So there's no possibility of an honest disagreement on this? Your opinion is fact, and everyone who disagrees must be rationalizing? If you really believe that, I don't know how a rational conversation is possible, so I hope it was hyperbole.

Take a close look at what you just said. AFAICT, you justs aid buying or trading used software is theft (at least if that software is still being sold new).

Also, for it to be theft, it requires that the party you're stealing from loses something. Now admitting, for the sake of discussion, the concept of counting unrealized potential revenue as a "loss"*, consider the case that someone may not even have enough money to purchase the software they pirate -- what has the copyright holder "lost" here? Initially, they have a certain amount of physical assets (e.g. boxed software). If I don't download it, they keep all their physical assets and I don't pay them any money. If I do download it, they still keep all their physical assets, and I don't pay them any money. They didn't lose anything by my downloading it, either vs. the initial state, or vs. the hypothetical state where I didn't copy that floppy, and where there is no loss there is no theft.

*Counting unrealized potential revenue as a "loss" is a dangerous doctrine, and one should carefully consider the implications before accepting it. For instance, if I want to sell, say, some NOK stock, this doctrine allows me to claim that people selling instead of buying it, and thus lowering the price I get, are stealing from me.

Not sure what you mean here -- if you're referring to the service of distributing that good, then you'd have a point in some cases. For example, if I offer software for download to paying users, and a paying user shares their auth credentials to allow everyone on the internet to download that data, sending my bandwidth bill through the roof, sure, that's some sort of "theft of services". But if I pay for a copy, then make copies and redistribute them at my own expense, I'm not making further use of that distribution service.

If, on the other hand, you mean the service of developing the software, producing the movie, etc., then no, a copy of the resulting work does not represent that service. The company speculatively does the development on their own dime, in hopes of earning back those costs, and turning a nice profit besides, on per-unit sales and/or licensing. Oddly enough, while we're so accustomed to this business model that it feels perfectly natural, it's only sustainable by virtue of special-interests legislation and an artificial scarcity caused by the government's continuous threat of force against people who would dare copy their own property.

What I think you mean to describe, the notion that one pays, not for a copy of a speculatively produced work, but for the service of creating that work^, does form a natural and sustainable business model that would work fine in the complete absence of copyright -- but that's absolutely not the system we have in place, because until recently, it's been much easier to bribe the government.to bully everyone than to fix your business model. Sorry if it is "rationalizing", but I've never found "do as I say, or men with guns will sieze your money/throw you in jail" to be a morally persuasive argument.

The advent of computers and later the internet has dropped the high entry barrier to piracy; now that you don't need a printing press, there's a lot more would-be pirates, and it's a lot harder to force them all into compliance with an artificial business model based on artificial scarcity. The transition is still underway, but it's just possible that it'll end with a proportionate increase in enforcement being seen as infeasible or inefficient, and an industry shift to saner business models.


^Anyone remember Dark Angel? Firefly? T:SCC? In a world where people who want to see a show pay for the show's further development, no reason any or all of them couldn't have gone on for several seasons, with hiatuses if the fanbase wasn't enough for a full season every year. For software, the examples are less obvious, but the principle's the same -- if you let customers pay for what they want/need, you'll be a lot better at delivering it than if you guess/study/analyze what they want, implement it, then see if anyone will buy it. Actually, Vista might be a good software example: of what wouldn't happen.