Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".
The idea that every illegitimate copy is a lost sale is old and tired. Most people wouldn't mind enjoying plenty of entertainment products that would otherwise never pay for (regardless of whether a free alternative exists or not).
Since you talk about game developers, just today was "Hollow Knight: Silksong" released, a game with no DRM (which means it will be on every pirate site the minute it releases, something that was known beforehand), and had just a few hours later over half a million concurrent players on Steam, one of the many storefronts where the game is available.
No industry has ever been killed by piracy, not even close, and the cases of musicians, authors, and game developers who have attributed piracy to their success keeps piling up. I really don't get why people who in other aspects of life try to look at the facts of things keep arguing so fervently about something proven to be, at best, a net positive and, at worst, a way for more people to enjoy arts and entertainment that they would never had otherwise.
If you don't get money for your works, you might be unlucky, or you might just not be good enough to make what people want [to pay for]. As a game developer myself, that's certainly my case. I hope to one day make something so many people care about, that they go out of their way to pirate it, because statistically that means I'd sell a lot of copies.
Sure, 100% of piracy wouldn't translate to sales but from my own perspective - I pirate. A lot. Hypocritcal for arguing about this? Yes definitely. But if there is a movie I really wanted to see, such as Tom Cruise's last Mission Impossible entry, and the concept of downloading a movie for free didn't exist - I would pay for it (Whether it be a cinema screening, a digital purchase, DVD, or specific streaming service). Otherwise I could never see it [Maybe on Free TV at some down the line?]. However, I do know that we live in an age where every bit of media can be stolen so I am less likely to pay, and know at some point after threatrical release it will be available online. And I was right. I kept my $20 and enjoyed the movie.
And I'm not arguing it's killing the industry. Shoplifting exists today but brick and mortar isn't dead (Well, it is dying but that's because of online shopping). But stores would see a little less profit due to shop lifting. Very similar to piracy.
It is stealing, and using an out dated definition to try and paint it as anything else is a wild take.
I hope you do make it as a developer one day, and create a hit game, and you have some telemetry showing 10000 people playing and check your Sales to see 200 copies sold and you tell me if you think you haven't been robbed.
> akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
If a corporation walks up to you, taps you with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate of you slowly materializes, then walks away with the duplicate, would you consider it theft or copyright infringement?
You would argue they are depriving you of a scarce material resource: your knowledge and experience that make you a valuable, esteemed professional. The corporation would argue that nobody is removing your copy of knowledge and experience, and they would not have hired you in the first place anyway.
> You would argue...
I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.
Is your hypothetical an invasion of privacy? Yes.
Is it enslavement of the duplicate? Very probably, yes. You don't specify what the corporation will do next, but I don't see how they'll avoid it.
Is it theft of my knowledge and experience? No. I'm not deprived of them, and would still have them after.
Is it copyright infringment? Possibly, but not necessarily of "my" copyright. I remember plenty of copyrighted music and can hum it on a whim. Presumably the duplicate could do so also, so that music has been copied, along with rest of me.
You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient and from deprivation of specific property to deprivation of natural rights. And you've genuinely lost me with what this hypothetical is even supposed to prove.
Again, it's possible for things to not be theft and also still be wrong for other reasons. Theft is a specific wrong. Words have distinct meanings.
> I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.
I would. I was steelmanning your argument. Your bad faith is showing.
> You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient [...] deprivation of natural rights
You have made a wild jump from a work of art to a car without any issue. I have never talked about deprivation of natural rights.
> Theft is a specific wrong.
Define theft then, and let's see if it applies to downloading a pirate copy of a music album.
Theft is taking possessions away from someone else, and as a result depriving the victim of that property. The legal threshold would also include an intent to deprive (mens rea) in most countries.
Copyright infringement is making a copy of something for purposes beyond fair use when the government has declared it the exclusive right of someone else to make such copies. The legal threshold would also include evidence of harm.
The jump from a digital file to a physical car is specifically to demonstrate that these things are not equivalent. Copying a file does not deprive someone of that file. To make the physical world work similarly to the digital, we have to add magic that violates conservation of energy and duplicate a car at effectively zero marginal cost. To make the digital world work similarly to the physical, we would have to end general purpose computing and lock down all computers such that files can only exist in one place and can only be moved, not copied. Both transformations in an attempt to achieve equivalence are obviously absurd. That's the point.
These things (theft and copyright infringement) are both wrongs, but they are strongly distinct wrongs.
The jump from inanimate things (files and cars) to sentient life (human duplicates) in your example is still unclear to me. It looked to me like you were assuming I would think of it as theft if a corporation made a duplicate of me. So I gave several reasons other than theft for me, or anyone, to think of that as wrong. What are you trying to demonstrate, given that I still don't think your example would be theft and have other reasons---those deprivations of rights---to think of it as wrong?
> I was steelmanning your argument.
No, because what you brought up was not my argument.
Steelmanning, when the counterparty is present, involves restating someone's argument until they agree, "yes, that's a fair summary of my argument," and then critiquing that.
You are strawmanning, not steelmanning: inventing a new example that the counterparty did not reference, which is substantively different from the argument actually made, and then critiquing that.
These apologetics for piracy are ancient and weren't good decades ago, let alone now. Yes, digital data has no scarcity. But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it. Someone worked hard on making that music (or game, or whatever), with society giving them the chance to turn a profit by selling copies to people. When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time. So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, piracy is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
Megacorporate propaganda conflating copyright infringement with violent raiders on the high seas is both decades old and completely ridiculous.
> But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it.
Please reply to what I wrote, not what you imagine I implied. Nowhere have I suggested copyright infringement is victimless. I have suggested it is more like a tort than a crime, but civil wrongs are wrongs against someone (i.e. a victim).
> When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time.
Please don't twist and abuse language in lieu of a sound argument. Stealing a person's time is already a specific thing: wage theft. It doesn't involve a nebulous social contract; it involves an actual contract between employer and employee for scarce time.
> So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, [copyright infringement] is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
People aren't entitled to whatever returns they fantasize about for a given business model. If technology obsoletes a competitive strategy, we all have to live in that new world. People are understandably upset, and understandably refer to a wrong (theft) that is familiar, sympathetic, and yet factually not the case.
Copyright infringement need not be understood as theft to be understood as wrong. Treating it as theft mischaracterizes the wrong and sets society on a path to criminal enforcement against civil violations, creeping restrictions on general purpose computing, and the growth of the surveillance state.
People who pirate in the year 2025 are almost definitely going to be spending more on music (physical media, merch, tickets, etc) than the average Spotify subscriber. This was true ~20 years ago and given the ease of Spotify and the relative pain of pirating, I would imagine it's even moreso the case today. And even if they spend half a Spotify subscription on music, that's more money going to artists than a Spotify subscription giving them carte blanche access to most music.
The world in which I choose to live (which is seemingly getting further removed from 'shared reality') the meaning of words actually matter. I'm reminded of the classic Calvin & Hobbes strip[0] that ends "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding"
"Maybe by definition" does not a counter-argument start.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/words/comments/10k610a/calvin_and_h...