Piracy - what we should be asking

[Mr Khan]

Kenny said:

Wonktonodi said:
Theft can also be define as unlawfully taking something not always just deprivation of goods
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
2 obsolete : something stolen
3 : a stolen base in baseball

Think about it where did the term Piracy come from
your example is not a very good one there is a huge difference between putting a sentence in a forum and writing that by copying it people agree to pay you and going out and ACTIVELY making a copy of something you don't have the rights too

(bolded for emphasis)

That's the crux of the matter.  If you made a copy, then you never took the original - it's still sitting on the source hard drive from which it came.  What you may or may not have taken was the potential sales arising from the item that would otherwise have existed had piracy not been an option.

As for my example, it was a simplified argument, but that doesn't change my point: If I released a piece of software for sale for $100 billion, and somebody said 'screw this, I'm not paying that' and copied it instead, it's silly to argue that I have lost $100 billion to piracy, simply on the basis that it was a lost sale  Basically, while the fact is that somebody made a copy of the software, it does not necessarily follow that said software ever existed as a sale.

Also: imagine if we were referring to anything other than data. If i built a duplicator ray (patent pending) and then went to the Louvre and made perfect copies of everything there and walked off with them, what harm would i have done to the pre-existing objects or their owners? Absolutely none, except deprive them of potential monies they could have made by selling the various works of art to me. But if we define the loss of potential money as theft (as opposed to the deprivation of property or the loss of actual value), then we venture into a strange legal realm indeed.