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by qjz 5581 days ago
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.