Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Further, it is very different than your analogy; harassment and murder are on entirely different planes both legally and ethically. No normal person would equate the two as being equivalent.
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So are theft and infringement (granted not as extreme as the two I mentioned).
The main reason society considers theft a criminal offense is not because the individual ends up getting something for free. It's because they are depriving someone else of their rightful property. The act of physically taking something away from another person is what primarily makes theft ethically wrong. If an individual forced someone to let him build an exact copy of their car, nobody would call that theft. There may be other laws violated depending on how the individual forced them to comply, but they're not going to be charged with stealing since both of them end up with copies of the physical object.
The ethics behind copyright infringement are entirely different.