It's the same kind of logic that the RIAA would use to conclude that my downloading a terabyte of music is equivalent to my stealing x trillion dollars from the

It's the same kind of logic that the RIAA would use to conclude that my downloading a terabyte of music is equivalent to my stealing x trillion dollars from the record labels, regardless of whether I ever would have spent money on the music (or whether I ever even listen to it). It is, simply put, the logic of intellectual property laws. It's why I don't like intellectual property laws or things that rely on them (like the GPL).