One of the cool things about France’s civil law system is that it places a premium on defining things precisely, and thus I’ve never seen a better definition of "theft" than that of the French Penal Code: the fraudulent subtraction of another person’s property. The word "subtraction" here, of course, is key. To steal something is to fraudulently subtract from their property. With file sharing, of course, no subtraction occurs, since the file is copied.
Earlier, Mataconis differed:
From a philosophical and moral point of view, there seems to me to be no question that there’s very little difference between stealing a physical copy of a book and illegally making a copy of a digital version of that same book. In both cases, the creator of the work has been deprived of an economic benefit to which they’re clearly entitled, and the person committing the act is gaining possession of something for which they haven’t paid for. That’s stealing.
Yglesias pushed back, reminding us that something called libraries exist:
Now as it happens, the powers that be have decided that it’s socially beneficial to allow friends to borrow each others’ books even though this results in losses of royalties. The government even funds, at taxpayer expense, institutions dedicated to helping members of the public obtain books without paying royalties to the author.
The Dish 