Of course piracy is stealing. The law defines it as theft and you can get prosecuted for it - thus, there can be no arguing about the fact that piracy is a criminal activity.
However, piracy is not theft from the economic aspect, because that would imply economic harm was inflicted upon the copyright owner by committing the crime of piracy. However, if a person pirates a CD, that CD hasn't been physically stolen from the company that holds rights on its contents. A loss of revenues cannot occur when there were no revenues in the first place. Therefore, it is incorrect to draw a parallel between pirating a CD and stealing a Ferrari Enzo. The closest thing would be copying the blueprints of Ferrari Enzo and constructing one in your garage. That way, you have violated intellectual property and thus broken the law, but you have not physically stolen property of the car-selling company or harmed them in any way. As proven by a number of researches, if you had not had the opportunity to obtain the blueprints and construct your own Ferrari, it is extremely unlikely you would have purchased one legitimately. That metaphore best illustrates why I loathe the concept of intellectual property.
However, it is moral implications of breaking the law that divide people into those that would never pirate a record and those that have no qualms about doing so. The former group views differences between copying a CD and stealing a CD as pure semantics, either because they are ignorant or because for them the legal definition of piracy, and not its economic aspect, bears most weight. For the latter group, however, desire to obtain music is stronger than fear of legal sanctions - their decision to pirate is dictated by the economic implications of piracy. A parallel can be drawn with 18th century French commoners - most of them purchased only what food they could afford, even if it meant having to endure hunger. Others, however, chose to steal food rather than starve. We all know that the unbearable social situation in France eventually led the country into public revolt and anarchy. My point? If we set aside MP3 sharing as the most harmless form of piracy (one that has been proven that it does not have an effect on revenues of the music industry, at least presently), piracy as an activity will continue to spread, and corporate world will be forced to adapt or face complete destruction in not-so-distant future. Of the well-known carrot and stick method, industry has so far only used stick, which has proven rather ineffective. Though prosecuting pirates is necessary, the only way to combat them efficiently is by furthering efforts to encourage potential customers to buy legitimate products. For video games such efforts can include price cuts, providing free online gameplay, offering free downloadable content and increasing general quality of games. When the industry gets the message, more people will purchase their products and pirates will be going out of business at a much faster rate than by taking police action against them. Obviously, piracy, if anything, teaches companies that shoddy and ridiculously overpriced products result in a decrease of profit, and could thus have a positive long-term effect on availability of software, movies and music, which is one of the main reasons why I support it. And though I intend to begin purchasing original software when I have my own source of income (provided that source of income is sufficient), I will still have no qualms about pirating a product if I identify it as a shameless rip-off (read - I will never ever buy a legitimate copy of any Microsoft software).
GO PIRATES !
