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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Let's change your little story except that you didn't pirate the book -- you shoplifted it.
It you really give all the free publicity suggested, your shoplifting probably did benefit the creators of the book. So what? To me, it is still wrong.
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But you simply can't equate the theft of a physical object with the copying of a file.
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The implication of your post is that morality is solely a matter of whether anyone is harmed. If that's what you think, sure, piracy can be seen as a good thing.
A big problem with your hypothetical is that the piracy comes before the reading and the posting. What happens when you read the pirated book and find it to be a fine work from a purely literary standpoint, but hate the author's perspective on life?
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Morality is indeed largely a matter of whether anyone is harmed. I think one could argue that in the case of piracy, the harm is perhaps mainly to the person who pirates, rather than to authors or publishers or book sellers.