Of course there is. Pirating streaming media isn’t like stealing bread to feed your starving family, it’s entirely optional. If you don’t agree with the terms of service (i.e. DRM) then don’t use the service. Deciding on your own terms of service is just entitlement. I personally don’t care either way but you can’t say there is no argument against it.
Stealing bread actually deprives someone else of a scarce resource, but the marginal cost of making a digital copy of a TV show is ~zero. So you’re right - it is quite different. Stealing bread is much worse than copying a digital file.
You both argue around the question: how does the unlicensed reproduction of media morally compare to stealing.
Argument 1: Sufficiently severe benefits should mitigate the moral fault in theft.
Argument 2: Sufficiently small damage should mitigate the moral fault in theft.
You both seem to at least implicitly agree that both is theft, which would be a traditional point of disagreement in the debate.
I commented because I think one and two might be structurally the same argument: It's a consequentialist idea of utility thresholds.
A key disagreement would be whether there are thresholds that make the quantitative difference in utility a qualitative difference. Think hunger on one side and unquantifiable small loss in profits on the other side.
I’m actually arguing from a slightly different consequentialist position; I don’t think intellectual property law in general is socially efficient. You have to consider whether the (putative) benefit of IP-based R&D funding exceeds the loss associated with the introduction of artificial scarcity, social cost of IP enforcement, etc. For something like rocket engines or metallurgy, I would say “maybe”. For the latest Star Wars spinoff, I would say “strong no”.
Even for rocket engines or whatever, it’s not clear if the patent system is still producing acceptable returns.
Then why do public libraries exist? Reading a book is optional. Artists who make TV and movies gain nothing from google being hostile to the people trying to view their work. It’s the publishers and middlemen that are doing this.
