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You have to separate morality and legal technicalities to answer this properly. For the legal part, stealing is for physical objects, eg. the victim doesn't have disposal of this stolen good anymore. This is not true for intellectual «property» since it's a copy.
This is why copyright & copyright infringement has been created, whose original purpose was to protect authors from publisher and protect publishers that made advances to authors from other publishers. For the moral part, you have no clear answer, circulation of free copies obviously reduces revenues of authors, but also it allows access of content to people that wouldn't have paid for it anyways, case where the loss of revenue is shaky. To extend further, it's related to consumer frustration, while it's no question that being frustrated if you don't own a Ferrai is frivolous, if you can't afford it, you have to steal it from someone, the frustration occurred for copyright content is solely based on publisher/distributor strategy on maximizing revenue. The thing is, total revenue has a, albeit unknown, maximum theoretical possible, hence after a trigger frustration left is purely and solely a strategy to protect revenue.
In the end, you get frustrated people just to have copyright holders a better peace of mind and revenue, and nothing else, so there's a moral balance to keep that you can't reduce to a black and white situation. |