If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Good faith dialogue is not possible under these self-imposed constraints.
The nub of the issue though is not really if something is theft on a legal definitional level. Laws themselves are extremely rarely enacted by direct decisions of those who are commanded to follow them. so they don't reflect what the vast majority of people would consider moral, which often include reciprocity, fairness, and staying beneficial to the society as a whole rather than benefit a tiny minority with highly detrimental consequences for the rest of people.
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
The most relevant definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".