Chozo

Bruh, no one in here is arguing about legality

What are you talking about? That's literally the entire point of the article and this comment section.

You're trying to blur the line between what is and what should be. We don't live in an ideal world.

Lost sales are considered damages, so yes something is lost.

EDIT: This is worse than arguing with SovCits.

"Trivial" is not "zero".

I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else's labor without paying.

so nothing is lost when digital media is used by someone without paying.

Using, no. Acquiring, yes.

Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”

You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren't just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.

Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.

No, they're just stealing the fuel and wages the employees should be getting for maintaining the train.

The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.

And media costs money to make.

If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.

If you weren't going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That's the thing, if you're interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.

If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.

How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?

More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.

The transportation authority who maintains the trains and stations.

What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.

Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?

A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being "removed" in that situation either.