It's not unambiguous. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same, or if anything worse because they are distributed and impossible to stop, where as repurposers can be at least targeted. If you own a physical goods store, shrink is shrink...a professional thievery team vs 100 grannies and kids shoplifting results in the same loss, but if anything, it's easier to watch out for and stop the team.
Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
The ambiguity comes because laws are supposed to be a reflection of morals, not the other way around, and a very significant chunk of society, myself included, doesn't see downloading a file from the internet without the author's blessing as a wrong.
If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same
I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them.
You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods.
Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.