I don't see much analogy with software piracy and so on, since this would be more like sneaking onto a flight without buying a ticket.
Software piracy isn't theft, so sneaking on without buying a ticket isn't actually analagous. (And in any case, you're thinking about the receiving end, not the giving end.)
When you redistribute something that's sold under terms that say, "don't copy and distribute this", you are breaking the contract you entered into with the seller. And if you intended to do it when you bought the thing, then you entered into that contract fraudulently.
This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.
In both cases, the seller would never have consented to the purchase at the offered price if they knew what your intentions were, which is what makes your purchase fraudulent.
This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.
There is no contract to go anywhere. You are buying options to take rides on planes.
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.