Every analogy that has ever been trotted out is way off base.
It's not theft, it's not "piracy," and if we're going to liken it to murder or grand larceny we may as well go all the way with it and call it "terrorism."
No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery.
Literally: the act of producing an unauthorized copy of a document, work of art, [etc.].
That's a better word for it perhaps, if you see the act in a negative light.
Even then, doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original? It's not quite the same if I make a copy of something where 'originality' doesn't apply and it is a 1:1 duplicate. Maybe NFTs will fix this ;)
> doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original?
They do, but here's where analogies become incoherent or inapplicable. Mind that "original" doesn't have to mean "master copy;" many business models (like software) trade in authorized copies.
You don't buy ownership rights to movies-- you're buying limited exhibition rights (do they still put the FBI warning at the beginning of the DVD? I haven't seen one in years). Even when you buy the DVD, you don't really own anything other than a permission slip to show it to a half-dozen people at a time, in your own home.
Thus, making unauthorized copies of a movie amounts to forging new licensing agreements, where future licensees are not accountable to the rightsholder.
Maybe the best analogy would be an NDA-- "we'll show you this movie this one time, but you can't record/copy it and show it to others." Nobody is sympathetic to the lamentations of corporate media lawyers and their contractual disputes, thus, we get lame analogies about stealing your car to try to make their struggles relatable enough to dissuade the behavior.
It's not theft, it's not "piracy," and if we're going to liken it to murder or grand larceny we may as well go all the way with it and call it "terrorism."
No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery.
Literally: the act of producing an unauthorized copy of a document, work of art, [etc.].