well, I like to think of it like this.
Some people justify pirating/stealing programs by saying that it costs nothing to duplicate. This is true- a simple copy of the original. However-
Take, for example, a sculpture or painting. People make replicas of sculptures and paintings all the time, and they get sold for cheaper, or in some cases given away.
But a replica is NOT a duplicate. If it were possible, via a machine, to make an exact duplicate, atom for atom, that was indistiguishable from the original, how are we to tell them apart? In a sense, they are both the original and thus the artist can exercise the same rights over any duplicates as they do to their original copy. And of course any modifications to these "originals" is more or less vandalism.
The same sort of logic is easily applied to programs and music. the original artists work IS the duplicate, since the duplicate program is indistiguishable from the original, (not counting of course "vandalism" such as with "black XP" or "last XP" with Pirated Windows XP copies, for example) Because of this the artist (in this case the software manufacturer) can exercise the same rights over this duplicate as they would over an original piece of property.
Just because it's easy to duplicate something doesn't make it moral. It still takes work to make the original; and wether you like it or not, the duplicates aren't necessarily products of the original but really. they are the original.
there is no universal moral law...
actually, there are quite a lot of base set of morals that almost every culture recognizes. The only cultures, I believe, that would think stealing is not immoral are probably deep in a jungle somewhere. Even so; a persons actions are viewed by others in the light of some culture, and given that any software-exposed culture has the basic tenet of "theft is wrong" it can be deduced that, in the context of the internet at least, there IS a universal moral law.
Even forgetting about the moral aspect, it's still illegal. you cannot argue against a law saying it simply doesn't agree with your morals. Sure, you can attack it on the basis of a constitution, but intellectual property rights do not infringe on the rights of the individual. Their infringement, on the other hand, constitute a violation against the rights of the copyright owner.
