I think that isn't (technically) theft. It's probably it's fraud or maybe violation of a contract.

It is not semantic hair-splitting. It is a simple, genuine, important difference. Your example indicates that you don't understand it, which I find weird:

If I go to some sort of practitioner of whatever and walk out without paying, I haven't stolen anything tangible, just their time.

But their time is not a copy. It is irreplaceable. They will never get those moments back. Therefore what you have done is theft. If you used the public record to create an AI simulacrum of the practitioner, and consult the simulacrum instead of the practitioner, that is analogous to pirating the time of the practitioner. (You may be stealing the time of the simulacrum, but that is a separate issue).

The question is not tangibility. The question is whether, after I do ____, someone else then has less of something than they did before. If I "go to someone for their services, and don't pay them", they have less time than before. If I ask Google what I was going to ask the professional and so don't need their services, they haven't lost anything.

"This seems like semantic hair-splitting. If I go to some sort of practitioner of whatever and walk out without paying, I haven't stolen anything tangible, just their time."

Yes, that is a key difference though. You have stolen their time. They can not use it again.

In the case of piracy, the original owner loses nothing.

One could make an argument about diminishing the value of the property, the potential business, or even how much a pirate deserves their allegedly ill gotten goods. However, all of those are unrelated points.

That's actually a flawed analogy. To actually mirror file sharing, it would have to work like this:

Said practitioner performs whatever service it is they perform, on one paying customer. From then on, whoever that customer shakes hands with, receives the same benefit (whatever it was), at no further cost to the practitioner.

vn

But would you wear the t-shirt?

maybe, but just because something isn't theft doesn't mean its not wrong.

Yes, but just because it is illegal doesn't mean that is is wrong. The original intent of copyright was to give authors the right to profit from their works for a limited time, as an incentive to produce more works. I don't see how 70 years past the death of the author benefits anyone.

Sure. I wasn't saying it wasn't wrong. I just think it is important to distinguish the two, because they are different in a deep way. Theft is wrong because it costs someone something. Piracy may or may not be wrong, but you have to use entirely different reasoning to get there.

or getting pejorative

"Piracy" is Not Theft
It's Free Speech

though that could use a more complex cartoon.

Well, yes. Or even not really?

Piracy is theft. Actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy says it's robbery.

So copying is not piracy.

Repurposing "piracy" (a fairly emotive word with negative connotations, although Captain Jack Sparrow may have made a it little more cool of late) to make copying (a relatively innocuous-seeming word) seem like the heinous crime it needs to be to keep the record companies in business is, well, piracy.

Eight Generatives Better Than Free

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

I was not talking about economic efficiency, but about there being a crucial distinction between the categories, such that very different moral & practical arguments need to be made about them.

That said there's probably a level of "optimal" piracy in terms of social welfare. A level where the tradeoffs between encouraging innovation and the benefit from free goods co-exist. No patents for medicines, probably a bad idea. Rampant music stealing, probably not so bad because people will make music anyways.

I completely agree, this is exactly my position (plus "And often we shouldn't enforce IP even when it is socially optimal for the industry because of the negative effects of enforcement in reducing civil liberties"). But I find it unsatisfactory because every industry is different, which makes for a complicated set of laws. Oh well, that's what you get if you want efficient laws...

Yeah, but who wants to run a website called

thecopyrightviolationbay.org

?