Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Some other metaphors that could be useful, from the world of finance:
1. Debasing, as in "debasing an author's IP rights".
2.Devaluing
3.Counterfeiting.
The useful thing about such metaphors is that they move away from the idea of theft as physical act, but keep the idea of harmful conduct that causes unspecified damage to specific people or public.
This metaphor game interesting is!
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Of those, counterfeit comes closest... though, since there is at heart no difference between a legal and illegally-copied ebook file, and counterfeit usually denotes an inferior or good-but-worthless copy, that might be a stretch.
Better to call them "wrongly-copied" or "wrongly-distributed" ebooks than counterfeit.