Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income.

That is a claim. You have made it in this post, ergo it is a claim you have made.

That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.

You're claiming it to be a fact, that doesn't make it so lmfao. Piracy of things that are unavailable for sale robs creators of what income, exactly? "Piracy" including circumventing DRM, including for legitimate license holders, again, what loss income? Y'know it's cheaper to fly from Melbourne to LA and buy adobe creative suite than it is to purchase it in australia, unfortunately evading geoblocking is considered piracy. Those immoral Australian deviants have no right to circumvent the noble price gauging of multinationals apparently.

There is no fact here. There is a baseless claim that, again, I'd ask you to substantiate. What's this, like my fourth post in a row where I've invited you do to do so. Perhaps a fifth response where you fail to do that will convince someone.

And for your reference, confidently claiming something does not make it a fact. There needs to be actual truth to it as well, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of a claim then nobody is obligated to accept it as fact.

Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.

We established several posts ago that pirated products are typically more profitable. Your (often false) assumption that pirates haven't purchased the rights to the content they are pirating and incomplete ideas of what piracy includes is failing you here. If there is no opportunity to pay for said content, is it still immoral?

You appeal to holding up the social contract, what about cases of actual theft where legitimate customers are cut off from access by developers and via pirate to have access to content they have legally paid for? How much extra money should should someone owe universal studios if they want to rip a DVD or download a rip to their laptop so they can watch it on a flight? When kids used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, how much money do they owe the record labels for doing so?

Which there is no evidence of ever happening

Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.

Your definition of piracy is inadequate, but even in those cases where piracy meets your definition, you cannot provide any actual substantiated cost for what creators have lost, because no such evidence exists. There is no evidence to support the assumption that a pirated piece of content is a lost sale (there is, however, evidence that leads to the likelihood of pirated content leading to more sales, be it by word of mouth marketing increasing the products sales or by future/parallel sales by the pirate themselves).

If it's bullshit, link a study and prove me wrong.

And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.

Lmfao I made a point that equating piracy to theft is as wrong as equating murder to speeding and you claimed that was a straw man because nobody is arguing speeding is murder. No shit genius, the point of that comparison is to demonstrate the absurdity of the former claim, because nobody is so clueless as to make the latter.

For your education benefit, a stawman would be an argument derailing the topic of conversation with an entirely different claim (not by drawing a legitimate comparison). Here's an example, it's subtly different so try to see if you can't spot how it's not the same as the argument above.

Defending the big corporations and the establishment means you're supporting scumbags who benefit from it like Harvey weinersien and the sexists at activision/blizzard. You are directly supporting abusers of women

You're so confidently asserting nonsense and making both stupid and irrelevant claims. If you want to lick boots and swallow corporate propaganda equating serious crimes with misdemeanors that's your choice, but you'd have to be beyond stupid to expect that sentiment to be shared and a left leaning, somewhat anti corporate message board.