>Making photocopies of paper currency of the United States violates another section of the code, Title 18, Section 474 of the U.S. Code. Also forbidden under the statute: printed reproductions of checks, bonds, postage stamps, revenue stamps and securities of the United States and foreign governments. Those who violate this law can be fined up to $5,000 and/or be sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
You're right - it's not stealing, but it's not right either. Do you think there should be no intellectual rights? Are you OK with everyone copying whatever side-project revenue stream you may have without paying you?
That's not the point. The point is that copyright infringement is a very well-defined crime, and the activities we are talking about here are copyright infringement.
It's not theft.
It's not fraud.
It's not vandalism.
And yet, people in these discussion use those wrong terms to describe the activity. But the only reason they do that, is because they want to attach the greater stigma of those crimes, onto the less stigmatized crime of copyright infringement.
You're right, of course. But this isn't a court of law and so we use terms like piracy and theft when we are talking about copyright infringement and nobody is really confused.
Yes it is. You can pedantically argue the American legal systems definition of stealing means that you have to charge thieves using different laws depending on what was stolen, but this is an unintellectual argument hiding behind legalese to abuse colloquial words.
It still baffles me that people try to justify their objectively immoral theft of someone else's hard work and their right to profit on that work as they see fit with pedantry like this.
