Pirate download a sin?

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DavidCro

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Is, say, downloading from pirate bay sinful? Some compare this to stealing.
 
Thomas Aquinas says that stealing is a deadly sin. 😃 But please do explain how is it a venial sin?
 
If you stole a widow’s last bit of money, that’s pretty mortal.
But downloading Black Panther illegally? Marvel won’t be bankrupted by losing $20 of profit. Venial.
 
If you can buy and pay for it legally most definitely sinful. Venial in most cases but I’d say mortal if you intend to deprive the creators of their payments. So if you say, download Minions because you want it and are too lazy to use legal channels it’s different than downloading Spiderman simply because you don’t want to pay or don’t want to support Peter Jackson. Still, a sin to be avoided but depriving even a millionaire because you don’t like them is a far greater sin than simply being lazy because of the intent.

However, there comes into play some legal grey area. For instance, the amount of literature, abandonware games, and shows. Someone legally owns it but they are basically missing in action. For instance, there are many 90’s TV shows that there are no legal means of obtaining. Many times these shows have been uploaded from someone’s old VHS tapes and are hosted on the site. I have a few myself. I would love to buy them legally and have good copies but they just don’t exist. I do check periodically.
 
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Aye. Would say that falls under theft. It’s not like tossing a pen into your pocket after writing a check without thinking about it.
 
If you download a movie that is playing in theatres that would sound a serious matter.
You have an obligation to pay, normally by going to the theatre.

If its no longer in the theatres and the producers made a fortune issues are grey. If you would not bother to buy the DVD its getting more trivial. Its not quite the same as normal theft where something material is taken which has intrinsic value. Your are rather infringing on invisible intellectual “property”.

How long does a producer have the right to make money from his intellectual property for doing absolutely nothing? At what point does it become “common land” as it were?
I personally have no qualms about hard to buy cowboy movies from the 1960s.

So apply the above principles and act according to your conscience.
If you believe you were wrong then donate what you think the value of the movie is worth (given you are not paying the DVD making or advertising company) to the Church poor box.
 
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It’s not stealing, though it may or may not be sinful. Committing piracy (by making copyrighted works illegally available to the public) is usually gravely sinful.

I gave my full opinion in my posts in this thread:
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Streaming movies (mortal sin?)? Popular Media
Whether or not the act of streaming constitutes copying under US law probably comes down to technical considerations regarding precisely how the streaming works. But in any case the act of making a copyrighted work publicly available for streaming constitutes public display and is therefore against the law on the end of the person making the work so available. In any case I don’t think that the particulars of whether or not the act of streaming (on your end) is technically illegal affect the mor…
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