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I think, and have always thought, that piracy is stealing. I don't say this in a sanctimonious way, as if I'm somehow above it - I used to pirate stuff quite freely in my younger days. I regret it now, but I absolutely stole that software/etc.
The alternative here is to not consume it at all, not to pay for it. IMO what you're doing is no different morally than seeing a restaurant whose owner you dislike, so you dine and dash rather than paying the bill. I get why you're saying you aren't willing to countenance paying them money, but I don't see how that justifies theft. It's not like you need this stuff to live or anything.
Piracy might be morally wrong, but I've always felt like the attempt to compare it to "stealing" is incorrect. It's in a separate category. If I steal an apple, the merchant doesn't have the apple any more. If I pirate a movie, no merchant has been deprived of a DVD or anything like that - there's just one more copy of that movie in the world.
Imagine I had a matter duplicator. I walk up to your car, duplicate it, hotwire the copy and drive away. Did I steal your car? The only moral violation I think I might have done there is violating your privacy, depending on what was in the car when I copied it.
Now, I acknowledge that in a world with widespread matter duplication, the government might impose limitations on the use of matter duplication, so that creators are incentivized to create and innovate and produce new products. But I almost think this is getting the obvious funding model backwards. In a world where it's easy to create a copy, but hard and resource intensive to create an original, it's foolish to stop the creation of copies. Money needs to enter the system somewhere, but the distribution step isn't the most obvious place for that to happen. Instead, it makes sense to me to use a patronage/crowd-funding model.
Car companies would put together a proposal that says, "We'll create a car with features X, Y, and Z and we need to collect $A in order to make it worth our while." Then people who like their cars can pay into the crowd-funding scheme, and after car is created, people can use their matter replicators to make perfect copies of the car.
I feel like media companies have resisted moving to funding models that are a better fit for the world we live in, and trying to stop the creation of new copies when literally every person has the means of creating a copy in their pocket is Quixotic at best, whatever it might mean for morality.
This is the usual argument that piracy is not stealing, yeah. I've never found it persuasive. IMO the salient thing which defines stealing isn't that it's zero-sum, it's that you're taking something which doesn't belong to you. So it doesn't matter that you are just copying bits, it's still stealing.
I mean, yeah I agree that media companies are being idiotic. They have resisted new methods of doing business at every step of the way, right up until their hand is forced and it turns out they actually make more money the new way. But that doesn't mean it's OK to just steal their shit, nor that the law should turn a blind eye to it. Kind of like I was saying in my post above: if companies are retarded in their business practices you should by all means not do business with them, but it doesn't justify stealing from them.
The reason theft is wrong is because you are depriving someone of their property, the use of said property, and indirectly the time and effort put into creating/obtaining that piece of property.
This is why the matter replicator thought experiment is salient. If someone came up to me and said, can I have your car for free, I'd say no. However, if instead they wanted to merely duplicate it perfectly at no cost to me, I would instead agree.
I disagree. Theft is wrong because taking something which doesn't belong to you is inherently wrong. As I said, that's why I don't consider the copying distinction salient.
"Taking" harms someone due to deprivation of the old owner, not possession by the new one. Copying is not taking in any meaningful sense. There is no moral case against copying in and of itself; you can argue that since we have laws against it, those laws should be followed, and you can argue that creating and enforcing these laws is net-positive for everyone, but the act itself is clearly net-positive in its first-order effects.
You're playing silly semantic games with "taking". To take something does not require deprivation of possession, but even if it did that's a poor hinge for your argument. You're nitpicking my word choice, not offering a substantive objection.
I would disagree and say you are the one playing a semantic game here.
Taking implies that there is some thing (item) which you now have which no one else can now have because you have it.
That is simply impossible in the case we're talking about.
Again: that is not part of what it means to take something. But even if it were, that is still not a substantive objection to my point. That is nitpicking my choice of words, not actually a meaningful argument against my position.
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