What if I would never pay for it in the first place? Then I'm not depriving you of anything
E.g., if I had pirated Photoshop I would not have been depriving Adobe of anything, because there was no way I would pay the several hundred dollars they were charging for it at the time.
But Adobe is not the only company selling image editing software. Rather than pirate Photoshop I bought the much less expensive Pixelmator. They would not have gotten that sale if I had chosen to pirate Photoshop.
In fact, I would use open source software instead, since I'm not in the mood for paying. I use Krita now because I don't need the extra Photoshop features
Think of it like this. If you are flicking through channels on your TV, you might find something halfway interesting that you want to watch, and so you do. But you never would have paid for it.
Same thing with piracy. You might check something out of curiosity or boredom, but never would have paid $20 for it, and me personally, I'm not going to 'rent' something that requires DRM to play, and don't want to own it on physical media, so piracy is the clear choice.
This is pretty normal human behavior, and I see no ethical issue with it. There is only the fallacy of the lost sale as a flimsy counter-argument, the rest is greed and lies.
But they are available for free. I can go to any torrent site and get anything I want.
You don't think they should be available for free, but that's quite a different argument.
> You're right that greed is normal human behaviour, but that doesn't make it okay, let alone good.
Downloading a movie to watch on a Sunday afternoon that you would never pay for is not greed, it's curiosity more than anything. It's greed to try and punish that behavior.
I'm sorry to see you've been so successfully indoctrinated.
If I steal a Porsche, I'm depriving someone of a Porsche.
If I download Ace Ventura, I'm not depriving anyone of anything.
Yes, it was! The context was very clearly piracy.
> If you want to be more specific, then say things that aren't so easily countered.
Nah. Context was clear. You simply have no argument and made an argument in bad faith.
In any event, now that you do understand the context, surely you have a counter? Or did those MPAA commercials not provide you your next line?