So just to be clear, are you denying the "anti-piracy" side their argument on grounds of moral simplicity? Of course there are shades of nuance, as many people here have already established. BFV and wasoxygen both have valid points within their discussion, as does thenewgreen when he mentions that stealing for need inhabits a different space on the moral spectrum as stealing something from desire.

In light of all that, it looks like you've oversimplified the argument a few shades. I've seen very few people other than, I dunno, ad men for "The 20" portion of my movie theater experience ever argue that "stealing is stealing, period." I've seen plenty more people supply the below arguments, pro and con. Don't dismiss one side of the argument based on (don't say it don't say it I'm gonna say it) strawman.

You know what else I've seen? The effects from the supply side. This isn't something I talk about often here for various reasons, but for the sake of my stance I think it's useful to clarify: I was once a relatively successful supplier of the kind of IP you're talking about. You know why I'm not anymore? Because more people, by orders of magnitude, decided that they valued my IP enough to copy, share, experience and talk about it, than people did enough to attach a dollar value to that IP the same way they would, say, a sandwich (and at much the same price, I should point out).

I remember being initially flattered by the numbers I was seeing vis a vis filesharing of my IP. Hey, this is great exposure! People like this stuff! This is awesome! That feeling deflated over time as I realized that:

a) A lot of the support I saw at shows was at least as much due to extensive label-side promotion, savvy product placement, licensing exposure, and good ol' fashioned elbow grease from me and mine than from support garnered from the fleeting online hype cycle. We worked our asses off, on the road, for the better part of the year, for several years in order to see the returns we did. Filesharing? It's great for immediate exposure, but it also facilitates a culture of consumers with very low attention span and an insatiable appetite for new stuff faster than you can possibly supply it.

b) Roughly ten times as many people just downloaded our shit over the period of five years than bought it. Resulting in

c) Our label not being able to afford more publicity support due to always having to dig themselves out of the red. Less publicity and general support from label = less exposure = less money for us.

Now, min_wage brought up the tour support thing below (by the way, I have quite a lot of respect for _wage's argument sheerly by virtue of owning it- steal for want, steal for need, but if you're going to do it, tie it to larger philosophy rather than some small-minded moral equivocation). In response: said live purchases are enough to support touring costs- transportation, upkeep, room & board, merch reorders, equipment repair, theft mitigation, management percentage, booking percentage... list goes on. Whatever net profit was left over, that was split anywhere between five and seven smelly, hungry performers. It was often enough to get us through a few months with some pocket change left when we got home... but not always. Money made on the road supports the road.

Interesting tangent: you know where we got the most money? Huge corporate interests that wanted to use our stuff to add "hip" cred to their product. The Man everybody loves to rail against? He was the only one willing to assign value to and then compensate that value for our work.

Wasn't enough, though. Now, if those that had downloaded our IP for free had instead paid for it- and it was pretty cheap, all things considered- I can say with confidence that I'd still be working at it.

I stopped doing what I was doing on the scale that I was doing it because I was broke and tired and finally had to find something that would support my family. So quit and stop whining about it. I did. I bring it up not to cry in my beer, but to highlight a simple point: the less you're willing to pay for the product you choose to consume, the less the producer of said product gets. The less that producer gets, the less incentive there is to supply product.

So if you value the IP you're consuming, it might be worth doing a little more empathizing and a little less justifying. Or else, jesus, have the stones to own up to what you're doing rather than trying to snake your way out of culpability. Is stealing sometimes morally justified? Yeah, fine, but you'd be hard pressed to apply those circumstances to this arena. Sure, you're not stealing a physical thing, you're making a copy. But each free unauthorized copy means less food in the producer's mouth. That's taking something you want at the expense of what she needs. And there will come a time when your very favorite product just doesn't exist, because there's no incentive to produce it.

If I sound like I'm saying something along the lines of "if you say anything to the contrary, you are simply trying to exuse away your own thefts," it's because within this particular framework, that's a valid response to the question as posed. In the arena of filesharing, "can we refute stealing is stealing?" In short, no. But here's what you can do: you can re-frame the debate.

Every argument that the side against copyright has seems to be perpetually bogged down in definitions and assumptions and challenging paradigms

There's a reason for this. Me? It's in my marked interest, as it is for anybody who works within and stands to benefit from the current system, to keep the debate firmly on grounds of morality. Because, barring a change to the system, it's not only an extremely easy argument to make, but it represents the last available appeal to people who would otherwise bypass that system entirely at the expense of a few distant actors. You can get this by means that lie outside of my preferred marketplace, but if you do, you are effecting my bottom line. That's an easy and potentially powerful argument.

