Choice of words here is very, very important. If you want to start staking out a moral claim on information, you damned well had better choose your message carefully.

Consider, if you will, that for hundreds of years the concept of intellectual property--indeed, even the idea of land ownership in some places-was foreign. You simply cannot throw up your hands and say "But semantics!" and expect to be taken seriously.

At best, you look lazy--at worst, you appear a sycophant to those who rely on provably unneeded monopolies of information distribution.

You're position is indeed much simpler: you seem to be either unwilling or unable to understand that this ongoing public dialogue about intellectual property, copyright, and related matters is something that isn't cut and dried.

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." Thomas Jefferson

"The ordinary subjects of property are well known, and easily conceived... But property, when applied to ideas, or literary and intellectual compositions, is perfectly new and surprising... by far the most comprehensive denomination of it would be a property in nonsense." Lord Gardenston in Hinton vs Donaldson, 1773

To me and a lot of others, illegal copying is far more morally defensible than theft. If someone tries to call a person that pirate a thief, my immediate reaction is that the claim is not only flat out false, but offensive.

Copyright protection is an artificial government monopoly on an activity that does not affect your property rights, and as such it is perfectly defensible for someone to consider it moral to violate copyright. I do consider some forms of copyright violations morally wrong, such as selling copies, but I do consider a lot of piracy morally acceptable (despite the fact I don't engage in piracy, though I did some 20-25 years ago)

Theft is materially different because it deprives the owner of continued use of that which was stolen.

I see that a programmer or artist is slightly different because the work the programmer or artist did can be duplicated where as the lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic's work can not but they're still effectively the same. Someone worked and expects to be compensated for that work. Not compensating someone for work you received I believe is also called "theft".

I'll also note that the most pirated software often represents a lot more work than a single lawyer, plumber, doctor, car mechanic. If you use one of their services you'll likely get a few hours of their time. If you pirate photoshop or MW3 that likely represents a few hundred man years of time.

Anyway, I'm not arguing against piracy. I'm not sure what other word their is though for taking someone's time/labor without paying them.

That's not only "slightly different", that's the crucial difference. So no, they aren't "effectively the same", they are two completely unrelated cases. Would people please stop trying to use this dishonest and flat out false argument to support entirely wrong chains of argumentation?

Besides which, the work an artist/programmer has done is unrelated to the distribution of the result. If one expects to be paid for the actual work done, they have to seek other models. One that often comes up here is Kickstarter, where a form of contract is made - money for work done. Perfectly fine. Musicians have and always had concerts and merchandise as their source of income. Comissioned works are also possible, and are a very valid source of income. Additionally, there's patronage - which is, for example, basically the way Linus Torvalds makes his money.

I'm positive this list is by far not exhaustive.

So no, pirating something is not taking someone's work time, since their time and money spend for distribution is effectively zero.

I'm not saying they are the same but I have yet to see someone clearly make the distinction on why one person's duplicate able work needed to be paid for and another's is not.

If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?

I live in a country where it’s forbidden to organise people to jog in the park together via social network (unless you get appropriate permission, lol). Is such a 'crime' immoral?

If you think your country’s laws are always correct, think again.

There are even cases when what has been considered a crime now is considered a bravery. For example, Lithuanian book smugglers were commiting a crime, but now they are considered to have been doing the right thing.

And what is dishonest about that?

When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life.

Nurses, doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, mechanics, service staff, chefs, teachers all have the same deal. You can't multiply your work by the people who benefit from it forever (maybe everyone who likes the person whose life you saved?) and get paid by each one.

Now to me, that seems sane and normal. You want more money, you do more work. Getting the government to pass special laws allowing you to extract rent from your creative endevour for every person who experiences it going into the future is what seems dishonest to me.

A builder:

  - is hired by a single client
  - to build a house for many months
  - and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary, 
    which is pretty much guaranteed (unless being let off for typically external reasons).

  - also takes many months to complete a book/movie/game but
  - he is not hired by any single client
  - his income is directly related to the reception of the end product by the audience.

Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.

Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.

Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.

Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.

We need new software, because: a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright), b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation, c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).

If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.

If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).

What's dishonest about it? The mental gymnastics to rationalize their actions when it's really about "I don't have to pay for this and there are no consequences if I don't so I'm not going to".

What I've been saying is that for many people it is not a rationalization. They genuinely believe, because of arguments from history and logic that sharing isn't wrong. They aren't jumping through mental hoops, this is their honest belief after considering the alternatives and arguments.

Now that isn't to say that there aren't some, maybe many people for whom it is purely rationalization, but your posts seem to entirely ignore any other possibility.

It comes up every time because piracy and stealing are worlds apart morally. Were I to steal someone's car, they would be incredibly inconvenienced. Were I to illegitimately obtain a piece of software, the developers just get a smaller check at the end of the month.

As the article says, things are not black and white and we should not treat them as if they were. There are degrees of 'badness', and piracy is not as bad as stealing.

..Only if you were going to buy it in the first place and decided not to.

That is theft because you've robbed the lawyer of his opportunity cost. For the time he was spending giving you legal advice, he could have been giving it to someone else that would pay him.

A more apt analogy would be secretly listening in on a lawyer giving legal advice to a paying client. You haven't taken anything away from him or the paying client, and all you've done is "copied" what was being heard anyway.

It's not stolen, it's copied. One of the dark-arts pro-copyright people used was to conflate those two terms into one word. We can still discuss if breaking someone's business model by copying is moral or not, but we really need to separate those two words and talk about them with extreme precision - especially given how heated the discussion is.

Mix that in with a bit of Work-for-Hire for things no-one really wants to make, and it would hopefully be viable. Maybe I'm an idealist.

It is materially different from theft. Enough so that making property law fit copyright is not feasible in any reasonable way.

One is based on an presumptive right of the individual to protection of their right to continued use of something.

The other is an artificial government monopoly restricting the public from exercising their right to full use of their own property, by preventing them from copying and distributing information that is legally already in their possession, and where nobody are deprived of continued use at all.