It's perfectly fine to copy someone else's work. The immorality comes in when you start using physical force to punish people thinking thoughts you feel entitled to.
Copying scientific ideas (with attribution!) is completely OK and good.
Having heterodox ideas is vital for society.
Forcing people to think certain thoughts (or trying to) is the worst evil.
But making a movie is a commercial enterprise that involves risking a bunch of capital. It rarely pans out to make a profit. Copying it without payment is a very minor form of theft, but it's still theft.
Like forcing people think that copying is theft? Or that by clicking a button you agree to few hundred page agreement you couldn't possibly read or understand?
If the content is a movie created in the last 100 years, it was almost certainly created to slot into that revenue model.
The artists have a right to sell their property on their terms. And if they decide to do so by selling their rights to a studio, then that's how it is. And if you don't like corporations, contracts, or the revenue model, then that's completely irrelevant to the parties involved.
Furthermore, what is and isn't legal is a product of the legislature and the judiciary. Let's not forget that people write laws and interpret laws. They aren't some function of the cosmic order, though it's convenient to posture them as if they were.
When someone "has the right," it's because a group of people gave it to them, and anything that can be given, can be taken away. The fact that we forget this reality is a massive collective hallucination. Once you know how the hallucination works, it's hard to buy into it ever again.
TLDR; The arrow of implication doesn't go from reality -> laws. It goes from laws -> reality.
The pirated works were created under this understanding of the rules.
In other words, movies and games were financed and made at great expense and effort with a view to selling copies and tickets and making money off of VHS rentals / Netflix streaming. Piracy is a clear subversion of this, and by the way, if it became mainstream, would break the industry that creates some of the things we like.
While the law isn't part of some cosmic order, there's nothing written in the stars that entitles you to every creation of every other person, at your convenience, for free.
I'm glad there's room for both and the gray areas in between.
Do we, for example, have an obligation to those who play by laws we believe to be unjust?
If movie productions were so concerned about profit, maybe they should stop all the Hollywood accounting nonsense.
The industry has just made several films surpassing a billion dollars. The industry is absolute fine. And someone downloading Deadpool isn't stealing or doing any harm to that industry.
If people want to pay for it they will, and if they don't they won't. If I don't have enough talent to make a lot of money from my work, then that's the only reason - not piracy.
for sharing or facilitating the thinking of thoughts you feel entitled to.*
This was also a time before mass copying and distribution on a massive scale.