No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.

I’d argue stealing physical items from massive corporations is also morally acceptable. If you shoplift from a small mom & pop store, you’re actively hurting your community, however, if you shoplift from Wal-Mart, you’re actively hurting an entity which is hurting your community, therefore helping your community.

Given that no one makes a fuss about it when corporations do the stealing, I think so.

If “buying” is not owning, then “piracy” is not stealing.

It is always morally acceptable?

Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.

Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

[src]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If buying isn’t owning, then pirating can’t be stealing.

I’m not going to say piracy is right or wrong.

What I will say is if everyone had access to that replicator, and everyone replicated everything in the store and left, the store would close down, and the products would stop being made.

Likewise, piracy is only viable because not everyone does it. If literally every person pirated the games or movies of any given company, that company would no longer be profitable and would close down.

Piracy is getting something for free because other people pay for it.

perhaps the only ethical consumption under capitalism is that which denies capitalists their profit.

People try to boil these things down to incredibly simplistic rules in an effort to justify what they’ve already decided they’re going to do.

I am pro piracy, as I imagine virtually everyone on this community is. But I also think people get way too reductionist because that is easier than engaging with the nuances of what it means to “steal” or “pirate” or when we are or aren’t hurting a creator.

I think the pros vastly outweigh the cons, the “victims” are few and far between due to it being so rare/situational as to make it ok to functionally treat it like there are none, and I also think all the people arguing they are “doing media preservation” who don’t even know what a proper 3-2-1 backup is are full of shit lol. I also think people need to accept the fact they just want free shit sometimes and trying to dress up their motivations/sense of entitlement to free media with high minded arguments about sticking it to corporations or whatever is disingenuous - just own the decision!

I use my server because it is convenient and because I don’t want my kids being visually assaulted and manipulated every time they turn on a tv. I used to watch one of them visibly become panicked when all the tiles of a streaming service would pop up in front of him, it was just so overwhelming. I went a solid seven or eight years without the high seas because there was a time when streaming services were reasonably priced, convenient, and not dominated by ads. Now that that is no longer the case, I have gone back to my server. Simple as that.

I don’t mind paying for a service, I don’t even mind the occasional advertisement in my life. But what we have right now is absolutely ridiculous and easily justifies so many reasons for pirating.

All of this is to say you’re not gonna find people here who disagree with your decision to pirate. But you’re also not going to find some airtight philosophical argument that works 100% of the time. You have to consider the ethical implications of your actions in your day-to-day life, there are no simple rules to avoid that.