So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.
You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.
This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].
Regardless of the linguistic semantics, the campaign to conflate piracy and stealing was a manipulative mind game that tried to dissuade people from a common activity by overstating its harms. Pirating a movie is victimless, except for aggregated market effects where too much piracy can impact the financial viability of film production. It's very different than stealing, which has a discrete victim.
If you download a movie or a game without authorization, that's a societal no-op, unless it's a thing you would have paid money for. At scale, pirates do include people who would have paid, which is problematic for the film business. That's bad and worth solving, but it's not the same as stealing.