Filesharing. That’s why everyone is a member of this site. It’s our common interest. But is it moral to participate in filesharing? Is it even technically illegal?
Strictly speaking filesharing is not a crime in terms of theft. The most frequently quoted definition of stealing is that the action in question led to someone being deprived of his or her personal property. As such, seeing as filesharing involves copies, it is not exactly stealing.
However, for an action to be considered theft it does not have to deprive the lawful owner of the use of an object or income from its use or sale. With that said, imagine there was a greedy shoemaker who made huge quantities of shoes and in fact made so many that he couldn’t sell them all. If someone were to “take” some of these excess shoes from the shoemaker without permission, it would still be considered theft, even if the shoemaker had no intention of selling them.