[stardek]

Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy.

If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (though the owner still has their good so not entirely identical) but that doesn't seem to be the typical scenario. The ads only make that equivalence because it's better for the companies if they convince people it's theft.

From a moral perspective I think whether it is theft really depends on your motivation/what you would do in the absence of piracy.

[nybble41]

> the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have

You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale? Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly competing with artist A and taking the place of many sales, and there still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of anything.

Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual damages." And yet they have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high ground…

[FabHK]

Furthermore, by the way, theft typically destroys total value. If someone steals a wallet (or anything really), the amount he gets from fencing it is typically much smaller than the cost (including hassle, time spent, and potentially nostalgic value) to the original owner of replacing everything (if that’s possible at all).

Copyright infringement, by contrast, arguably creates value - instead of one person being able to see the movie, two can see it.