>Obviously there is no boat-stealing or plundering involved - no Johnny Depp or kraken here. But separately from whatever meaning you attach to the word "piracy

>Obviously there is no boat-stealing or plundering involved - no Johnny Depp or kraken here. But separately from whatever meaning you attach to the word "piracy" - illegally downloading creative works is theft. You are not entitled to someone else's creative work under any conditions other than those that they set, period. Well, you've bought into the lie. It is not theft because you are not depriving the original owner of it. it's breach of contract at the very most and it's an incredibly harmful to society contract that will likely never be fixed legally because entrenched interested have too much invested in keeping that system broken and abusing monopoly to rent seek excess profits from the masses. Believing that you have the right to deprive me of the fruits of my own labor copying something is one of the most extreme cases of entitlement I've ever witnessed. No one is taking anything from anyone. The creator of the work still has their own copy of their work. People are spending their own effort making copies of data released into the wild by the creator and that's it. Further, the economics of any particular created work where the marginal cost of copying is effectively zero are incredibly clear. The largest welfare improvement is from distributing that created work to everyone for the marginal cost (aka zero) and allowing everyone to create derivative works if they choose. The only reason to have any sort of copyright is to encourage additional works to be created and that should be tempered to the minimum time needed given the massive dead weight loss from distributing said works at above marginal cost. So, how long does a copyright term need to be to encourage new works? I am extremely skeptical of any claim beyond high single digit numbers of years and it is extremely clear that copyright terms measured in decades (or worse in author's life time plus decades) cause massive dead weight loss and are utter insanity.