[tm-guimaraes]

> It is more about stealing an income stream or someone's time and labor. When I deprive someone of an income stream that they are able to generate without coercian (by forcing others to buy)

Very murky argument, because pirating something doesn't mean that if the piracy option was not available, a purchase would happen. So, was the income stream really stollen, or did it not exist to begin with?

Also, the "without coercion" is also shaky. Copying (for most digital goods) is practically free/unlimited. Everyone is being coerced by force of law/jail to abide by artificially scarcity rules. I wonder about the % of University students that would be facing legal consequences if laws were always enforced when some pages of study books are copied (and these aren't even as simple to copy as something digital)

> they are stealing my labor, my time

The labor already happened, it was not stolen, the revenue speculation was just wrong. It happens to any kind of business, regardless of piracy or not, I would argue that relying solely on income that comes from a good that is replicated almost freely is not a good business practice.

Same shit with Free Software movement, FOSS is not a business model, you can make money with it, but FOSS itself is not a business model, it's up to you to figure a way to make money with it. (And nobody is being stolen of labor when someone clones a repo/downloads some package). Plenty of people made their careers with just Free Software business, and there have been DRM-free games in #1 spot on Steam.

The same applies to any other digital artifact, it's up to you to figure a way to make money, the easiness of copy-ability is part of the physical reality, "artificial scarcity" is "artificial" for a reason.