[nbouscal]

I inadvertently focused this discussion too much on the duplicability aspect of the argument, when there are other factors at play as well. For example, if someone purchases a song and then plays it on speakers, and you are nearby and listen to it, I've never heard someone claim that you've stolen the music. Similarly, if you go to a music video on youtube, then listen to it while switching to another tab, you also have not stolen the music. Yet if you download the exact same song from a torrent site, then listen to it, and then delete it, the claim is that you have stolen the music. The dividing line here seems arbitrary and difficult to pin down. In every case, you had the same auditory experience. In the latter two cases, you had the same sequence of bits stored in memory, the same instructions execute on your processor. Yet only in the latter case have you stolen something. So, what is the property? What, exactly, is it that you have stolen? The fact that this isn't completely trivial to answer is my justification for claiming that there are, at the very least, some shades of grey in this issue.