I recognize this is about 15 years too late but stolen is the wrong word. The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived which isn't necessarily the case.
The concepts of "stealing" an idea, i.e. taking credit for someone else's, and "stealing" someone's spotlight occur in standard vernacular [1]. These don't concern depriving someone of something they have, but depriving them of something they could have had. The logic behind modern copyright is that distribution someone else's content deprives them of potential sales, royalties, et cetera.
There is reasonable debate around whether science, particularly taxpayer-funded science, should be copyrighted. But arguing you can't "steal" the intangible runs counter to our culture. A more productive line of argument lies in attacking what can be copyrighted and for how long.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea...
Whose culture?
The culture that surrounds me seems organized almost chiefly, and at least largely, around radical freedom of information.
I... didn't do that. I don't think? Did I?
And there is not really a case of "stealing" an idea--which is incidentally one of the most tiresome claims anyone ever makes--but rather distributing the fully-credited articles through alternative channels.
The issue is not intangibility. The issue is scarcity and ownership.
Theft is (or rather, ought to be) when you deprive someone of a scarce resource they can claim ownership over. If they can't claim ownership of it, or you're not depriving them of anything, then it's not theft.
Any given idea, after it has been conceived, is obviously not scarce; the reproduction costs for an idea are essentially zero. You can't deprive someone of any idea by copying it.
The question, then, is whether you can claim ownership over the control of an idea (i.e. who is allowed to know the idea, and how they are allowed to apply it). To me, that seems insane, but obviously not to everyone.
But copying an idea without taking the credit isn't stealing in the English culture I am part of.
"Yeah, but if I could burn a copy..."