Using the terms "piracy" and "theft" to refer to file sharing pisses me off!
"Piracy" is what is happening off the African coast, where pirates commandeer vessels, kill people, and/or hold people or goods for ransom for love of the almighty dollar. Piracy is not what happens when you upload or download material that the entertainment industry would rather you not.
"Theft" is where someone physically enters a home or a store, removes physical items that belonged to someone who had paid for them, and runs away with them, so that the purchaser is materially or financially damaged in some way. Theft is not what happens when someone downloads a file for private use, regardless of whether a company in the entertainment industry regards that act as a potential loss, and not an actual loss of money or material!
Law and order have been seriously corrupted when "Piracy" and "Theft" are embedded in entertainment funded propaganda and laws. That really pisses me off!
So what would you call sneaking into a movie theater? Or sneaking into a rock concert or sporting event? Surely these things aren't theft either, and so should be perfectly acceptable -- if you don't get caught doing them -- so there should be no reason for management to throw out any interlopers they find.
People who are opposed to intellectual property rights sometimes annoy me. I honestly wish these people actually worked in an industry that produces the entertainment that they consume for free. Whether you call it 'theft' or 'piracy' or 'circle jerking for God', the loss of sales revenue hurts more than just faceless companies or shareholders; it also impacts the workers that produce the products that we all enjoy. Having demand for one's products means nothing if the people that produce the products aren't making money off their creations. (Whether or not certain specific industries are gouging consumers for one reason or another is an entirely different argument.)
The attitude that, if someone creates something and it makes its way into public circulation in whatever fashion, then some other people automatically think they have the right to do whatever they want with the product also pisses me off. I hate to throw out the term 'Communism' to describe this, but it is certainly anti-capitalism. There are a lot of rights and abuses attributable to big business that I'd like to see curtailed, but, long-term, I see the diminishment of IP rights to be just as damaging to smaller, independent creators.
My preference is to see content become plentiful, readily available, and cheap (not necessarily free) to obtain, without a huge inconvenience or hardship associated with the experience. The problem is, I doubt that commercial industry is likely to solve this challenge, at least not anytime soon, and hurting the producers of our entertainment too deeply in the meantime will ultimately hurt us consumers.
