But then again it’s not pirating to re encode your audio files once you’ve downloaded them. So I feel more confident in saying it’s not the bits that are licensed, it’s the work itself. The act of downloading it from piratewarez.example.com feels fishy, but if you download it from musicbackups.example.com — a hypothetical site that says you should not download copies of files unless you have bought a license for them in the past — then it starts to feel like a more interesting gray area. You’ve licensed a digital copy of the work, so why is it wrong to get a copy of it from some place else? The person distributing the work is probably in hot water, but you shouldn’t be, as long as you have the receipt for the original purchase and/or a copy of the license.
For me, the big one here is ebooks. If I buy a physical copy of a book then as far as I’m concerned I’ve bought the license to the work as well as that particular piece of physical media. I don’t lose sleep about pirating the ebook version as well.