Quote from: Timo Y on March 04, 2012, 12:09:17 AM

Also, technically speaking, bitcoins are not property but information. In court this probably wouldn't be treated as a theft but a privacy breach. You stop "owning" bitcoins the minute the wallet.dat files leave your physical computer.

i can't agree with this. the vast majority of fiat currency exists only on accounting ledgers, as nothing more than information, yet its theft is treated the same as physical currency.

further, bitcoin hasn't technically been classified from a legal standpoint, and if i were a betting man i'd put a sizable wager down that when and if it reaches the point government agencies do make an official classification, it will be classified as a monetary instrument or derivative of one kind or another, not as the equivalent of a scanned image. they can try to impose regulation on monetary instruments, but can less effectively try to regulate simple information.

i have no idea what logic your using to conclude that ownership of digital information is transferred when you store that information outside of your physical computer. the entire cloud boom is based on the exact opposite tenant. are you of the opinion that dropbox owns all my photos that i transferred from my computer to their storage service? do you believe that mtgox owns the BTC users have deposited there? i don't imagine any cloud storage service would last long that tried telling its users it owned their stored information.