The supporters of a too-strict, repressive form of copyright often use words like “stolen” and “theft” to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth.
Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The supporters of repressive copyright are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.
To refute them, you can point to this real case which shows what can properly be described as “copyright theft.”
Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn't make it wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.
A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that “piracy” and “theft” are smear-words.
Yes, it might be a copyright infringement in some jurisdictions or license violation or may be even completely legal. I see nothing inherently bad about it. If you blindly follow every law, sure, don't do it. Some people can cross the law in some cases.
Actually I don't think making a copy of some stream of bits for my own use is immoral regardless of who's making the software or whether it's some indie studio or a megacorp.
But trying to defend Apple from piracy is just laughable.
I recommend that you remain entirely unaware of the extent of my illegal and morally questionable activities. The movie/TV show piracy, the ad blocking, the software theft, and the KVM-based Hackintosh I’ve been using lately will surely leave you with heightened blood pressure. Also, I never stop at red lights when riding a bicycle. Oh, the horror! Somehow I’ve survived two decades of this. So wrong.
Or you could learn to mind your own business and avoid all of that nastiness. Your choice.
If you suspect that a crime was committed, I encourage you to contact the appropriate law enforcement agency. Until then, you’re welcome to stand aside while others hold themselves accountable to their respective systems of values. You call it stealing, I call it using imaginary property. I don’t force you to participate in my heists & capers, and you can’t force me to pay for imaginary things. Everything’s good in the world.
I think a more productive way of puting it is that using hackintosh makes it less urgent to build great mac os / iOS alternatives, while providing no solution to apple locking strategy in the long run.
