See, here's the biggest problem with "copyright infringement" as a term; it's too broad. It covers $random_co using your stuff commercially, but it also covers your gran downloading songs from sketchy websites in Russia.
I don't think even the most die-hard of $(insert favorite adjective form of term under discussion) would excuse the first, but quite a few normal, reasonable people would excuse the second, in part, because the economic "harm" is unambiguous in the first case, and impossible to quantify (possibly negative) in the second.
Large multibillion dollar organizations suing grandmothers, printers, and dead people, and claiming $(insert noun form of term) is responsible for $dubious_bignum in "lost sales" isn't helping.
Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same
I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them.
You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods.
[1]: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-...
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-ti...
Do note that the same people who were pirating games/movies i Decades ago are now making them or buying them.
Not to mention that There's more content to consume today - for free, than there is to buy.
Programmers are creators of lots of copyrighted works. Claiming that programmers just want to dismantle somebody else's livelyhood is misguided when we use on the copyright system heavily in our work as well.
On another note, I'm sad to see you downvoted. Your point of view is widely shared by the public and if we're going to enact any change, we as a community should listen to and think about how to address your points.
Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators, so it seems moral to them to more or less destroy their wages, force them to make money not off of creating, but touring, beg for tips via Patreon, etc. If the same thing was done to them, they'd be howling how unfair it is. How about your job pays you little to nothing and you need to advertise and get people to support you monthly on a crowdfunding site just to make ends meet in your field?