Quote:
Originally Posted by mrkai
It isn't theft because you aren't depriving anyone of property. No one ca steal a copy of an electronic anything from anyone, because they still have it.
"Potential revenue' isn't YOUR property. "Potential revenue" isn't...anything 
You are infringing on their exclusive distribution rights. So no, an electronic version of a property by definition, and law, cannot be stolen. |
Perhaps we should stop bickering about the exact words. People have settled on the word "piracy", and everybody knows what's meant by that. Technically, piracy means something else (what with people raiding ships and all) and that's the same thing as people using "chemical" to mean "poisonous" or "hacker" to mean "computer criminal" - but everyone here in these forums knows what's meant.
It's also not "theft" to sneak into a movie theater without paying, or to hitch a ride on a train or bus without a ticket (the train is going anyway, so you might as well use it for free, right?).
One can argue that the business model is broken till the cows come home, but the assumption that you can divide real costs by an expected number of payers and add your profit seems to work just fine for many things. Even for old-fashioned, product-in-your-hands kinds of business. How much do you think it costs to make
one car, or
one computer?
You can argue that "pirates" are a fact of life, and if they really couldn't get around paying they simply wouldn't get the product. It's not so much as a
publisher I am annoyed by pirates, just as insurance agencies aren't really worried by fraudulent customers. Because you know what? They simply increase their premiums to account for it. Same thing with ebooks: publishers will simply factor in how many of their readers will simply not pay, and increase the price accordingly for us poor suckers who
will.