> No one has been deprived of their property.
You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property. Still theft.
If you squat in an apartment, is that theft?
That's not a good analogy either. Apartment is a physical, limited resource, using it denies it to its owner and deteriorates its condition. Digital copy shares none of the properties with a physical resource.
Revenue from a purchase that I'm not going to make is non-existent. It can't be lost or gained.
>You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property
You have not; that revenue never existed.
Squatting is sometimes legal (in the UK at least) and squatters can end up owning the property if they live there long enough.
Speaking of CDs: the music industry (maybe RIAA was involved, I don’t know) seems to have figured out digital content delivery. I’ve got exactly one subscription for music: Spotify. I can get all the music I want to listen to with this, more than I could ever get when I used BitTorrent (public trackers were sometimes limited, and seeding on ADSL was hard). If they were to raise the price, I’d still use it. There are issues with how artists are remunerated for their work, but the problem of distribution is basically solved. Why can’t the film industry do this?