[nlawalker]

I agree that it's dishonest to call piracy theft in the truest sense of the word, but I feel like the primary reason that most people rail against the terms being conflated is because theft is a more familiar criminal concept to most people and thus has a stronger connotation, and pirates would prefer it if piracy wasn't actually a crime.

I strongly disagree that it is worse to steal something than it is to make a copy of it (EDIT: when doing so is a violation of someone else's right to sell it), especially when the "something" in question is digital data. Unlike a painting, a copy of digital data is functionally equivalent to the master - neither of them can be called a forgery, nor does one have more or less value than the other. Additionally, the ability to produce copies of data is not a talent or a skill. It is available to everyone.

This brings us to the center of the "information is free" argument: digital data is essentially worthless, because it can be copied infinitely for essentially no cost. The only way to associate value with it is to make it artifically scarce, i.e. control copying.

Information may want to be free, but the people who produce it want to be paid. The people who take the time and expend the effort to arrange or gather data often do so with the intention of selling copies for money, or with the intention of keeping one or a very limited number of copies for themselves (such as the source code for your new startup. If piracy's OK, I hope you don't mind me grabbing a copy and starting my own business.)

TL;DR: Piracy is theft of the author's ability to sell and protect their work. Some may argue that works that can be replicated for free should not be able to be sold, but I disagree. I like commercial software in addition to free software, and I like being paid to be a software developer.