By conflating unauthorized copying with stealing, they're usually doing so to justify excessive punishment. If the owner lost what they had, they were obviously harmed, right?

Property rights are about control, not about physical objects. Never has been. By committing copyright infringement, trespassing, or, yes, stealing, you're asserting for yourself the privilege to take something that doesn't belong to you (exclusive control) from someone else.

Legally speaking, is murder stealing?

(And yes, "legally" matters, because we're talking about laws in this thread, not colloquial "their life was stolen" type expressions.)

This question is obviously (hopefully) rhetorical, no need to answer. My point is that different crimes are different. Otherwise literally every crime is stealing, and no other words for different crimes matter. Obviously different crimes are different.

IAAL but this is not legal advice.

In most U.S. states, the actual crime will be a specific reference to a section in a Penal Code (or, for Federal crimes, the U.S. Code). For civil actions, it's likely to be a reference to a common-law tort, or some Federal statute providing a private right of civil action.

In the case of taking a physical object from someone else, most states call it "theft" in the penal code, or "conversion" for the common-law tort.

But all of this is academic anyway. I'm not entirely sure what your point is.

> I'm not entirely sure what your point is.

I edit my reply as you were responding to make my point explicit.

Maybe but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when the argument at face value is factually incorrect.

This tired argument--that copyright infringement is not "stealing"--is at least as old as my Commodore 64.

Yeah, considering that taking trade secrets is absolutely stealing, this could be considered stealing