[neycoda]

"Stealing" has been used as a common word for "copying without permission" in the digital age. To try to play word games by trying to walk back the definition of stealing to mean only "taking someone's physical property" is completely pointless and futile unless you're just trying to feel OK with yourself copying without permission.

If I produce and distribute content like music or videos, it's fair for me to want people that want to rent or own it to pay for it. I put a lot of time and effort into it, I have to manage and market it, maybe store it, and I want to make a living at it.

If people are stealing it, ahem, copying without permission, it undercuts my living. I have a right to earning from my work, and you don't have a right to just download it or copy it or distribute it to others without me getting paid for it. It's literally preventing earnings for me that would otherwise happen if you didn't copy it without permission (ahem, stealing).

[vehemenz]

"Stealing" is morally charged and too associated with the loss of property to be a fair or accurate term here. It's not word games; it's conceptual analysis and a basic understanding of rhetoric.

Digital piracy, broadly speaking, is unauthorized copying. Depending on the context, it could be theft. Sometimes that theft is legal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Other times that theft is illegal, but people feel it shouldn't be on moral grounds. Sometimes, it's just not theft at all.

[partitioned]

Yeah but if you sell them something and they click “buy” or “purchase” and not “rent” and then you revoke the license years later you’re the thief, not the person downloading what they purchased on utorrent.

[jonhohle]

I’m increasingly convinced that the right of first sale must extend to copyrighted work licenses to individuals to rebalance the benefit to society. Movies, video games, and music are all “sold” primarily in a way that prevents them from being shared, lent, or transferred to others. Books are probably the only medium left that is still primarily physical (71% in 2022).

[scotty79]

> I have a right to earning from my work

You really don't. If you don't work on things that are profitable at the moment you don't have any innate right to earn anything from your work. Right to earn comes from specific agreements with employers. Earning might also come from innate profitability but it's not a right then as the profitability is ephemeral thing.

[Sakos]

When the people who sell it to us are free to revoke access at any time, then there's no walking back being done by us. We're just recognizing that the accepted state of things was reneged on by one party and they can't insist on being in the right when we decide we're not obligated to follow their arbitrary rules anymore.

[polartx]

This is why you’re wrong:

[Dowling v. United States](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/)

Tl;dr: Supreme Court ruled bootlegged/pirated media does not constitute theft as it does not deprive the legal owner of his/her property. That’s why they had to invent the term—“Copyright infringement”