You lose all respect from me the moment you equate copyright infringement and theft. Copyright law exists explicitly because theft by definition can not have occurred if the victim still has the the supposedly stolen item in their possession.
You make an interesting point for sure. Perhaps people are 'breaking the [copyright] law' by copying currently protected material. They are not stealing it by your argument since it is still possessed by the owner. Perhaps 'don't steal music/movies' sounds more forceful than 'don't break copyright law'. I'm not saying you're either wrong or right, though I would like to examine this a bit further as an intellectual exercise.
The point is that the law still bears force even if the owner decides to never release his material (unless he/she himself indicates so otherwise, or the legally specified number of years of copyright protection has passed).
As such, there is no justification to break the protection granted to Ralph at this point in time. You may not cause pecuniary damages to him, though you have broken the law, and in doing so, disenfranchised Ralph from his legally provided right to keep possession of his work. Whether this possession is morally correct or not, is not a question of legality. If Ralph discovers a cure for cancer, writes it up in a book, and never publishes the book, keeping a copy for himself that gets stolen and posted somewhere, then the only thing to save face that can be done is for the *laws to change*, perhaps making an exception that certain life-enriching works must be distributed by the author or granted free to society if such distribution is non-existent. I'm not sure this applies to a technical book about a vintage system
As you mention, some countries take non-commercial copying of unavailable works lightly. This may seem harmless, until we realize that in the case of Ralph, you are basically going against the wishes of the owner, who had stressed his position about his out-of-print work being copied freely. Remember that he is a *living author* who has/had the intention of building on his earlier works to provide a new commercially available product (the new edition).
