in a small, polite voice, ask the shop assistant if they wouldn’t mind unlocking the mackerel fillets when they have a moment.
Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the article Greenland welcome to our era of brazen theft Jonathan Liew covering the intersection of copyright mobile phones and the articles core argument
About the Article Its Core Argument
Q What is this article basically about
A Its a sports column that uses a specific incidentDenmarks football team wearing a wrong kit that resembled Greenlands flagto argue that in the digital age copying and repurposing others ideas has become normalized and often goes unpunished
Q What does brazen theft refer to in the title
A It refers to the modern attitude of openly taking intellectual propertylike designs art or cultural symbolswithout permission credit or consequence often by claiming it as inspiration or homage
Q How does a football kit relate to copyrighted art
A The kit design is intellectual property The article suggests Denmark stole the visual identity of Greenlands flag for commercial and branding purposes mirroring how digital art is often stolen online
Copyright Art Specifics
Q What does copyright mean for a piece of art or a design
A It means the creator has the exclusive legal right to control how their original work is used copied distributed or modified Others cant use it without permission
Q I just save cool pictures from the internet to my phone Is that theft
A For personal use its generally okay Theft in this context usually means republishing the work without permission or credit to the original artist
Q Whats the difference between theft inspiration and fair use
TheftCopyright Infringement Using a substantial part of a work without permission for your own benefit
Inspiration Being influenced by an idea or style to create something new and original of your own
Fair Use A legal exception that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission Its complex and not a simple excuse
