> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.

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].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001873

Language is complex and nuanced. Identity theft is an interesting edge case - your identity is an intangible, but it's also not something that someone else can use without harming you. They're effectively stealing your reputation. It's not a physical thing, but especially in the age of digital tracking, there's only one instance of it.

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.