It isn’t theft, it’s copyright infringement. Otherwise known as a bullshit crime that corporations invented to force the state to protect their bottom line. An individual infringing on a corporations copyright is, at worst, neutral. The artists working on these movies, games, albums, etc are either salaried, contracted, or having the majority of their profits siphoned off from their publisher. If you really care about supporting artists, throw independent artists a few bucks where you can and “steal” to your hearts content from the companies that already exploit their creative workforce.

Honestly, I wish pirating measurably hurt corporations bottom lines. They need to go down and that would be the easiest way to do it. But decades of rampant piracy have shown that piracy actually helps these companies in most instances, as people who have pirated a product and like it are more likely to purchase the product in the future compared to someone who simply hasn’t used the product in question.

Additionally, many smaller or independent creators either don’t give a shit about piracy or actively encourage those without the means to pay to pirate it anyway. People who are doing it for the love of their craft aren’t profit centered ghouls who only care about enriching themselves and create things to contribute to our shared culture and entertainment. Pull your head out of your ass

Copyright makes sense to protect creativity to an extent, until we figure out some other way artists can make a living.

Corps make BILLIONS thanks to copyright. It’s not protecting creativity, real creators don’t get that money.
I agree that work has to paid, but this is ridiculous.