> The semantic details are a distraction. But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a sm

> The semantic details are a distraction. But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a small child "what's yours is not what's mine", and everyone learns that theft is bad. So calling piracy theft means everyone has the gut reaction that it's bad. Calling piracy an infringement of a monopoly has a very different flavour to it. Copyright monopolies do serve a purpose. But one shouldn't try to distract from this purpose by calling piracy theft. Before "copying" music or books was cheap, the situation was quite different (tunes and books were copied left and right, nobody cared, but you had to pay the musicians to perform a tune, and the scribes to copy a book), but theft still existed, and was punished.