IMHO the defining part of theft / larceny is that the original owner can no longer use the thing that was stolen.

It’s hard to ignore the intuitive meaning of stealing an idea, as in stealing the benefit

People also say that someone stole their heart, but it does not mean that they have a gaping hole in their chest. Casual use of a language for narrative purposes is one thing, speaking about actual criminal activity another.

To be clear, I make some money on my IP (being a self-published author who sells his books) and I encountered people pirating scanned copies of my work. I do not mind on this scale, but I am aware that if someone just started publishing my books commercially and I had no copyright to protect me, I would be in trouble.

But it still wouldn't be theft, rather a foul kind of "competition". My physical books wouldn't disappear from my (rented) garage and readers who like me would still hopefully buy them directly on my e-shop.

The most sold book in the world, by a large margin, for a long long time, is The Bible. If genetic historians and biblical scholars succeed, perhaps someday the unknown decedents of the unknown authors and other known valid holders of IP rights, such as the decedents of Moses and brothers, sisters and cousins of Jesus, could one day be fairly compensated. But it would end up being everyone alive, so we should do that, fairly compensate all the IP holders for the unpaid use of all that IP, including all the movies and TV shows, and including all interest accrued across the centuries, and literally everyone will get rich off the proceeds of past, current and future Bible sales. Crazy idea, but it just might work.

Thank you.

And it's strange, in that you could become relevant and have your audience expanded by the infringers hand.

Question there is how to benefit from that...

Then you'd have to sue your business competitors if they manage to capture a part of your market. After all you've been deprived by them of the benefit of getting money from that part of the market.

This is basically how it works

This meaning of stealing relies on creating artificial scarcity. It doesn't seem that intuitive.

This definition is almost explicitly crafted to make IP seem worthless.

Information that requires investment to gain is considered valuable. This argument is basically "any job that isn't physical manufacturing should not be paid, since the ideas only spread instead of move."

Oh you spent $500m developing a novel cognitive treatment for ptsd and proving it works better than sota? Humanity thanks you! Enjoy your total loss."

Oh you wrote a book? Hopefully it wasn't a book on business building, since you'll be earning nothing for your effort.

Oh you're a consultant? How charitable of you!

You seem to lack the simplest terms when talking of IP laws. Copyright is something you infringe. You don't even say what you are referring to here by talking of "IP". The important stuff is always in details.

There's a large amount of misinformation and people lacking an understanding on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks. Making these threads repetitive to read. Always such a pointless anecdotes such as yours, truncating all IP systems under "IP laws".

For example. The patent system came to existence to ensure that inventions were not hidden, but published to the public in a form patent. Instead of the inventor hiding the invention, the society grants the inventor sole rights to the invention thanks to them making it public.

Copyright and Trademark are different beasts to Patents, and all these are very linked to the laws of single countries, bar signed treaties. Please distinguish what you are talking about. Otherwise your point is moot.

We see this opinion on HN frequently yet various legal systems recognize the concept of theft of nontangible services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services).

One wonders if the HN readers denying the concept of IP also support copying GPL code without adherence to the GPL. It would be logically consistent.

Saying theft and copyright violation are different morally is not suporting copyright violation. It is to ask as the difficulty of copying wanes, perhaps it is time to rebalance giving up the right to copy in exchange for more innovation. When the right to copy was traded in exchange to protect publishers, it was a lot harder to copy stuff, so relatively less was sacrificed. Now copying things is super easy and crucial to normal work flows.

And yet taking a snap of a museum artifact still is quite distinct from stealing someones pen.

I do not deny the concept of IP (if it is me who you were addressing; see my other comments), but I believe that sloppy nomenclature leads to sloppy thinking.

Fraud vs. theft vs. copyright violation vs. insider trading etc. are all different categories of illegal activity and we shouldn't mix them up by using their names interchangeably.

I admit that as a maths major, I tend to be pedantic about definitions, at least in things as serious as crime.

There is a moral dimension as well. I do not believe that we should cut punishments for theft in half. But I do believe we could well cut copyright protection periods back to the levels where they were in 1960 without causing any major problems or undue hardship to anyone.

Correct. Ownership is a legal concept.

Possession exists in a physical sense, but ownership does not.