It might surprise you to know that many people believe in, and is codified in law in most countries, the concept of intellectual property: https://en.wikipedia.

It might surprise you to know that many people believe in, and is codified in law in most countries, the concept of intellectual property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property In fact it is this very idea, and the notion that an author of a work should be able to dictate the terms under which it may be distributed, that underlies the concept of copyleft on which the GNU General Public License is based. If no-one respected intellectual property, then any company could take GPL code and incorporate it into their own closed-source products without distributing the resulting source code (as the license requires) or even acknowledge the original author. All other FOSS licenses similarly rely on intellectual property as a legal concept. I do agree that the words like "stolen" or "theft" do not really make sense in the context of intellectual property or digital artifacts, due to their differences from physical objects. I'm not sure what other terms to use, though I'd like to see a consensus reached. Nonetheless, the fact that data can be copied for effectively zero cost does not make it moral or legal to do so when the author has made it available under specific terms.