What if the owner offers you the bread? Isn't that what happens when someone offers to let me copy a file from their harddrive over the internet?
If you look back over my comment history, you will see that I have argued the other side of this issue too. That is because it is a hard problem that doesn't fit well with the moral intuitions that we developed for other kinds of property.
To make matters worse, US copyright laws are way more strict than most people's moral intuitions of what intellectual property should be like. Even if you think the author should have some right to the content they produced, few people think creative works should be locked up until 75 years after the author's death. I have downloaded books illegally from authors that died in the 70s and I feel no moral qualms about it.
If you look back over my comment history, you will see that I have argued the other side of this issue too. That is because it is a hard problem that doesn't fit well with the moral intuitions that we developed for other kinds of property.
To make matters worse, US copyright laws are way more strict than most people's moral intuitions of what intellectual property should be like. Even if you think the author should have some right to the content they produced, few people think creative works should be locked up until 75 years after the author's death. I have downloaded books illegally from authors that died in the 70s and I feel no moral qualms about it.