A rap artist is hired by a label to create an album. Said artist later dies. The label goes bankrupt soon thereafter, or perhaps simply folds up shop and leaves the business without auctioning off its assets.

I have produced a copy of the album, which I host at my own cost from my server, once these events have transpired. There is no reasonable "victim" left for this crime of infringement, and indeed I'm helping to reduce the scarcity of this product in the world.

While somewhat contrived, this thought experiment is not particularly far off from reality.

Of course, in a lot of cases demos would work well for that, but they seem to have fallen out of favour recently.

It is materially different from theft. Enough so that making property law fit copyright is not feasible in any reasonable way.

One is based on an presumptive right of the individual to protection of their right to continued use of something.

The other is an artificial government monopoly restricting the public from exercising their right to full use of their own property, by preventing them from copying and distributing information that is legally already in their possession, and where nobody are deprived of continued use at all.

Consider, if you will, that for hundreds of years the concept of intellectual property--indeed, even the idea of land ownership in some places-was foreign. You simply cannot throw up your hands and say "But semantics!" and expect to be taken seriously.

At best, you look lazy--at worst, you appear a sycophant to those who rely on provably unneeded monopolies of information distribution.

You're position is indeed much simpler: you seem to be either unwilling or unable to understand that this ongoing public dialogue about intellectual property, copyright, and related matters is something that isn't cut and dried.

If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?

To me and a lot of others, illegal copying is far more morally defensible than theft. If someone tries to call a person that pirate a thief, my immediate reaction is that the claim is not only flat out false, but offensive.

Copyright protection is an artificial government monopoly on an activity that does not affect your property rights, and as such it is perfectly defensible for someone to consider it moral to violate copyright. I do consider some forms of copyright violations morally wrong, such as selling copies, but I do consider a lot of piracy morally acceptable (despite the fact I don't engage in piracy, though I did some 20-25 years ago)

Theft is materially different because it deprives the owner of continued use of that which was stolen.

We need new software, because: a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright), b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation, c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).

If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.

If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).

Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.

Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.

Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.

Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.

You seem to think that I am defending pirating; offering up a moral justification of sorts. I am not. I am not interested in the slightest in the morality of the topic, one way or the other. I offer them no moral defence, nor do I morally condemn them. Rather I am telling you that you should not get bent out of shape over it.

And for the record, despite your insinuation, I pirate neither software, nor music, nor movies, nor whatever else there is to pirate. Why would I?

I think you are taking my response too personally for some reason.