What I’m saying is that this isn’t theft, I’m not saying there is no harm in piracy, but there is a clear difference. When you steal something from a store, they would need to acquire the merchandise again to restock, as well as being denied the money that item would have otherwise be sold for.
I’m not saying piracy is victimless, or that it is ethical, but it’s clearly a different level of crime, so it should not be called theft.
By this logic wage theft isn’t theft since the employee never had the money in their possession.
Let’s exaggerate things. An indie dev sells a game for 5$ and when all things are split up they have 2$ going to them. They sell one copy but with the tracker they put into the game, they can tell that there’s a million person that have played it. Their income for the work they put in is 2$, a million -1 people got to enjoy what they created through piracy. So you’re telling me, no one has stolen anything from that creator?
in wage theft, there is an agreement about getting paid, and the employer fraudulently does not pay that. I have no such agreement with ubisoft or blizzard.
Ok, but you acquiring content through piracy also is fraud and also makes you acquire something someone worked for without compensating them when the agreement they had with society in general was that they would make their creation available in exchange for money.
But hey, social contract, who needs that? 🤷
Wage theft is different from piracy. When you work for an employer, you are giving them hours of labour in exchange for the compensation, I have a limited amount of labour hours to use in my lifetime, whereas copying a work can be done an infinite amount of times without requiring an additional labour time to recreate it.
I’m not saying that piracy is ethical, there are many cases where it is unethical, but it is not theft.
