> Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it.
Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust.
First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality.
Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped.
Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers.
It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them.
The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs".
So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us.
They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want.
Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple.
> When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.
