[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...
That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
> But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it.
Please reply to what I wrote, not what you imagine I implied. Nowhere have I suggested copyright infringement is victimless. I have suggested it is more like a tort than a crime, but civil wrongs are wrongs against someone (i.e. a victim).
> When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time.
Please don't twist and abuse language in lieu of a sound argument. Stealing a person's time is already a specific thing: wage theft. It doesn't involve a nebulous social contract; it involves an actual contract between employer and employee for scarce time.
> So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, [copyright infringement] is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
People aren't entitled to whatever returns they fantasize about for a given business model. If technology obsoletes a competitive strategy, we all have to live in that new world. People are understandably upset, and understandably refer to a wrong (theft) that is familiar, sympathetic, and yet factually not the case.
Copyright infringement need not be understood as theft to be understood as wrong. Treating it as theft mischaracterizes the wrong and sets society on a path to criminal enforcement against civil violations, creeping restrictions on general purpose computing, and the growth of the surveillance state.