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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 1554971" data-attributes="member: 5468">But are they different in a meaningful way?  What if the bookstore burns down that night, or if the thief is arrested much later, after the bookstore goes out of business with two copies of the book still on the shelf?  Is the thief less cupable if no "loss" is incurred by the store?   At the very least this is theft in the sense of "theft of services".  If I sneak my garbage into your apartment building's trash bins, what are you "losing"?  But it is still considered a form of theft.  Additionally, I disagree with the last sentence quoted.  The author invested work which was produced for a commercial product, and the source of the commercial material set a price for it.  The product was removed without the price being paid.   The seller has the right to assign a cost to describe what constitutes a lawful exchange of property.  If the thief does not provide that amount, the amount is considered the value of the theft, even if the one stealing it does not consider the value of the object as that high.  If one were to steal a physical game book from a bookstore, it would not work to say "Well, to me this only has a value of $2.00, because that's all that I was willing to pay for it" for two reasons: the price of the object was not the decision of the thief, and that the crime is only loosely associated with the value of the object.  There is a difference between stealing something worth $2,000 and something worth $200, but there is not a legal difference between stealing something worth $200 and $20.  Let's think of it as two acts, thing (1) and thing (2).  The difference with electronic copies is that we have considered (1) and (2) as linked for so long that if thing (2) doesn't come into play, there are plenty of people (some of whom have posted elsewhere on this thread) who see the lack of (2) as permission to do (1) to their heart's content - as long as "they wouldn't have bought it, otherwise".  After all, we can have a legal code with more than one crime one it, so we don't have to stop prosecuting for arson, et al.</blockquote>

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