[earbitscom]

If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution.

I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.

[waqf]

"exercised [...] shares"? That's not a meaningful sentence, so it's not clear what situation you're trying to describe.

In any case, either your partners can (in this example) dilute you or they can't. Neither of these is a fundamentally dishonest situation, you just have to make sure that everybody and their lawyer is on the same page as to which it is (and write your contracts accordingly).

Same with copyrights. People will be understandably aggrieved if they create works believing that the law will protect them and then it doesn't. But if we change the law so that new works created in future are not eligible for copyright protection, there's no such problem (because everybody should know what to expect).

[earbitscom]

Sorry...authorized shares. I guess your commitment to semantics really does outweigh your commitment to productive discourse. I think we're done here.

[graphene]

I think the essential difference is that shares in a company are not pure information that can be reproduced at negligible cost.

Point is that even though "shareholder rights" are somewhat abstract, they are less at odds with the laws of physics than "intellectual property rights".