You're going to have a hard time refuting it, too. On the other hand, if you as a file-sharer take up the argument on practical grounds, your job becomes easier: "whether or not my actions are moral is moot; available technology allows me to assign lower monetary value to the stuff I want. The onus doesn't fall on me to ignore available tools, it falls on the market to correct for the presence of those tools."

Then again, I can counter (and already have) with the argument others have taken up in other IP arenas. Sure, you can leverage available tools to take my IP, and there's nothing I can do about it. But if there's no money in it for me, I'll stop producing. That's a market correction.

Anyhow, the question about "how to counter the morality argument" seems a bit off the mark, as you're looking to fight a very uneven fight. Which is why you as a consumer are better off reverting to practical arguments, as others have done. But then I'm not sure that road takes you anywhere you necessarily want to go, either.

Note: I wrote this essay length reply to thenewgreens post on my smallest laptop in the world workaround, currently my window into the cyberverse. My eyes will take their vengeance on me presently. Meanwhile, I see there is much more discussion here, probably much of which refers to that which I refer, and much more. Hopefully, someday, I'll catch up. Realistically, I won't. Cheers to all nonetheless!

Well, thanks for looking out for my interests, my friend, and I hate to do any injury to my theoretically possible future self/career, but at a moment like this, it would be simply perverse not to adduce the following:

Copying is Not Theft

The fact that it doesn't serve my personal economic interests would be no worthy excuse not to confess the following: the foundational problem here is that ownership (the basis by which theft can be assessed) is itself nothing more than a contingently necessary mass-hallucination. It has no self-evident qualities, no a priori claim upon being. It might as well have been a dozen other ways, and in fact, it has. Even among societies which have participated in the belief in ownership, modern western notions of ownership remain distinct, the most highly augmented and elaborate. This distinction reveals primarily the importance of ownership, i.e., the regulation of access to stuff as a means of controlling reality, to our society. The most fantastical of these notions, the furthest abstracted from any basis or grounds in material reality, is that of intellectual property. The above video does a brilliant job of illustrating this fact, along with a hilariously nursery rhyme-esque ditty and animation to boot, which is why I love it so much, and am so delighted to share it. The laws that protect intellectual property serve to reward and thereby fuel visionaries (and any of those legally capable of appropriating said-visionaries breakthroughs), and as such, we must regard it as a powerful tool for discovery and progress. This rationale is, however, entirely utilitarian, and therefore contingent. It has no basis in reality, and is in fact contrary to what we see in the natural world, wherein discoveries, developments, evolutions, etc., are distributed, disseminated, inherited, etc., equally, and without any thought for compensation or establishment of paternity.

I ought to say that the difference between taking bread and taking files of music/what have you does demonstrate something significant about different kinds of ownership, as defined. While the taking of bread for the hungry is palpably more urgent, it also deprives the former bread-holder of actual calories. Dude now needs another loaf. On the digital download side of things, we see no urgency of acquisition, but also no deprivation of anything previously held. The mp3 is the digital equivalent of Jesus Christ's loaves and fishes, broken 5,000 times and still remaining entirely whole.

I do believe it is important to support our artists, and I am incredibly grateful to all those who have, and who will, support my own artistic endeavors. However, I would argue that to protect my own wellbeing, and indeed the vitality of our culture, we must take a different tack than that which our production/consumption based society would offer us. Instead of regarding our art as units of production, which are expected to go out into the market and return us ducats from faceless consumers in whereverland, as would a pair of tennis shoes or a smartphone or a spool of floss, we might regard it as a vital medium which connects us all, and in which we all are welcomed to have ownership, not the ownership of exclusive access, but the ownership of active participation, of engagement, and of the enfranchisement which attends active engagement.

Someone once said (and I think it was Billy Corgan, though I can't track it down ... any help?) that the music industry had basically invited the scourge of illegal downloading by pushing its artists for so long to make songs which were ever more disposable. The pop song is meant to hook you on the first listen, infect you on the second, and sicken you on the third. That way you'll be ready to welcome the next one. So what if we instead create work that is meant to outlast us, and welcome a community of listeners to be as actively engaged as were any of Shakespeare's rambunctious penny audiences?

I'd like people not to download music illegally, but not because I think it's theft, or because I think it's wrong. Rather, I'd like them to consider what they are cheating themselves out of by not committing to the works of art they are consuming, and how much more rich will their experience of it become once they show up and participate in the experience, and contribute, not just financially, which is an expression of what we value, but also with their focus, their thoughts, and their vital life energy. We don't have to swallow the modern Western faux-divides of audience/performer, connoiseur/virtuoso. This is something we're meant to do together.