Not at all what I’m arguing. Dropping content and claiming you don’t own something that they position as “buying” is stealing too. I’m not arguing that and have not said what you’re claiming anywhere. You’re arguing a straw man.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

if a pirates copy was not available.

This is exactly why my calculation does work. If a pirated copy was not available, they wouldn’t be able to consume the media without paying for it.

We can summarise all of these by saying “theft is taking with the intent to deprive the owner of said possession”.

Yes… and as I’ve pointed out to you repeatedly, we’re disagreeing on what is being stolen. You’re arguing that it’s not theft because no one is deprived of the media. That is not the argument. I’m arguing that they’re being deprived of the income. You are stealing money from the creator.

You’re assuming that the person would have paid for the media had they not pirated it.

No, I’m not. I’m not assuming anything. I’m flat out asserting that, if they had not been able to pirate it, they would not be able to consume the media unless they paid for it. This is a fact that you cannot dispute.

You’re poor because people didn’t want to buy it.

If they didn’t want to buy it, then they aren’t entitled to still make use of it.

It’s not a strawman argument, it’s a tangental argument that is very relevant to the subject at hand. Pirated versions are sometimes better than the official versions.

It is a straw man because I never made that argument. I never stated or made any kind of position about pirated versions and how they compare to official versions. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere in this thread that piracy can be justified in any number of situations. Whether it’s justified or not doesn’t change that it’s stealing.

No, you’re misunderstanding the term “stolen” and “theft”. You should really look it up.

I am not. In fact, people have posted the definitions here. Again, we’re just disagreeing on what is being stolen.

Either way, I’m done here because you’re continuing to argue straw men, ignore the most central idea of my argument, and then claiming that I’m misunderstanding something when the entire point of my argument is how the two things are fundamentally the same and result in the creator not being paid for their work.

I have pointed out how they’re different, from my first comment to my last.

I said materially different. You’ve pointed out ways they are different that have no bearing on my point and aren’t relevant to it. You’ve mostly focused on the legal aspects of copyright infringement vs. physical theft which has nothing to do with my argument.

And now you’ve done it again. You’re arguing the legality of copyright infringement and how it differs from physical theft which has no bearing on my position.

But what you’re ignoring is the idea of whether or not they would have bought instead of pirating.

I’m not ignoring it. I’ve literally stated the argument against that statement several times - if they didn’t buy it, they couldn’t consume it if piracy didn’t exist.

only consumed the material because it was free

It wasn’t free. That’s why it’s stealing.

The reality is that most of the content people pirate is not content they would have paid for,

Then they shouldn’t be able to consume it! There’s no issue if they wouldn’t have paid for it if they don’t consume it. The whole argument that they wouldn’t have bought it becomes bullshit as soon as they do consume it because, without piracy, they would not have been able to consume it.

I have pointed that out as a possibility. Not consuming it at all, though, is not theft precisely because the person isn’t consuming it.

Not in the US. The content of my courses (I had a total of 9 years of undergraduate study lol, in 2 different universities, in both science and engineering) was all in the lecture slides/notes.

Ok, so as I suspected. If your classes weren’t lecture based, you’d probably be in a similar situation then. That’s not really a refutation of the point, though.

However, that doesn’t mean you have suffered a loss

This is the entire crux of my argument, though. If they’re playing the game, then you have suffered a loss because, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to play the game. The alternative is that the game has to be DRM’d or somehow otherwise inconvenienced and that’s just bullshit. Why is it so hard to just admit that you shouldn’t be able to play something that you haven’t paid for and that, if you do, you’re stealing? There’s no judgement on that. I don’t care if that’s what you want to do. I just think people should be honest and admit that that’s what they’re doing.

The middle man kills good business far more than any pirate. I’m sure Google and Apple made a satisfactory profit off your apps, even if you suffered a loss.

Agree with this and everything above that you wrote. I feel like that explicitly disproves your argument, though, that piracy is only a service/quality issue. I’m very familiar with what Gabe has said and mostly agree with his position but that’s an entirely different argument, yet again, than what I’ve been making. Gabe doesn’t pretend that people pirating games aren’t stealing them. He’s just arguing that there are service reasons for why people might pirate them that have nothing to do with just the cost of the game.

The movie is good, so fewer people pirate it, because they’re also happy to pay for it.

