"Stolen"? What do you mean, "stolen"? Torchlight still has its assets, right? That's not "stolen"!
As to why some people apparently feel more comfortable saying "stolen" in this case versus people sharing MP3s: There's an obvious qualitative difference between people sharing files, and someone passing work off as their own, especially when profiting from it. From what I can tell, it's the whole plagiarism part that really pisses people off.
But the minute I make money, it somehow bothers you. Why?
Sharing culture is much more complicated than just monetary values.
If you then go out and sell that same MP3 then every sale you make is a sale that _I_ should have been paid for. The people you are selling to are willing to part with money and instead of it coming to me, the original author, it is going to a 3rd party.
When the copy is free, there's a non-zero cost associated with making that copy. 20 years ago, it was the cost of a cassette tape. Even now, there is a bandwidth cost associated with giving away a copy.
If they were just sending out verbatim copies of torchlight without profit then it would be a different issue.
That said, I agree with your point even if you probably don't: using the wrong word in the wrong place is not a good thing. Conflating copyright infringement with theft is bad even if you empathize with the person whose copyright was infringed.
Also, we need to expand the meaning of words by analogy, otherwise we're left with calling things Thing A and Thing B.
[1]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theft [2]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/theft
Since copyright infringement does not stop the original "owner" from using the property in question, calling it theft seems intellectually dishonest. All the historical judgments are based around this idea--the reason theft is inherently bad and punished by so many societies is that the person stolen from does not have use of his property any more. Extending these to something that does not deprive the original owner of anything is not reasonable.
Besides, the idea of "owning" information involves having exclusive control over its distribution. Given this parallel, somebody just having an unauthorized copy does not own the information as they have no exclusivity or control over it whatsoever. If somebody with such a copy could then enforce that others could not use the information, it would be akin to owning it, but it would also be a very different story!
So your definition of theft would probably have to be amended to "using something without paying the price..." since just having a copy of something confers no ownership. But then this definition suddenly becomes very broad--much more broad than the commonly accepted meaning of theft. For example, trespassing would fall under "theft" as you're using somebody's land without their permission or "paying the price".
Expanding words by analogy is a good thing, granted. However, this assumes that the analogy is reasonably accurate. There are clearly harmful examples of expanding words by poor analogy: the oft-repeated mantra that "evolution is just a theory" only exists because the analogy between the common use of "theory" and the scientific use is fundamentally flawed.
So expanding words' meanings by analogy is good assuming the analogy is not relatively misleading or clearly biased. The analogy between theft and copyright infringement is both, so this use should not be encouraged.
I wonder how long we have until someone makes a car analogy?
While I don't like that Armed Heroes used other's copyrighted work without permission. It's sad that these assets were not released under Creative Commons in the first place. Armed Heroes should've taken the "high road" and released their own assets under CC instead of using other's. IMHO, those who are hypocrite on this subject are simply missing the bigger picture.
Now, releasing the assets under CC after 5 years or so I could get behind. Let the culture remix your work after it has had a chance to stand and be judged, appreciated on its own.
Another thing is that you would not have to reinvent the wheel each time. Sure, you expect the important bits of each game to be unique. But do you really care that the wooden crates or doors from one game are reused in another? Being able to take an existing model of something unimportant and tweak it to match your atmosphere would save a lot of pointless work.
Just having access to such a library would not stop a good game development team for making a creative, distinctive game. It would just save them from having to make a whole bunch of boring models of limited utility. They would still make all the core models--characters, exotic settings and so on--for each particular game.
Besides, I think game studios already share assets between similar games in their own lineup. This would just make the sharing global, giving everybody access to more material to start from.
Personally I mostly enjoy games for their story and atmosphere, and the few times I've recognized a reused asset (e.g. a sound effect) it's been really distracting. It's like the Wilhelm Scream in movies... once you know about it, you can never stop noticing it.
A better idea would be to make an open library for procedural generation of assets, so that you can make infinite variations of every item, and tweaking is easy. We already have e.g. SpeedTree, but these things are so valuable they always end up being commercial rather than free.
> the few times I've recognized a reused asset (e.g.
> a sound effect)
We call them "mods".