[iakov]

Your definition of "theft" is a bit too broad, don't you think?

Usually theft means that the original owner is deprived of goods - they can't use them, can't sell them, they simply don't the the original item. This is simply not the case for digital goods. HBO won't lose money when I download GOT, won't they?

[cortesoft]

If it was totally legal to pirate all content, why would anyone pay for it? And if no one pays for content, why would HBO finance its creation?

It is disingenuous to say piracy doesn’t cost anything to the content creators.

[iakov]

It is totally legal to pirate content where I live now, and where I've lived before. Still, I pay for video games on Steam or for Spotify. Hell I even buy music on Bandcamp. I do this because it's convenient and because I want to support creators.

However, when a creator goes out of their way to alienate me as a customer - by either dropping support for my platform, or by region-blocking - I happily put on my pirate hat and get what I want for free. There is no other viable choice for me.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Steam is successful not because piracy is illegal. It is successful because it made buying games more convenient than pirating it. It is far easier to click, pay, get content than torrenting stuff and finding correct cracks/keygens, etc.

I have bought a great deal of games I played in 1990s (pirated, of course - there simply did not exist a way to buy games legally in Russia at that time), just because I liked them back then.

Also, please stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a dangerous penal crime involving violence and an open theft of possessions. It has nothing to do with copying information.