Asklemmy

The crime of theft is depriving another person of a possession they have, the dynamics of piracy are completely different.

First - piracy is taking a copy of something that can be produced ad-infinitum. No actual thing is taken from anyone.

Second - the idea that it's depriving someone of hypothetical income doesn't hold because often times thing X being unavailable via piracy isnt going to mean the pirate is going to pay, they are just gonna pirate thing Y instead or even just get nothing at all.

Think about it - if dominos pizza was free, I'd eat it a lot more. I'd probably get fat, too, because it's literally free so I'd eat more. But as it stands it isn't, and I dont eat it. On the whole I probably eat less total than the amount I would eat if it were free.

The point is - the inherent abundance of digital goods is an inherent behaviour changer and introduces a completely different dynamic than what we're used to IRL. The scarcity in the digital world is absurd and artificial and it's stifling human potential to make the line go up.

And third, and this is adjacent - copyright is just absurd to me, it is deeply absurd to me that one could claim ownership over something immaterial as intellectual property in the first place, ideas are not things, they do not belong to anyone, it's pure category error to suggest otherwise, imo. Not that obviously artists or scientists shouldn't be credited for coming up with ideas or something but that's a job for historians, not the police.

Intellectual property's only benefit is that it really shines a light on how capitalism is not at all some inevitable product of human nature, but in fact requires heavy enforcement and ultimately a threat of violence (prisons) to protect the elite's ownership of the means of production and the economy at large.