| >>>You can try but you'll never be able to rationalize stealing from someone. Especially when you use someone(s) else's actions to try to justify stealing from them. The supporters of a too-strict, repressive form of copyright often use words like “stolen” and “theft” to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth. Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The supporters of repressive copyright are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says. To refute them, you can point to this real case which shows what can properly be described as “copyright theft.” Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn't make it wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that “piracy” and “theft” are smear-words. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft |
Stealing from others habitually is a very bad decision. You can justify it using any inner dialog you like.
The only caution is this: there are consequences to bad decisions you've made.
Here is the biggest consequence: if you purposely decide to hurt someone else (financially in this case), unless you are sociopathic/career criminal, you'll have an internal conflict about it. You will 'explain it away' so it doesn't feel as bad: "I do this because the law is unfair" or "everyone else is doing it".
YOU ARE LYING TO YOURSELF. You know darn well you shouldn't act that way. Once you start lying to yourself, you're going to green-light lying to yourself again.
For example: If asked in a job interview with the IRS "let's say we hire you and you have access to the IRS secure network, and after a week you discover that a lot of your IRS coworkers change personal data in our computer system and underpay their taxes. And you find your coworkers also download and seed torrent clouds with copyrighted material. Which activity would you find acceptable?"
YOU'D HAVE TO LIE TO THE IRS INTERVIEWER!! See? You'd have to say "I would never cheat on my taxes. And I download copyrighted material and seed with copyrighted material all the time."
YOU WOULDN'T SAY THAT!
Nope, you wouldn't get hired if you admitted to the IRS interviewer -- OR ANY OTHER COMPANY INTERVIEWING YOU FOR A JOB -- that you make illegal, unauthorized use of copyrighted works.
Why wouldn't you admit to the IRS job interviewer you seed torrents with copyrighted works without the owner's permission?
BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT'S WRONG. That's why.
RECAP: (1) you're stealing from an artist by not paying royalties on their film/music/etc. when using sites like KAT; (2) YOU'RE LYING TO YOUR FUTURE EMPLOYER in a job interview.
Slippery slope. In managing large groups of tech workers, what I discovered was this: if an employee is unethical or dishonest in one area of life, they seem to have a hard time restricting those bad decisions to only one area.