No it’s not. If you don’t pay for it, you don’t watch it. If they’re not entitled to your money, then you’re not entitled to the product of their time, effort, and labor.
I'm not arguing the legal or criminal semantics. I'm arguing the dishonest justification and misrepresentation of piracy. Piracy is stealing. You're stealing income from the creator if you ingest their work without paying for it. I don't care if people pirate things but admit that it's stealing and move on.
Then we'll have to agree to disagree. It doesn't matter how many levels of abstraction or semantics you hide it behind, you're gaining from something made by another person without returning that gain (whether financially or otherwise) to that person.
Someone else posted the definition of stealing in this thread elsewhere. If I gain something from someone without giving them what they've demanded in return, it's stealing.
No, you do not. If you hire someone to make you a website/video/picture and then don't pay them after they've created it, you're stealing from them. You can argue the semantics of that all day long and say that it's a different term, I don't care. You're stealing from someone when you gain something from their work without compensating them (if they're asking to be compensated in exchange for that work).
More semantics. This is exhausting dealing with your dishonesty. You've stolen the product that they created for you because you haven't paid them for it. Sure, it would be a violation of a contract too but I think most reasonable people would agree that you stole the website/video/picture.
And no... by my definition, nothing is stolen in your example because you lent your friend the movie. You gave them permission to have it on a temporary basis. If they never return it to you, then they've stolen it. Your examples are terrible.