The victim of identity theft is deprived of their credit rating, reputation, etc. Credit is a resource that gets used up as you use more of it or take out loans and don't pay them back. Making a copy of a digital file has no similar effect on the original owner of the file.

Even if, you leave the original in a pristine state, the fact that multiple copies are available and can be used (for good or nefarious purpose), dilutes or erodes the value of the original.

And this is true for both digital content or something as intangible as an identity.

So I am not really convinced by the simple argument that since the original still exists untouched, everything is fine. Yes, this is surely convenient and better for the original author/owner/creator, but not enough to say nothing harmful happened.

There are multiple copies of the Mona Lisa. Many, many millions of reproductions. Is the value of the original Mona Lisa diminished because of it?

Time and labor are resources that get used up too.

You're paying for the creator's time and labor. Taking the product of that time and labor without compensation is theft.

That is the common rebuttal, but if someone illegally downloads a film he or she never intended to purchase or rent anyway, then that argument does not hold. Even if the choice is between buying something legally and downloading it for free illegally, that word does not apply.

Loss of income does not equal theft.

Whether you have then been wronged or not is another discussion with valid arguments on both sides.

If you did not want "to purchase or rent " legally why is it ok to do it illegally? Is it that you did not purchase or rent it because you knew that you could simply steal it?

I am neither condemning nor condoning illegal downloading when you had no intention of paying for it — merely stating that it is not theft; the differences are just too great due to the nature of digital content (i.e., being able to effortlessly copy an item without incurring more than trivial costs).

Why not call it copyright infringement if you want a more neutral term?

Your identity may be intangible, but you can certainly be deprived of its proper use by someone successfully impersonating you. So unlike digital piracy (for want of a better term) something is taken from you in a manner that precludes your own use of it.

More to the point though, labelling the act of downloading the latest film as theft is not conductive to a discussion about the moral justification of piracy, because you are using loaded language to condemn it even before presenting an argument. That is, there appears to be no strong consensus that piracy falls under what is commonly referred to as theft.

(I am under the impression that the term digital piracy did stick regardless of one's position in that debate.)

> What about identity theft ?

This is also a inconvenient word, though for different reasons.

There really is no such thing as identity theft. Rather, some organizations occasionally fail at authenticating people (that is: they fail to correctly determine the identity of people). Usually because they use obviously unreliable methods for doing so (like, asking for information that is semi-public, like date of birth or SSNs, which obviously cannot be used to reliably determine your identity). Then, after they failed at that, and believed some random person's unsubstantiated claim that they were you, and as a result gave that person access to something that they shouldn't have, they try to deflect their responsibility for that failure by claiming some bullshit about "identity theft".