You've still yet to show me how it's theft. Now you seem to be going on how law makers need to change the laws to shoe horn it in for today's society, but that doesn't make it theft at the moment, which is my point.

I've read up on quite a few trials, involving the RIAA, Pirate Bay, profiting off of modding consoles and selling pirated software, and they're all tried the same way...under copyright infringement, not theft.

Of course piracy is theft.

The thief's argument is this stupid 'nobody is harmed if I make a copy'.

But what about taxes? Analogically you could say 'nobody is harmed if I don't pay taxes'. But fact is that the supposed receivers of the taxes do get harmed, as they don't get the resources they should have, and society condemns the act of not paying taxes, and tax evasion is seen as a serious crime by almost everybody, punished just as hard as theft is.

How is piracy theft? Every piracy case I've ever heard of has been tried under copyright infringement. Every case where someone brings a garbage bag into Walmart and stuffs it full of videogames gets tried under theft. They are both harshly punished, but they are not the same crime.

ok Onyx, lets look at my first post, shall we?  

what I said, first line, "I don't agree at all, theft is a very proper metaphor and is correctly used."  notice how I establish theft is a proper metaphor?  and then I go into my analogy about how dog walker not getting paid is theft.  

You then respond and tell me that my analogy is ridiculous and then liken it to somebody else saying stealing a life as if they were the same thing.  Which is, of course, not at all the same thing.  Of which, I went ahead and proved that not paying for a service is considered theft.  

So lets get down to it and finish this because it is late and you just seem to be picking at everything I say instead of conceding anything.  I will concede that piracy is not "theft" in legal terms, but law makers using the term theft metaphorically is perfectly legit and I stand by that.

Now, will you concede that my analogy was in fact a legit analogy.  That the stealing of a service is the same as stealing a tangible object?  That my original post was justified and you were wrong in your response?

For technical reasons. If you define theft from a wider perspective than just from a 'law-technical' perspective, then piracy just like tax evasion is a form of theft.

Or what else lay-mans term do we have for the phenomenon where people refuse to pay for services or don't pay their taxes? Un-altruism??

Long article but very thought provoking!
Some interesting points mentioned.

I'll concede that theft of a service is a good metaphor for theft of a tangible object, but I don't feel piracy is either of the two. The tangible object is the retail copy of the videogame and the service would be not paying for the development of the game, which is the employer's issue. The reason any metaphor needs to be used at all is because piracy is relatively new and people don't understand it yet. We've become so accustomed to our regular crimes that they don't need metaphors. We understand what theft is, murder is, etc. but since we don't as a society understand what piracy is, it must have a comparison point. Unfortunately, it's true comparison point, copyright infringement is not any more known to the masses.

So I'm not going to concede that theft is a good comparison point, because it's not. If it were, piracy would be tried like larceny is, but it isn't.

@Slimebeast-I don't see why we can't simply call it piracy. I always felt that was the layman's term for what is actually copyright infringement. Calling it theft is labeling it something it just isn't.

I feel it can be used as a slang term, in the same manner as anything can be stolen. Examples being "You stole my heart", "You stole her life", "You stole my innocence you filthy rapist", etc. These are all phrases to show something either tangible or not that was seemingly owned by someone was taken by another, but it's used as a phrase not to be taken literally. That's how I feel piracy can be called stealing, in that manner. I don't feel it should be called it in a manner where people say it's just like taking something from a store. That just isn't true, and that's how it gets misconstrued by many.

@Onyx
cool, sounds like a good stopping point. We may look at piracy differently, but don't worry, I'll still like you Onyx, you're a good mod :)

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.

I like his approach (read only a few §).

but yeah Piracy is more like getting on the train or bus without a ticket or listening to a tour guide near you when you're not part of the tour.... stuff that is not really frowned much uppon.
It's basically stuff that if goes unnoticed, will never bother anyone.

If you want to take the comparison to the absurd... parking tickets, who never had one? getting one means you either parked illegally (in essence, temporarily stealing space!) or that you didn't pay for your parking sport (oh yeah theft of service here)... I don't think anyone would use the word theft for that ^^ but it's the same analogy as for piracy.