I fully agree with the general message, but this particular anecdote doesn’t really make sense to me and can easily be waved off by anyone who disagrees with it.

If buying isn’t owning, that means it’s renting or borrowing.

If you pirate it, they get no money and therefore cannot rent it out to you. You cannot just steal a movie from the movie rental store or a car from a car rental place. That’s stealing.

Sure, it’s infinitely reproducible but that’s not what this meme says. That’s an unrelated argument for piracy. It draws a direct connection between the 2 relationships of buying + owning and pirating + stealing. However, one has nothing to do with the other.

When someone owns something, they are allowed to rent it out. It’s always been that way and that’s valid.

The real argument should be “if there was no intention to buy in the first place, then piracy isn’t stealing” or something like that.

Am I completely missing the point or is this analogy completely nonsensical? Quite literally, what someone does with something they own is their business and they get to decide what they let people do with rented content, from a legal standpoint. It’s DRM free content is so important because online platforms are allowed to remove content from you for any reason.

On a side note, I condone piracy and nobody should ever give money to large media corporations. But if we use stupid arguments like this it makes us easier to dismiss.