Again, if this were true and this simple, no good movies would be pirated. And yet they are.

Nonsense. You’re just continuing to be dishonest. You do not have access to their server. You destroyed the product you have. This is like saying that if you took a television and destroyed it that the TV isn’t gone because there are more TVs in the manufacturer’s warehouse.

Then you’re proving my point that you’ve paid for the rights to a copy of that file

No, I’m not. That’s not my argument so I’m not proving anything. You’re arguing a straw man and not what I’ve actually said.

I guess you’re making up your own definition for ignoring too.

Ok, well… bye.

No, of course not. They’re explicitly allowing you to have it for free. It can’t be piracy if they’re not selling their work. The entire premise is that, if they’re selling it, then the trade is payment in exchange for their work.

This is false. “Pay for it” or “Pirate it” are not the only 2 options available.

What are the other options then?

If I snap the that disc, I’ve done nothing at all to the file, nor the content.

This is just a flat-out lie. If you snap the disc, the file is gone unless you previously copied it through some other method. That’s the entire distinction between this physical media and the intangible product on the disc. You’re continuing to be dishonest.

If you want to be consistent, then you’d have to assert that if that DVD becomes scratched and no longer plays, I have to delete my backup otherwise I’m stealing.

I do not have to assert any such thing. You’ve already paid for the content. You can do whatever you want with it for your own personal use. That’s not what my argument is.

No, it’s the red herring you keep pushing.

Ok. Ignoring it yet again. Either address it or stop arguing.

Netflix Amazon funimation and other distributers often just bid on anime projects and don’t specifically order one particular series.

These are distributors and they don’t have a monopoly on anime or manga. They just happen to be the producers who pay for the anime and manga that you like. That’s not an argument against my point.

If buying digital products isn’t owning then pirating isn’t theft. Funimation just said fuck you to all their consumers who ‘bought’ their digital products.

Nonsense. This is an entirely different argument than what I’m making. I think it’s false advertising and theft just as much that these companies use the term “Buy” for something you don’t actually own. That is irrelevant to whether or not piracy is theft. Two wrongs don’t make it right.

I’m not arguing about Funimation’s actions. I’ve already said multiple times that that is also theft. That doesn’t make piracy not theft.

We are talking about copyright infringement.

We’re not. I’m not making any kind of legal distinction.

I think we just need to agree to disagree. You’re ignoring the very central part of my argument to try and argue the legal distinctions that are irrelevant to my point. If it’s just going to continue to be a semantic argument then I’m not interested in continuing.

I’ve explained how they are not.

You have not. I brought up a foundational argument that you have yet to refuse. You just keep repeating they’re different as if it’s a factual statement, completely ignoring that I’ve pointed out a fundamental way in which they are not that is outside of any legal or semantic meaning.

You are claiming that a potential revenue is akin to a loss. That is a flasehood.

It is not. If someone ingested that media then it ceases being “potential revenue”. In the same way that a “potential” theft of a physical good isn’t the same as the realized theft, the only situation where there is no loss is one where the person didn’t pay for the good and didn’t make use of/get the benefit of the good.

You haven’t though.

Yes, I have. You said “copyright infringement” which is a legal term only. Copyright infringement and theft are not the same. Piracy and theft are. You can’t conflate copyright infringement and piracy because that only is meaningful in a legal sense.

Again, you’re just making a semantic distinction and yet my distinction and argument are far more foundational than that.

they spend their time on the work and then relinquish the product of that work at the time and price of their choosing

…to the people who have paid for that work.

An creator doesn’t possess the less by their work being copied.

Yes, they do. Otherwise, you’d have to pay for it. Without paying for it, you would’t be able to consume it.

Copying is not taking.

The media itself is not what’s being stolen. It’s the income being stolen by ingesting/consuming the media. If you don’t pay for it, you don’t consume it unless you steal it.

Is art only valuable if it can be profited from?

I have never made that argument nor that point.

What harm has been done to a baker if I take a loaf of bread from their trash?

You didn’t pay for a loaf of bread. This is disingenuous anyways because bakers bake their goods in order to get paid for them.

system depends on it, not because it’s ethical or justified.

An entirely different argument than what I’m making. A different system that what we live in doesn’t exist currently so that entire argument is meaningless and piracy doesn’t somehow magically bring about that other system.

