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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 1544569" data-attributes="member: 5468">To say that the electronic theft represents what the creator "would never have gotten" presumes a 'God's-eye' view in which it's possible to claim that the thief would never have valued the material enough to buy it when the thief did value it enough to steal it.  Removing the material shows that the thief broke the implicit contract of not getting access to the material without paying for it, so I feel it's totally reasonable to use the cost of the item to describe the magnitude of the stealing.  If you shoplift an item from a store that has a price tag of $1600, then your charge will be based on that price tag, not your claim that the item only has a real value of $1000.  We can both imagine ridiculously extreme situation in which a judge might use his/her discretion to adjust this for this silly case, but that would be a reaction to what is clearly an extreme, and I don't think that there is a case this extreme that has come up.   Even if I go with you completely on this, it does not change the act itself, so I don't think it should change the legal repercussions of the act.   I have never met anyone who falls into the category of the geek in the story, but I have met too many people, unfortunately in the gaming community, like this to imagine the scenario as "Geek steals a copy of one, decides it is really cool, and decides to steal another by the same company".  Could you please explain how you can know that the wonderful, noble thieves of your story so outnumber the ones in mine that filesharing does no harm?</blockquote>

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