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.