Antabus said:
That is your way to think. Acquiring something without proper compensation might as well be considered stealing by some other. I live in EU. Therefore I can't buy for example The Last Story, I am not damaging anyone if I download the game? I bet Nintendo agrees with you! |
In legal terms stealing and theft are well-defined terms. Not all cases where you "acquire something without proper compensation" fall into their realm.
Moreover there's lots of cases, especially when the goods are of digital or epehemeral nature, where I'm pretty sure you don't think of that as stealing yourself, not even in very subjective terms.
When you read a digital copy of a public domain work, say Shakespeare's plays or the Ilyad you're acquiring something, compensating nobody. Is that theft?
When you borrow a book from a friend of yours, read it and return it and end up not buying the book, are you stealing that content?
If you buy a used DVD, zilch of your money goes to the authors. Have you properly compensated their work?
If you use free-as-in-free-beer, open source software you're getting terribly complex pieces of software infrastructure worth hundreds of thousands of man-hours without paying a cent. Are you stealing?
All these examples are to show that trying to define what is proper doesn't make much sense if your reasoning follows rails based on finite goods. Flawless information replication breaks economic models based on scarcity, and any ethics that wants to economically support the arts must follow.
Compensating work of incredibe intrinsic value with zero can be proper and ethic, depending on the circumstances of its distribution and the economic chain. The only moral compass that makes logical sense is asking yourself if you're doing what you can to financially incentive the authors of what you sincerely enjoy.
If you can't compensate them for circumstances out of your control I can't see the logic or ethics in denying yourself the content: the very thought of a victimless crime makes no sense.
