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.