We produce gratuitous surplus, we can provide the means of living to everyone without concern for exchanging it for labor.

Again with the fantasy. I agree with your fantasy. I would love that. We don’t live in a world where people don’t need money to survive. Full stop.

You just said that it wasn’t a straw man (a term whose definition is ‘arguing against a point that wasn’t made’) and then admitted that I never made that point. If I never made that point, then it is, by definition, a straw man argument.

It’s not just the legal sense, it’s the core definition of the term you’re misassociating.

It is not. We’re simply disagreeing on what is being stolen. You’re arguing that, because the media itself isn’t stolen (it is infinitely reproducible), it’s not theft. I’m arguing that it’s income that’s being stolen.

Your argument is flawed, because piracy is different to theft.

No, my argument is specifically that piracy and theft are not different. My argument can’t be flawed because they’re different if the argument is that they’re different. That’s circular reasoning. You can’t just say that they are different without pointing out how they are materially different in a way that a creator is properly compensated for the content that they created since that is the entire crux of my argument. If a creator isn’t getting paid for someone consuming their work, then that’s theft. We don’t allow people to consume anything else they haven’t paid for in any other context so, unless you can make a meaningful distinction for a creator, you haven’t actually addressed the central premise of my argument.

There is a potential loss with piracy, but that isn’t theft.

It is not a potential loss, though. If someone consumes that media then it is a real, tangible loss. They consumed the media without paying for it. The idea that they may not have paid for it anyways is unresolvable with the idea that, if they hadn’t paid for it and piracy wasn’t an option, then they wouldn’t have been able to consume that media.

Man, I feel so privileged in that I didn’t have any mandatory texts to buy for my degree.

How in the world is that possible? How could a teacher possibly assign any sort of assignment if you didn’t have a shared textbook or curriculum? Or is this another semantic argument where you didn’t have to buy it but were allowed to rent or otherwise borrow the books?

Or, at least, the level of piracy occurring is a good indicator of how bad the product/service is,

That’s not true in the slightest. If it was, none of the games on Steam would be pirated. Games that cost 99 cents wouldn’t be pirated. The fact that both of those situations exist is proof that piracy as an indicator is completely detached from both of those things.

I’ll give a personal example but fear it will just lead to more needless pedantry. My studio used to create mobile games. We initially charged 99 cents for the game because we didn’t want to do microtransactions or any of that other nonsense. Within the first week, the app showed up on piracy sites but we had code that detected when the dial-home for analytics was bypassed. We had no DRM on there, we didn’t restrict the pirated versions and, in some cases we actually uploaded copies to these sites ourselves. When we looked at analytics for months afterward, the people playing the game the most were the people that pirated it. They can’t claim that they didn’t find value in the game because they were playing it every day and yet they didn’t pay for it. In the end, we had to stop producing games because we couldn’t get people to pay for the game despite them playing it regularly. I’m not sure how someone can resolve the idea that the game was bad and so they didn’t think they should pay for it with the fact that they played it as much as they did (more even than the players that did pay for it).

Comparing Steelbook movies to piracy is a bit of a false argument. That’s a physical good. I’m sure the movies themselves do suffer some amount of piracy - however the product is so good that people do buy it.

That is entirely my point with the example, though. With Steelbooks, it isn’t the movie in the case that’s the good. The case is what people are paying for despite being able to pirate the movie within.

The limited physical good is the plastic circle.

This is just dishonest, yet again. Without that physical good, you cannot distribute the file copied on that disc indefinitely. The entire reason the current situation exists as it does is because of the distinction between tangible and intangible goods which, again, you keep ignoring.

Your definition is wrong, because your definition of theft is incomplete.

It is not. The author is deprived of something tangible. They are deprived of the cost that they are asking for the exchange of being able to consume what they created.

Copyright infringement only involves the potential profit. There is no actual loss.

We’re not talking about copyright infringement. That is a legal term that only applies to the legality of the action. I am not discussing the legality.

There is a potential loss, but not an actual loss.

This is not true and, since you continue to try and argue the legal matter, it has already been determined that piracy is not a potential loss, even though that’s not at all what my argument is about.

Digital piracy is not theft, it’s less than that. It may be wrong, it may be similar, but it’s not theft.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Whether something is tangible or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether someone who creates something should be paid by the people who consume the thing they created.