The data to validate this is scarce, but I'd wager that most rips come from stolen physical media. I don't think there's too many people out there going "I just paid $20 of my hard-earned money for this Blu-ray, so now I'm going to give it away to strangers for free". The whole "paying for something" thing is kinda antithetical to piracy in the first place. But again, there's no real way to quantify this.
Nothing that some customer could have bought is removed by jumping a turnstyle.
Nothing? Not even the fuel required to transport the extra weight of somebody who hasn't paid? Not even the wages for the employees who conduct and maintain the trains?
You can argue that the amounts are miniscule, sure. But "miniscule" does not equal "zero".
Digital piracy has literaly no real cost to the producer except the nebulous “lost sale.”
You know that the pirated files were stolen in the first place, right? Movies and video games aren't just sitting out in the open free for somebody to snatch up like apples on a tree. They end up in the hands of scene groups by somebody in the studio taking an unauthorized copy of the product and distributing it.
Lost sales are damages, as demonstrated by the courts hundreds and hundreds of times over now.
The trains cost money to run so you are using resources you haven’t paid for.
And media costs money to make.
If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway they haven’t lost anything.
If you weren't going to buy it, why would you pirate it? That's the thing, if you're interested enough in a product to want it, then you taking it for free is a cost to the producer.
If you streamed it from their servers for free using an exploit that would be stealing, as you’ve actually cost them resources.
How do you think scene groups get their materials in the first place? They just find it on a flash drive on a park bench?
More often than not, scene releases are gathered internally by rogue employees in the studio who took something and distributed it in a way that they were not authorized to do. The origins of any movie you pirate come from theft, full stop.
What would you call taking or using something without paying for it, then? Resources are still being spent to transport the person who has not paid for them.
Not asking about the morality, asking whether or not the people making this argument on piracy consider jumping the turnstile to be theft, in the most practical sense. Not in an ideal world, but in the real world, would you consider that theft?
A turnstile jumper is also exploiting the products and services produced by offers without paying the cost to use them. Nothing is being "removed" in that situation either.
I mostly just use it for laughs. I'll usually ask GPT to explain things from the nihilistic viewpoint and get amazing results.
I also use it to rewrite emails that I need to send for work. I have a tendency to over-explain things and use a cold tone when I write, so sometimes I'll tell it "rewrite this to be more concise and empathetic" and it does a really good job of cleaning it up.
This is a forum. It's a place for people to talk to each other, ask questions, and share ideas. There is no requirement that you must find your own answers. If there was, then nobody would ever ask questions anywhere on the internet in the first place.
Quit being a jackass, dude. Not everybody is as thoroughly invested into the things you are and may not have the intimate level of knowledge of those subjects as you, and you're being a real prick by trying to shame somebody for not knowing something.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. The point is that in both examples, somebody is exploiting somebody else's labor without paying.