If you took a photo of one of the chairs and looked at it at home you'd be just fine though. You're mixing up theft and copyright infringement.

You wouldn't download a chair from the DMV

Someone should design a a front-end framework for which anachronistic analogies like this make sense.

E.g., if a user selects some text and chooses "Copy," the text gets deleted and a listener sends a message back to the server to signal that the text has been "pirated."

At that point the server not only deletes the associated data, but sends a message to all extant clients to remove the given text.

Kinda like a realtime borrow-checker, but not so much for memory safety as for the sheer stupidity of it.

Edit: clarification

That's totally the same thing - because downloading a paper destroys the original copy.

Let's talk about the purpose of these things, chairs & papaers.

The purpose of a chair is to enhance the space it resides in by enabling folks to rest/sit in the chair.

The purpose of a paper is to document science, such that others can see that science, replicate it, learn from it, extend it; the purpose of a paper is to present science such that we can all beget yet more science to happen.

Intellectual "property" is not property.