Piracy was NEVER stealing

1. Millions of people create things all the time with zero compensation. That's literally why the "starving artist" is a universal stereotype. Plenty of people create things out of passion and self-expression, for shared experiences, and for the good of others.

The idea that everything must have a profit motive behind it or nobody would do it is a Capitalist myth.

2. In most cases of large scale production, the vast majority of people involved are already compensated for their labor. Ironically, often it is the artist/group themselves that don't receive compensation directly for their work, but as a conditional percentage based on overall profitability of the parent label corporation, (who are near universally nasty, scummy, and exploitative.)

3. Doing labor is not a sufficient condition for compensation. If it were, I could go through parking lots, washing people's cars while they are inside, and then present them a bill for my labor. Then, if they refused to pay, I could take them to court for "stealing" my labor from me by enjoying a freshly washed car and not paying the bill.

I could create artwork and demand people buy it from me to compensate me for all the labor I put into making it. Both examples are obviously ridiculous, because while labor very well may be a necessary condition for compensation, it isn't a sufficient condition.

4. You admit that my concert example, at least in certain circumstances works. Which means that it proves my argument. If consuming content without compensation is actually stealing, then people walking past and listening to some of the music in a concert are literally thieves and should be arrested and forced to pay restitution. A ridiculous conclusion to the vast majority of people, even, I would wager, to many anti-piracy folks.

5. I advocate compensating artists for their work if you can and if the artist is independent. I think its morally wrong to support the current exploitative entertainment structure by willingly paying for services and products that are designed to abuse the consumer and in many cases, the very artists that are under their banner.

6. You also never addressed my Rolex example, which is basically a perfect analogy to how digital media is replicated IRL.

You also ignore the idea that an action can become morally right in and of itself depending of the motive. Piracy itself can be an act of protest to support proper orientation of the markets and social norms around the creation and distribution of art.

History is filled with activists engaging in what was illegal and considered immoral at the time, but we look back on their actions now as good and upright. Just because many pirates are nerds that post dank memes doesn't delegitimize their actions.

Labor rights activists a century ago read Socialist theory and distributed cartoons and media mocking rich tycoons and abusive bosses. In other words, they were also nerds that posted dank memes.

So following your argument further, if we all did this no one would produce anything because they'd never get paid.

You are literally saying this on Lemmy. A piece of software that is developed for free using other software/tools that are free, and run on servers that are hosted by others for free. Most open source projects work this way. People are fully capable of doing things because they want to. Not everything needs to be profit-driven.

If we all did this, what would happen is there would be way less slop and lazy cash-grabs. Because the only people left making things would be the ones who are actually passionate and believe in what they do.

You're initial closing statement criticizes people for "...hiding behind word definitions..." when the OP's post is arguing that copying is not Stealing.

It's very telling that your criticisms aren't ever leveled at the system itself, but instead, the people who object to how it is structured.

You frame yourself as a pragmatist who just operates honestly, never raising issue with the exploitative and often abusive practices of these corpos, record labels, executives. I never said piracy doesn't hurt anyone, I said it isn't theft.

Piracy hurts exploitative corpos the most, which is a good thing. It's good to cause harm to evil structures and subvert their authority and power. That's literally the point of social activism.

The fact that some well-meaning and innocent folks are going to get caught in the crossfire is sad, but such is the cost of subverting abusive power structures. Remember, pirates never created those structures, the corpos, billionaires, and corrupt politicians did.

I respect some pirates, I despise others. I tip or buy merch from small time artists whenever I can, often far more than they would have gotten from me buying their art, and far far more than if I streamed their song a few times of Spotify, YT Music, or dutifully watched an ad that played on their channel.

Piracy can be done in an ethical way, or an unethical way, but it's certainly not, "at best, morally grey."

You better go out and buy fast food at every drive-thru you can find, you not buying food from them might contribute to lower sales for that chain, which could lose those workers their jobs. Obviously that's ridiculous, but that argument uses the same reasoning you just used. If your argument is true, then you're a morally grey person at best if you aren't spending as much money as possible on fast food every month, or any other good/service in existence for that matter.