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wasoxygen  ·  3394 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Can we cogently refute "stealing is stealing"?

    reducing demand isn't illegal or immoral
Right, that's not the problem. The trespass is failing to pay someone who produced a work for sale.

This conversation was originally about whether the word "stealing" applies when the work is acquired by unauthorized duplication. I have come to think that piracy is different in enough particulars that using the word "stealing" to describe it gives people too much leeway to confuse the moral issue with semantic arguments and cartoon jingles. Copying is not Theft. Putting Merchandise in Your Pockets and Walking Out of Buildings is not Theft either.

    why is it ... not ok for me to reduce demand by copying?
In my view, it depends on the particulars. If a celebrity coins a clever Twitter hashtag that goes viral, I don't think they have grounds to complain about people copying their creation.

If you hire a wedding photographer, and they provide you with digital proofs so you can select prints, and instead you copy the files and make your own prints, you are in the wrong. You have clearly violated an agreement in a way that harms the photographer. It doesn't matter that you have only copied "information" in the form of data files. Almost everything can be conveyed as information.

Somewhere in between is downloading music. Most pirated music was created for commercial purposes. There is a contextual understanding that the producers create music for fans to enjoy in exchange for some kind of compensation. Failing to provide the compensation is a violation of that understanding. Identifying the parties subject to that understanding is murky. The fan auditing a new album before deciding whether to buy it is not the entrepreneur selling counterfeit CDs on the sidewalk. Radiohead is not Rachmaninov.