Piracy.  Whether you're the corporate executive complaining about imagined monthly losses greater than the GDP of France, the digital packrat who downloads every game ever made, or the bored forumgoer, chances are you have an opinion about it.  There are so many, in fact, that these debates never seem to get anywhere, instead getting bogged down over things such as whether it constitutes theft, whether there is a moral justification to disobeying grossly unfair copyright laws, etc.  I have, however, uncovered a lot of insight into the whole debacle over the infinite permutations of discussion on the subject matter over the years, and I think I can boil it down to five points which can help to move the debate forward. 

A) Piracy is Not Theft - By definition, theft necessarily involves the depravation of goods.  Piracy, however, takes an intellectual work and creates an unauthorized copy of it, leaving the creator with the original.  Most arguments centre around the depravation of lost sales, but these may or may not have existed.  Take, for example, this sentence: By copying this sentence, you, the reader, agree to pay me $100 billion USD.  Now, since you had to copy it to your computer's memory just to read it, and you have therefore just created an unauthorized copy of that sentence, did those $100 billion ever exist in the first place?

B) We Need Copyright - The whole point of the copyright system is to encourage the creation of intellectual works, which is to be rewarded with a period of exclusive profitability before it passes into the public domain.  Now, in a world where the value of an idea is zero because it can be infinitely copied, what incentive is there aside from prestige for anyone to create any intellectual work?

C) Prestige Doesn't Pay the Mortgage - Accordingly, relying on prestige as a sole motivating factor is not enough to encourage the creation of intellectual works, as there are a great many pieces of work which are reliant on economic resources to create.  It's all well and good to lavish praise on an artist, but praise doesn't put food on a dinner table.  In fact, if we had relied on it in the first place, it's quite likely that the whole gaming industry would never have come into existence in the first place.  Clearly, other factors are needed.

D) Pandora's Box Was Built by IBM - This brings us to the root of the problem.  Thanks to computers and the internet, the physical supply of an idea is now effectively infinite, due to the fact that it costs practically zero to copy.  The classical economic laws of supply and demand therefore break down, as they would dictate that the price of anything with infinite supply is zero.

E) The Real Question - Based on all that, the question we should be focusing on is as follows: Is there a way in which a society can encourage the creational of intellectual works by rewarding their creation with a return proportional to their beneficial value (whether in utility or popularity), fully acknowledging that the work can and will be infinitely copied?  The answer must reconcile the notion of creating incentive to produce intellectual works with the fact that that technology has driven the supply for existing ideas to infinity; failure to do so will basically criminalize everybody with a computer, cell phone, radio, or any piece of electronics with any storage ability whatsoever.

Even if the answer can be discovered, it will still take a great deal of political will to implement it on any large scale, but so far, it seems more sensible to focus on finding a workable answer to begin with.  I'm quite bored of the existing patterns of argument over theft and civil disobedience, and would much rather get bored on a whole new set of questions, which I hope eventually comes out of the whole debate.

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

It doesnt help that the copyright system is royally broken.

It also doesn't help that the RIAA are such corporate jerks with their copyright policies.

(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.

On piracy, simply this - no one owes you anything, and no one deserves anything more than the right to exist. You have no right to take what is not yours, and if you want something that someone else made, then a trade via barter or money must be made.

You do not deserve or have the right to free music, movies, games, etc. You are just an insignificant pollution generator in a world that will not recognize you until you either contribute something positive to society or murder thousands of people.

Welcome to Earth, here's a free razor for emergency evacuation.

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.

we don't live in a world with duplicator rays however code can be copied, by making the copy you are unlawfully taking the code for yourself you don't have to deprive someone else of the code to do this.
How about Identity theft it's still call theft and not identity piracy when they are taking your info and using it even if you still have the info

You can co-opt, say, Jackie Chan's identity for your own ends, such as fradulent bank withdrawals, but no matter what you do, Jackie Chan is still Jackie Chan.  You are not, and will never truly be Jackie Chan, no matter how many doctored documents you have that may say otherwise.  Therefore, the term "identity theft" is a misnomer, because it is impossible to truly deprive somebody of their identity, only use it.

Returning to the bigger topic, I'm most interested in a system that works.  Setting aside the notions of "right" and "wrong" for the purposes of this discussion, is there a system that will encourage the creation of intellectual works that embraces, rather than ignores, the fact that such works can and will be copied ad infinitum?

A)  Correct.  It's copyright infringement and unauthorized reproduction, not theft of property.  Whether sales of a product would or would not have existed is subjective when it comes to the law, what is clear (IMO) is that an individual responsible for distributing X number of copies is guilty of unauthorized reproduction of those X copies.  Beyond that, any other losses are unknown and left to the judge to determine when attempting to make the damaged party whole.

B)  I am not disatisfied with this.  I prefer it that inventions can be copied to an extent.  Imagine if after Karl Benz made the automobile that no other maker had ever been allowed to make one.  The industry would probably not be nearly what it is today.  The ability for competitors to emerge in a market is one of the principles of capitalism.

C)  Your reasoning is flawed.  Monetary incentive will spur development in any field.  This is where venture capitalists, patent attornies, and inventor-assistant companies find their niche.

D)  Your facts are sound.

E)  The solution is very simple actually.  Write an international law that makes the ISP an accomplice in the crime of unauthorized reproduction and distribution.   Watch what happens after that.