> If I make my own bike store and produce bikes which are identical to yours without taking yours away, then it's not theft. That's exactly in line with what

> If I make my own bike store and produce bikes which are identical to yours without taking yours away, then it's not theft. That's exactly in line with what I said. It's not theft in that case. You are getting lost in your own analogy. A bike is valuable because of the time, energy, and money put into producing it. If you set up your own bike store and produce the bike that's identical to my bike, you deserve to make money from it. But that's not what's happening here. Here's what's happening: Let's say you start making your living by producing and selling bikes at your own bike store. One night I break into your bike store and just take a bike away. I didn't put in any time, energy, and money into producing the bike. You did. You spent your time, energy, and money to build that bike, which you could have spent on other things in life. If I didn't steal it, you could have made money from that bike. I deprived you of an opportunity to make money from your investment. Let's use a more large scale example to see how this can be a very dangerous line of thought. A guy named anthony levandowski took intellectual property from Google and tried to produce autonomous vehicles which are identical to what Google was trying to build, WITHOUT taking google's technology away. Google can feel free to build their autonomous vehicle, what's the big deal? This is not stealing, right? Well, here's what happened: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354906/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-lawsuit-sentence-18-months-prison-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354906/anthony-levandows... Intellectual property is very real. Just because certain types of intellectual property cannot be protected because of the nature of the digital technology, does NOT mean it is not stealing. Stealing is stealing. Some thefts are considered "ok" because "everyone else is doing it and there's no easy way to enforce it", but it's steal stealing.