Theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given. Now when you copy someone else's code, at the end of the process this person still owns this code. He still has it on his disk, and he still can use it. He is in the exact same situation as he was before you copied it. Time spent in developpment has value, but since the product has zero marginal cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost), then this timework loses its value as soon as only one item is sold. It is just the same for a poet who writes a master-piece. His work may have great artistic value, but since it can be learned by heart by anyone, it has no commercial value. The functionality provided by the code is not any good reason for value. Again, this value might exist, but it doen't mean that it is a commercial value. The air I breave has much value for me, but it's free. We use the internet protocol every day, but it's free. You developp using a programming language that has been designed by someone else, but it's free. And yet, you want to charge people for a few lines of code that you wrote using these free tools. Shame on you. Software is information. Information is knowledge. Knowledge should be shared.