I don't anyone should concede that copying data is theft. Since theft implies an unlawful transfer of ownership. Copying data and deleting the original is theft.
I don't know about that. When Target or Walmart or whatever credit card processor experiences a data breach and customer data is exposed it's considered data theft and treated as such as well. While we can't compare digital goods with physical goods in a 1:1 manner because they have different properties, so far, aspects as it concerns the law treat them similarly.
Aspects of this may or may not change over time, however, in the meantime they are what they are. It's like physics. Till the consensus changes, current accepted theory applies, even if there are gaps.
In the end, "theft" is just reapplying old nomenclature to new phenomena. We could call it something else, give the behavior a new name and then have society turn around and apply the same laws, would that make things any better?
The actual crime is the fraud committed when someone pretends to be someone else and runs up debts in their name with "stolen" credit card numbers.
There are ancillary crimes that revolve around trying to keep credit card numbers secure, but taking my credit card number doesn't mean I don't have it anymore.
My examples could result in fraud, but aren't the kind you're talking about. You getting a hold of thousands, millions of credit cards without consent or some other agreement is a criminal offense. Let's get away from CC numbers. Just get a hold of thousands, millions of people's PHI through the same means. Get a hold of BEA's secret blue prints for future products.
Nothing about TPB is a breach of security on the parts of rights holders. The transactions taking place on torrent sites never even involve them. In reality, the only relation the law has to what TBP is doing is simply that depending on jurisdiction either:
The original uploader is violating the copyright of the copy he originally procured, but in some countries once he distributes that (and the recipient isn't liable, because it is a very Orwellian thing to claim that a user downloading some arbitrary file from anywhere is liable for the copyright violations involved, albeit if they are on TPB they have less of a defense there - but it is very thought police-y to try to assert that everyone is liable for all the data they download - because everyone is infringing copyright every day with every screenshot of Frozen or the cover art to music albums being pushed from websites to your music player.
All parties seeding are liable, albeit for the same reason I described earlier this seems like a gross dystopian model to use because it means you blame people for non-violent behavior they cannot know is wrong, just because the original provider of the data never disclosed its copyright status. It cannot be the fault of a recipient of information if they were never told it was being shared without a license to share on the part of the sharer, or that they do not then have rights to share.
Either way, that is nothing like hacking Sony's servers and copying movie data off of it. That is a violent intrusion on their digital property, literally, by entering their servers without their permission and with obvious intent to intrude and possibly duplicate or even destroy data.
Until the conversation about information sharing can be had outside of relating it to violence, which it is almost never, and I would never condone, then you can't have a legitimate conversation on this topic. First and foremost must be an acknowledgment that the copyright infringement most sites like TPB are advocating is the voluntary exchange of information one party has to one party that wants it, in violation of a state framework granting a third party to that transaction exclusive rights to control its distribution. That is just objective fact, before any subjective opinions or morality come into the discussion, but without that everyone is operating on false assumptions.
Theft does not imply an unlawful transfer of ownership. For example a person can be charged with theft of service for stealing electricity or cable TV, even though all they did was cause their own electrons in their own cables to oscillate in a certain way.
