"There is a very big difference between "We should share generously" and "All data should be public." If they were advocating the sharing of their own property

"There is a very big difference between "We should share generously" and "All data should be public." If they were advocating the sharing of their own property, that's one thing. However, they advocate (and facilitate), the sharing of other people's intellectual property without their consent. I have heard many reasons as to why this should be okay. "Data can't be stolen, only copied", "Information needs to be free", etc. So, going by their own rules, this is fine because email, password hashes, and usernames are just data. Information that can be freely copied and distributed without any harm to the original owner (they still have a copy of it. It's not like it's stealing). "The Pirate Bay doesn't advocate leaking credit card numbers or anything" No, but if I had their credit cards on an open forum, I wouldn't expect them to take legal action (unless of course they are hypocrites). Credit card numbers, like torrents, are just 1s and 0s that could be used for harm (IE: downloading illegal information). I find the people from the piratebay very hypocritical. They have this new service coming out that allows you to give donations (I can't remember the name.but I saw a video on it). They charge a 10% service fee, which is enormous compared to many alternative services out there right now. Why not charge $0? Yes, it may cost money to run such a service, but it also costs money to create many of the software applications, games, and movies that they seem to have no problem "sharing" (yes, I know they don't actually host the file..only torrents..but they host readme files on almost every torrent which explain exactly what the file is. They also run many of the trackers out there.).