Reply #26: Well, I wouldn't call unlicensed use "robbery".

[boppers]

Nobody is deprived of their own use when something is copied from them... It's not like actual assets are changing hands from one person to another.

What's being lost is hypothetical *potential* revenue, based on the assumption that if sharing didn't exist, people would have purchased their own licensed copies, at full retail value.... which is the same reasons that the media industries wanted to shut down video rental stores, cassette tape recorders, video tape recorders, used music stores, used book stores, etc.

Taking it a step further:
"it still needs to be big enough to make everyone pause before committing robbery by book sharing"... since people aren't paying for a retail copy of a book, should libraries be shut down?