Theft is a very forced metaphor for software piracy

[gergroy]

Onyxmeth said:

gergroy said:
I don't agree at all, theft is a very proper metaphor and is correctly used.

If you offer a service to people, say you walk their dogs. You would expect to get paid for that service right? What happens when somebody doesn't pay, is that stealing? They stole that time and effort you put forward to walking their dog.

So, if somebody is walking hundreds of dogs, but only half the people pay, the dog walker still gets paid, but not as much as he earned.

Piracy is theft. You can say "oh, but they weren't going to pay for their dogs to get walked anyway." Well thats fine, they shouldn't have their dogs walked then. It's not fair to the other people that paid to have their dogs walked and it most certainly is not fair to the dog walker himself.

The article is talking about the legal term of theft, not the slang term you're using to describe it as. For your information, your ridiculous analogy isn't theft either.

I can't remember who, but someone mentioned in the other piracy thread about murder. There's a phrase "stealing a life" which is how you are using the terms stealing and theft. However, you don't get tried in court for theft when you murder someone, and that is the difference between something legally being theft and people just using the word stealing to describe whenever something is either literally or metaphorically taken from someone.

lol, so what I described isn't theft?  So, if somebody from say, Geek Squad at Best Buy came out and Serviced your computer and you didn't pay them, that isn't stealing?  I'm not talking about stealing a life or anything like that.  I'm using this dog worker analagy to reference the time, labor, and investment that goes into their products and how they aren't getting compensated for it by pirates. 

this line in particular I find completely wrong

So if software piracy, unlike theft, is an activity that may or may not have a negative impact on the 'victims'

It does have a negative impact.  When you have people using your service (yes, a service is a real and tagible product or "property") for free then  you devalue the work that these companies have put forth to offer you this service.  The companies are forced to, for example, pay for expensive anti piracy measures, do huge price reductions to appeal to more buyers (a lot of times at the expense of making any kind of profit), and lots of other things. 

Piracy as a very negative impact on the industry, I don't think that can really be argued.