Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.

Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.

Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.

There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.

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tzs 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.

People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001873

	▲	bsimpson 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Language is complex and nuanced. Identity theft is an interesting edge case - your identity is an intangible, but it's also not something that someone else can use without harming you. They're effectively stealing your reputation. It's not a physical thing, but especially in the age of digital tracking, there's only one instance of it. Regardless of the linguistic semantics, the campaign to conflate piracy and stealing was a manipulative mind game that tried to dissuade people from a common activity by overstating its harms. Pirating a movie is victimless, except for aggregated market effects where too much piracy can impact the financial viability of film production. It's very different than stealing, which has a discrete victim. If you download a movie or a game without authorization, that's a societal no-op, unless it's a thing you would have paid money for. At scale, pirates do include people who would have paid, which is problematic for the film business. That's bad and worth solving, but it's not the same as stealing.

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throwawayxcmz 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you consider fair evasion theft?

	▲	defrost 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably). Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
	▲	beambot 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus? Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity. You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B. This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.