Taking something without paying for it is morally wrong, there's no justification for it. You aren't stealing bread to feed your family, you're stealing a tv show.

You’re replying to the guy who likes that it became •legally• wrong, with the full weight of the state behind it.

Is this a good position?

Why or why not?

Define "taking."

Acquiring something without compensation.

The record companies can claim they compensated the artist, even if the math is bogus.

See Steve Albini’s open letter to the music industry for the full accounting…from the nineties when labels made their artists •really• dance for their shekels…

Best example I know of Lawful Evil…

Define "acquiring."

You keep using words that inherently equivocate between transfer-of-property acts and copying-of-property acts. Choose your words more carefully, and then make the same argument.

No amount of definitions will change your mind. Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't. I think it's wrong but I do it anyway, that's intellectual honesty.

> Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't.

No, I don't think my sense of morality inherently has anything to say about downloading an mp3, one way or the other. There's no instinct in humans that pattern-matches on the idea of copying information that someone else created being a particular "cultural touchstone" or "human right", nor of it being "disgusting" or "taboo."

But something being "not immoral" doesn't make it okay. Without a clear sense of moral value to an action, that action's worth comes down to an ethical question — a question that has to be resolved with ethical arguments, questions of utility and harm and fairness and "the curtain of ignorance" and so forth.

And my point is that you're failing to make those arguments.

Would you steal a dvd from best buy, assuming you weren't legally punished for it?

Again, you're leaning on a moral intuition about theft of physical property. The problem Best Buy have, in that situation, is that they would have to themselves buy another copy of the DVD in order to then have the stock of it to sell. It's shrinkage, like stealing a TV.

This does not pertain to downloading an MP3.

Like I said: make an ethical argument, not a moral argument. Stop attempting to rely on moral intuitions; there are no good moral intuitions for this, any more than there are good moral intuitions for e.g. the ethics of someone who can "fork off" copies of their mind, forcing those copies to merge back together with them. It's just not something that ever came up in our evolution!