Theft is a very forced metaphor for software piracy

[Hephaestos]

Katilian said:

Slimebeast said:

Piracy is not an adequate word for it because the traditional act of piracy is a horrible crime, more like armed robbery than theft.

Theft is a good word because that's what stealing a service essentially is. "copyright infringment" is not a lay-man's term and doesn't describe the moral wrongness of the act.

Let's say there's an amusement park, animal zoo or a castle that is a museum. Now, sometimes people can go trhough the open gates of these kind of facilities, but they're still supposed to pay (unless entrance to the facility indeed is free, but this is not up to the visitor to decide!). Same with lots of city buses, you can walk right onto them from the backdoor without paying. But if you get caught by a controller, you get punished and no one protests against that. Same with tax-evasion etc.

Now, what could all these morally wrong acts when people go in for free be described as? I think clearly they're forms of thievery.

Is piracy morally wrong? Except for on internet forums, I personally don't know anyone who is genuinely bothered by casual piracy. Most people have pirated something at some stage, and in my experience, most people under 30 use infringing media on a regular basis.

Given morals are based on social norms, why exactly is piracy immoral?

morals are not biased on social norms...law is based on social norm. and this is why there are pirate political parties appearing in europe, because the law and the direction lawmakers are expanding it are not adequate to the social norm.

 

Morally though.... artists have had to perform in order to be paid for millenias... nowadays they just need to sit an relax as the money flows... how is that moral?

For movies, there is the issue of the larger investment... but that would not be an issue if the expected revenues were lower. Why are movies expensive to make? because people say it's bring a ton of money so they want their cut. I recall articles about T2 when it was the first movie to reach 100M budget... that was hudge.... now, it's meh! As far as I know actors and cinema workers had plenty of revenues even in the 80ies to feel content, and that was the prime time of VCRs and movie recording. Same for music, cassettes never were a problem.