There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't. The first one is considered morally wrong by everyone here, the second one is argued not to be.
> There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't.
That's why I'm 100% in favor of counterfeiting money, since that has the same properties: no one is deprived of the money they already have.
I think it's worth being careful with your language, but then you are talking about whether or not it's okay to infringe on the rights of another and I don't think it's any easier to say it is.
Copyrights are not "rights" the way most other "rights" are understood. The term "right" in this context is an abstraction and it is becoming increasingly strained in the modern world. Copyright is a "right" the way that minerals rights are "rights" -- in reality it is a regulation on an industry.
Copyright is tied to speech and expression the way speed limits are tied to driving: copyright is a restriction on what a person can say and how they can say it.
As for mineral rights, "theft" is not so clear at least based on the history of oil exploration. If I drill a well on my property to tap reserves that span the ground beneath both of our properties, is it really "theft" if I do not pay you a share? Historically the problem was that people were generally incentivized to drill their own land, which led to over-exploitation of petroleum reserves and giant messes in places like Los Angeles. Mineral rights were created to solve that problem by regulating the petroleum industry in a way that minimally disrupts property rights as they are generally understood.
In both cases there is nothing fundamental underlying the regulations. There would be nothing particularly wrong with a system that ignores the ownership of land above a petroleum reserve -- that is how air traffic is regulated in the US (nobody can demand compensation for the airplanes that fly over their property above a certain height). Copyright law has been changed many times since the Statute of Anne, and the original motivation for copyrights was to restore the publishing monopoly that had existed under a previous regulation system (the Licensing of the Press act, which was actually intended to enforce censorship). The rules are mostly arbitrary, and I would argue that in the case of copyright the goal of the regulation is also arbitrary (i.e. copyright was not established to solve an actual problem facing society).
Maybe if you're comparing piracy to stealing of personal goods, but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.
Digital products are easy to replicate, so they're obviously different, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.
> but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.
You've deprived them from selling those specific gallons of milk to someone else and caused them a direct monetary loss. Conflating that with brand is intellectually dishonest.
> but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.
Yes it does, it's hard to regulate because it's stupid precisely because you haven't actually deprived them of anything which makes it morally not wrong.
