"What if I "steal" your identity? Technically, you don't lose anything. I am just borrowing your information. Should this be okay too?"

Identity theft is a good example because it illustrates the way we call lots of things "theft" which aren't.

Similarly, we might say that murder is "stealing someone's life."

Anyhow, identity theft isn't theft, it's fraud. And if you pretend to be me so as to, say, extend yourself a line of credit, you're clearly doing harm to me (and my credit rating!), not to mention the counterparty you just (fraudulently) contracted with.

"There is no "artificial scarcity". The talented people that actually make software, music, and movies are scarce. This is what you are buying. If this wasn't the case, anybody could make Photoshop (not copy) in a few clicks."

You're parsing words here. Yes, the talent is scarce, but the means by which we reward that talent is breaking down because the marginal cost of media in a digital world is zero.

"Not "stealing" per se, but if you took the original developers work and put them out of business because you were copying (and distributing) it for free, isn't it almost the same thing?"

Well, personally, I distinguish between people who download something for personal use versus people who download something for the purpose of profiting off of it.

The law distinguishes between these two types of copyright infringement, too. The former is not criminal, while the latter is. That's why Grandma gets sued by the RIAA, but pirates operating on a massive scale get arrested by the FBI.

In any event, it's more about the macro trend of what would happen if such a technology existed. Right or wrong, it would fundamentally disrupt the economic system by which we produce automobiles.

But I think it's clear that duplicating my neighbor's car is not the same as breaking into his car, hot wiring it, and driving off without his permission, right?

"It's counterfeiting, which is worse than theft. With theft, you aren't going to put a television company out of business because a few tvs got stolen out of the back of a van."

Er, again, no. Counterfeiting involves fraud. It's fraudulently passing off something as genuine which is not.

That copy of Photoshop I download really is Adobe Photoshop (R), not a knockoff. I mean, it's bit-for-bit identical.

If I start selling DVDs of Photoshop from my storefront that's also not counterfeiting, but would probably be criminal copyright infringement.

If I were selling a DVD that I claimed was a legitimate, off-the-shelf copy of Photoshop with a license key and everything, but it wasn't, I suppose that would be both counterfeiting and copyright infringement. IANAL, so I don't know.

Anyhow, in conclusion, yes, if we had the ability to duplicate cars, atom-for-atom, at no cost that would be a huge problem for the auto industry. People would lose their jobs. There would be massive disruption, economic loss (at least in the near-term), and a call from auto manufacturers to ban the practice.

But it's still not theft. It's something else.

"When software is pirated (like in this article), it really can put a company out of business and destroy their entire revenue stream."

There are cases where that is true, but it's still not theft.