Trying to say that's not stealing is like trying to say "Someone hacked into to my bank account and "obtained" my money" is not stealing either just because there was no physical cash involved.
It also does not decrease the amount of cash owned by the content owner or hosting company (apart from hosting costs, but that's the nature of the internet and they are willfully participating in it). The only cost involved is opportunity cost.
I'm not sure to whom you are referring when you say "thief", but I was under the impression that we were talking about a person watching, but not re-uploading, a Youtube video without viewing ads. This person does not have Y dollars in his account as a result of copyright infringement since they simply watched the video and did not put it up for further distribution.
I wasn't saying "people who download are thiefs", I was saying "thiefs start by downloading". Then I had to explain what a thief is, and why they really have Y dollars in their account that should have been in producers account. In my other comment the thief is a separate party from the content consumers (so actually there are 6 parties, content consumers is split into those who watch ads and those who download without re-uploading).
There are at least 5 parties here:
· Content producer (spending time and effort making original content that people watch)
· Platform
· Advertiser
· Content consumers
· Thief
This is the reason Youtube's Content-ID exists.