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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 1542644" data-attributes="member: 2013">I am in fact pretty familiar with copyright law.  And I am aware that criminal, as well as civil penalties, are attached in some cases.  I fail to see how it's relevant to the discussion, however, considering that the law usually tends to treat copyright infringement much more harshly than actual physical theft (steal a CD, get charged with misdemeanor petty theft, put a file for download on P2P and get charged with a felony and millions of dollars of damages - despite the fact that it's nearly impossible to prove you actually *distributed* the file sufficient times to do reach the threshold necessary to trigger such damages).The fact is, they're very different beasts, and the law DOES treat them as such (though I think that the law is a bit bass-ackwards in its treatment).  The difference between copyright infringement versus theft is the difference between me looking at a brand new BMW in your driveway, carefully examining it (but without touching it), then arranging the dirt molecules from my lawn into an exact copy of the BMW versus me taking your BMW away and using it.That fundamental difference - that you are NOT deprived of the use of your original copy in instances of copyright infringement is what makes the beasts different.  Morally, you are in the wrong in infringing or stealing in that you're benefitting from someone else's work.  Morally, you're probably MORE in the wrong for stealing because in addition to benefitting from someone else's work, you're also depriving that person of the benefits of their work.  In other words, theft is a "double whammy" - though current copyright laws punish infringement FAR worse than theft (which makes no sense to me).Yes, I know they're different.  Yes, I know why.  No, I don't think it makes a difference to the discussion of whether piracy hurts sales. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />--The Sigil</blockquote>

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