I think the right way to understand it is as a kind of theft of service. Somebody does something which takes some work. There's nothing special about his work

I think the right way to understand it is as a kind of theft of service. Somebody does something which takes some work. There's nothing special about his work other than that it is available-- there's so many stories you can tell, there's so many ways to express an idea, that to, if the author hadn't created a particular work, making it illegal to create that particular work, people wouldn't have lost anything. It would be a trivial restriction. Thus when someone takes a particular work and does something with it, he chooses to not develop one of the other similar works he himself could have created, and takes advantage of somebody else's effort.