It's actually an interesting question there. Because I've been wondering if I buy something in taking ownership of it, whereas if I steal something I am still taking ownership of it without compensation. However if I'm not buying something but merely licensing it the wouldn't that mean that technically I'm not stealing it I'm only violating the terms of the license of it, which is now a civil not criminal matter.

That's not really how copyright law works.

Firstly, you're not "stealing" (committing the crime of theft) by making digital copies of a work. You are infringing copyright. Even a single copy infringes copyright. To not infringe copyright, you need a license for your copying from the copyright holder.

You can still manage to infringe that license even if you went through a normal storefront and paid the copyright holder the amount they asked for. You can do that by doing things with your licensed copy that the copyright holder wrote into your license that you mustn't do. If they sold physical items, they would not be able to apply such adverse terms to your copy.

If you void your own license in that way, you no longer have that license, and so any copying/modification/distribution you're doing is back to being copyright infringement.

Finally, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. That's when you make a significant profit from copyright infringement (for example, getting people to pay you to watch a pay-per-view event that you're illegally redistributing, or even just having adverts that make you money on a website offering unlicensed Nintendo ROMs for emulators)