Everyone who listens to music needs to READ THIS!

[Ron Obvious]

65. I'll try once more...

Copyright infringement is not theft. They are different things. Theft means depriving someone of something they previously possessed. Sorry, I can't make it simpler than that. This is regardless of the ethics involved.

The rest of my post merely tries to point out that copyright isn't in any way a natural, or obvious state of affairs, and I gave an example. In fact, copyright protection is extremely recent in terms of human history, so the ethics involved are not in any way natural or obvious to most people, the way actual stealing or murder, say, are instinctively and intuitively wrong to virtually anyone.

When I play a CD in my shop that my customers can hear, I'm also technically infringing copyright these days and owe the record companies money. I daresay that isn't intuitively fair or obvious to anyone, because it's a new state of affairs in a world of expanding copyright.

Equating copyright infringement with theft is an attempt to give the former offence the weight, gravity, and intuitive 'wrongness' of the latter offence by redefining the word 'theft' to equal the former offence. It's done consciously and deliberately. When you say 'downloading or copying is theft', you're perpetuating an artificial meme from the RIAA.

How much work and effort goes into the creation of a work is immaterial in this respect. I'm also indifferent to your opinions of my morals as you are apparently entirely misunderstanding what I'm saying and falsely projecting a point of view onto me.