[chrisbennet]

"Of course you can champion public food banks, and simultaneously oppose stealing food. Don't be ridiculous!

All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice."

Fixed it for you. ;-)

[scorchpt]

That is a fallacious argument. Food stealing (which you said) and food replication (which would be the fair equivalent) are different things, as are book stealing and book replication. I'm not making any judgements about neither of those, just pointing out the false equivalency.

Would you oppose if someone managed to buy just one single piece of food, then replicate it at a molecular level and at virtually no cost, and distribute it for free to the whole world, so that no one would ever have to starve ever again?

"Of course you can champion public food banks, and simultaneously oppose food replication and sharing. Don't be ridiculous! All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice."

[bediger4000]

I don't understand how food, a consumable, physical object with a production cost much greater than zero, is the same as a book, which is a non-consumable physical object with a large production cost, or a file, which is not a physical object, and has a production cost so close to zero that it's not worth measuring. Can you explain a bit further how this "fixes" my statement, or my accusation of inconsistent or illogical thinking?

[chrisbennet]

Both are easily available without stealing - books (videos, ebooks) from libraries and food from food banks. Heck the files that are shared are usually very cheap - why not just rent/buy them?

Some will make the argument that things that are easy to duplicate are OK to steal. If I wrote a book, I can assure you it would not have a low production cost however easy it was to duplicate/steal/"share".

What is really at work here is that people have become accustom to stealing easy to duplicate works and now they will use all kinds of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they aren't actually thieves.

[bediger4000]

Wait, copyright infringement isn't theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States

So you're just wrong, technically as well as practically.

[chrisbennet]

Interesting. I didn't know that.

What is the correct term for taking something that isn't yours?

[bediger4000]

Spoken like a true gentleman.

I suppose that you're referring to "theft", but copyright infringement isn't theft: it's just infringement. So, mind your terminology in the future, and you'll be just fine.