What about the fourth classification of people who search for a way to buy something and who torrent it when it's not available?
Don't forget the weird restrictions placed on regional DVDs by the industry, and the laws that prevent me from converting my player to a multiregion device.
It's not hard. A critical aspect of property theft is the deprivation of property experienced by the victim. IP "theft" lacks this aspect entirely. Using the term in this way makes you no better than the CEO of Turner Broadcasting who claims that not watching advertisements constitutes "stealing" of TV.
Call it "sampling" or "counterfeiting" if you want, but "theft" is misapplication of a term with an otherwise well-established definition.
[1] - Note that there is currently a concerted effort by many to connect IP infringement to "terrorism".
One has a legal definition implying loss of a tangible good, the other a rather different definition implying you haven't paid to use a thing.
Both are correct grammatically, but they aren't the same thing in the end.
I check if it's available on Steam, or some other non-horrible online service. If it is, I buy it. Otherwise... well, you can probably guess.
Once copyright was a deal in which my tax money was used to protect a limited monopoly, and in return I could use the art after the monopoly expired. Now it is corrupted so that once the time has expired, the written language is not commonly understandable. The recorded music and video will have fully deteriorated in their stored medium. The games and software won't run.
It is thus hard to classify their actions from a moral standpoint as something other than stealing. They steal my money to support a stolen copyright deal, and I do not accept it. The deal should be ignored and the thieves should be held responsible for their actions.
When? Where? To my knowledge, no such study or data in favor of that thesis exist. For music I know of a counter-study to such statements: http://www.scribd.com/doc/131005609/JRC79605, which concludes with
According to our results, a 10% increase inclicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites
and
Essentially these papers show that illegal music downloads have little or no effect on legal digital sales.
You want to know if clicks on illegal sources have an effect on legal sources.
Not if clicks on legal sources have an effect on illegal sources.
Yes, it's important.
No, they're not the same.
But that is not what the study is about?
It is easy. In those cases the owner hasn't been deprived of anything but potential profit. If there was a competing game some of the potential pirates might buy that instead, they might watch TV or read a book instead of playing a game. It is just competition.
I find it ridiculous that under current law it is illegal to make unauthorised copies of games, but perfectly legal to make a clone/reimplementation. Both can deprive the original author of potential profit.
Of course this is why some of the big players in the IP industry have been muttering about "patents" on creative works.
Games released via Steam have shown evidence that when a singleplayer game is unavailable as a torrent for free, then people will pay for it. The counterargument to this is that most people who torrent wouldn't pay for it anyway. But I assert that there is a third class of people: those who first check to see if it's available for free, and if not, pay for it. Whether these people constitute a significant portion of revenue is an open question, but it's hard to classify their actions from a moral standpoint as something other than stealing.
The closest classification other than "stealing" would probably be "sampling." I've often been frustrated at an inability to try out a certain kind of dev tool before buying it outright, and their free version is usually missing features which I really need to test. But there needs to be a large-scale study as to whether people really behave this way normally, or if they just take what they can get for free. Unfortunately it's difficult to find an unbiased source of funding for such a study, so the resulting research paper would probably be slanted in one moral direction or the other instead of presenting the raw data.
It's not an easy question to answer. I think technological capabilities will decide how companies will behave, because those who don't accept reality will go out of business.