(i) Imagine a billionaire who acquired his fortune from pyramid schemes. One day he fell victim to someone else's scam and is left penniless. He goes to confron

(i) Imagine a billionaire who acquired his fortune from pyramid schemes. One day he fell victim to someone else's scam and is left penniless. He goes to confront the scammer to demand his money back. The scammer admits to carrying out the scam, but points out to the former billionaire that the money stolen from him was stolen in the first place. "That's just whataboutism," the former billionaire protests indignantly, "just because I did something bad in the past doesn't give you the right to do bad things to me". Do you see the problem with the former billionaire's response? (ii) To describe trade secrets as "science" sounds incorrect (I would reserve the term for the kind of stuff published in science journals, that genuinely tries to push the boundaries of human knowledge). (iii) The kind of trade secret you are referring to are much more like source codes for proprietary software. You are sold some device that does a certain job. However, how exactly it does this job, is kept from your knowledge, because if you know it you would be able to make copies of it yourself, which would hurt the bottom line of the party selling the device. A more homespun example is KFC's recipe for their fried chicken. If the secret recipe is known, people would be able to make their KFC-flavor fried chicken at home. They wouldn't need to visit KFC to get it. (iv) once we see that the "trade secrets" alluded to are things like closed source software's source code, and KFC's secret recipe, one thing that should immediately come to mind is the entire free software movement, the most prominent spokesman of which has repeatedly argued that proprietary software is "evil". Is it really okay to sell things that is promised to do a certain job but how it does that job is not being revealed? Would we ever allow drug manufacturers to sell drugs that promise to cure some condition via undisclosed mechanism? How do we know the closed source software isn't spying on us? Etc. (v) Moreover, it becomes obvious at this point, that the only difference between the libgen type of cases and the "trade secret" cases is the difference in how easy it is to make copies. If you have a physical book or an ebook or an mp3, it's trivially easy to make an identical copy. But if you have a piece of KFC fried chicken in front of you, that in itself is of no help if you want a second helping. You can't just xerox the fried chicken, you need the recipe. And if the recipe is being locked away in some secret cabinet and you absolutely need it, then you need to steal it. But then this seems to suggest that those who pirate books have little basis on which to claim moral superiority to those who steal recipes/source codes. At the end of the day, they are both making unauthorized copies. The only difference is that the pirares are much more fortunate in that they have a much easier time making copies than the thieves stealing trade secrets. But is that a morally significant difference? How can it be that crime A is morally less bad than crime B simply because A is easier to commit?