To be clear, I am not promoting piracy, it does pose ethical problems. The metaphor to stealing simply fails to illuminate any of them.
So in a very real sense, stealing the soda and stealing the movie are hardly any different?
The corner store lost nothing.
But again, stealing a soda voids the ability for someone else to obtain the good. "Stealing" a movie via piracy doesn't neglect someone else from obtain the good. This is the GP's point - stealing implies there is something of loss.
One more time, boys and girls:
It's all too easy to make such a claim - particularly if you are the one benefiting from piracy.
If the couple chose not to watch the movie, they aren't going to sit and stare at a blank wall for two hours. Maybe they would have watched a movie on regular TV with ads - thereby benefiting the businesses who placed the ads. Maybe they would have watched a movie on Netflix who therefore gave a small percentage of the Netflix subscription fee to the movie studio. And maybe a month later Google fix the technical problems and the couple decide to pay to watch the original movie.
The point is that if the couple hadn't downloaded the movie illegally, somebody somewhere would probably have been financially better off.
I think it illuminates that you got to have/experience something without paying for it, despite the fact that the distributor wanted you to.
If I hire a programmer I get software from the programmer's time. The programmer's time is an expended resource.
If I buy a Coke I get a bottle full of liquid. There was a loss of resources to get it me.
Once that programmer has already written the software there is no cost to duplicate it infinitely. Same with movies.
Since it requires no resources why is there a distributor? A middleman has to work hard to provide his value. Netflix does with impeccable service and high reliability. In this case Google failed. Torrents use otherwise unused bandwidth (ie no resource) and are the baseline for value that these middlemen must compete with.