Is it wrong to take food from a grocery store that would otherwise be thrown away? The grocery store isn't losing anything except potential future revenue.

And I agree. However, when youtube decides to make you watch an ad every 2 minutes, you stop caring

As a general rule I actually agree, even if it’s a bit complicated and not black & white

I read it as “privacy is bad” and was so confused.

Theft has a very strict legal definition. Piracy is not legally theft. It is legally infringement, a separate crime. Conflating one with the other is propaganda by the largest IP holders.

These largest IP holders want nothing more than to lock up all culture and rent it back to you for a price, indefinitely. They would happily steal from you without a moment’s hesitation. In fact, they have stolen from you. They’ve successfully extended copyright terms to an absurd length, preventing works from entering the public domain for decades.

Many of these IP holders also don’t care about preservation. They’ll happily let their works be lost to history. Some are actively fighting against preservation.

Is it immoral to infringe? Yes. But IP holders don’t have the moral highground. They’re just as bad, if not worse. (I’m talking about the multi billion dollar companies here, not the small business persons struggling to get by)

I hunt criminals. Modern life as a whole is pretty criminal. You realize your tax money has gotten civilians killed right? All tax payers have blood on their hands for essentially paying other people to murder for them so they don't need to do it themselves and so they can create the apps and movies people pirate. It's fucked from begining to end. There's no such thing as holy unless you live in the woods and never touch the rest of humanity.

We are all immoral with no authentic values. Just indoctrinated to think we're more special than others and literally pay people to kill for us.

Piracy does not steal from the directors and creators, but from the distributors whose have already bought the rights. The distributors who attempt to create artificial scarcity, excessively monetize your attention, and in generally act hostile to their consumers. There used to be a pact between distributors extracting money from consumers while leaving the content in a desirable state, but greed ruined that. I don’t mind some ads, but we’re way beyond reasonable. I don’t mind phased rollouts, but actively preventing people from watching just because of their location? I don’t mind things not being shown, but the whole concept of stoking FoMO “before it goes into the vault for next generation”, is just wrong. I don’t mind attempts to copy protect, but paying your politicians to turn a civil matter into criminal and use govt resources to protect your artificial scarcity is just so wrong.

I prefer not to pirate. I used to think policy was wrong when there was some balance between distributors and consumers. However greed ruined that. Greed made distributors take and take. It is not wrong to steal from such corrupt unethical businesses. They’re not worthy of respect

then rob a federal bank.

Illegalist anarchists have entered the chat.

steals the rightful intellectual property of directors and developers

Software piracy from an independent or small studio, maybe.

Movie piracy? Everyone working on the film got paid for their work. What you're 'stealing' is the profits from a megacorp that's making more money year-on-year than ever before while still paying those in the industry terribly because they can.

Your hot take is a bit flawed.