[anon_for_this_1]

So if someone hires me to do some work for them, and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what is that? There is no 'thing' in that case.

Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.

[cturner]

   > So if someone hires me to do some work for them,
   > and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what
   > is that?

Breach of contract. It's not related to property.

   > Piracy is similar. 

It's not. The dynamic of contract violation is not at all like the dynamics of rape, pillage or intellectual property violation.

[anon_for_this_1]

OK, so piracy is breach of contract. Still against the law and immoral, no?

[petercooper]

Someone hiring you and not paying you is a breach of contract but that's not the same as piracy. If I download the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, I've not breached a contract because I didn't enter into one (though I may have breached a contract with my ISP). The offense committed is copyright infringement and in many jurisdictions this is a civil offense rather than a criminal one (or, as in the US, there are conditions to turn it into a criminal one that very few downloaders would satisfy).

[qjz]

Not if the contract is itself illegal and/or immoral. A contract is not necessarily enforceable by virtue of it being a contract. But this is a straw man; the point is that the terms "piracy" and "theft" have been misappropriated to protect intellectual property, bringing along a lot of basic assumptions that can be justifiably challenged. Even the term "intellectual property" is vulnerable for the same reasons. The whole debate takes place in a virtual world where not everyone agrees to the same conditions. But the same could be said about the ownership of physical things, which probably originally meant whatever you possessed at the moment (a piece of food, a scrap of clothing, a hand weapon) and was eventually extended to mean whatever you could protect over longer periods of time (livestock, shelter, huge tracts of land). The concept of ownership is continuously evolving.

[sophacles]

What? So if I hire you and don't pay you, you can go back in time, thus not losing the hours of effort you will never get back? I strongly doubt this, but assuming it is true: why haven't you just invested in the stock market and made trillions of dollars yet?

With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?

If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.

[TimJYoung]

It's a free rider issue. Your ability to acquire software for free raises the price of that software for those that do pay. It's the same reason why taxes are not voluntary, because eventually the system would devolve into nobody paying, with the last few payers being considered "suckers".

As the ability to acquire the software for free increases for average consumers, the more expensive the software will become, with the singularity being that there's one copy, the original, for sale for thousands or millions of dollars. The cost of developing software must always be amortized across all future sales. It's disingenuous to imply that once the software is made, there are no further costs to the developer. The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.