TIf I copy the money in someone's bank account - it's just numbers, after all - I haven't actually stolen anything. So that must be ok? TBH I would be ok with

TIf I copy the money in someone's bank account - it's just numbers, after all - I haven't actually stolen anything. So that must be ok? TBH I would be ok with that. But - inexplicably - the pro-piracy people never are. How about the videos of your personal sexy times on your phone? Ah but wait! Money has value! No, money does not have value. Money is a special kind of resource-constrained IP with a unique protection mechanism and tightly controlled access rights. If it were possible to hack that system - and some people have done this - it's still just numbers with no more "value" than any other numbers. Either you accept that ownership and access control are valid ways to manage access to resources, or you go full post-scarcity neo-communist and destroy the concept of ownership altogether. Anything else is hypocrisy. The fact that most IP is owned by terrible people and doesn't benefit the artists is a different argument. That's an argument against wealth capture, political inequality, and rentier capitalism - a much bigger issue with relevance across multiple domains. The real tell is that this is only ever about creative and never expands into wider questions of ownership and resource control. My suspicion is that non-creative people resent the apparent agency and freedom that creatives have, and this is always more about that resentment than some supposed question around IP. Basically some guy who makes music is an easier target than CEO bro, and it's always easier to punch down than up.