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Wow, this thread is still going on, and still rational, even.
While I do think that the search for better mataphors is kind of a mug's game, pursued by people who want to get away from the theft label, I'll offer one: dilution.
Piracy dilutes the value of a content creator's intellectual property right in their creation , making it of less value than it would have been without piracy ( or unauthorised copying, if you want to use that euphemism.) The more copies of an artrist's creation that are made and distributed without the author's permission, the less valuable the the original work becomes. ,
You can compare it to gold, or a rich dye, or paper money, or a drug, or maybe watering down liquor. Its not exactly like any of those things, but the principle is the same.
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