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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
The statement that a person who pirated a book "would never, ever buy it" doesn't change the fact that he has it now... that makes it a copy that has not been paid for, and therefore, a lost sale caused by theft.
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Sorry, no. The publisher still has it and can still sell it. That's in fact the key difference between theft and violating somebody's copyright. If somebody cannot afford to buy a certain book, CD, movie, whatever -- obviously the moral choice would be to refrain from downloading it illegally, but if he does so there was still no sale lost. Had he not been able to download it he wouldn't have bought it, either.
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The fact that he says he wouldn't have paid for it is immaterial to the fact that he took.
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That's only true for tangible goods (a book in book store, say). For intangible goods marginal costs are zero.