Piracy is stealing, and this is why you shouldn't do it.

Pirating is not technically stealing... But if you are obtaining something that you enjoy a lot (whether that be a movie, videogame, or music album) you really should feel the need to give the artists money for their hard work and effort, so that creative individuals like them will have confidence in pursuing a career as a musician, actor, screenwriter, director, etc, and then they will be able to create more content that you enjoy.

What I'm trying to say is that you can't complain about "Oh man the movies these days are total shit", or "this years music is so fucking brutal" if you pirate and steal shit, because artists that could have potentially created quality content (that you would have enjoyed) didn't have enough money, and were discouraged because they knew that the inudstry wasn't making nearly as much money since the internet and peer-to-peer etc, so they couldn't support them. Even if you buy a piece or type of music that you barely enjoy (let's say a radiohead fan buys a lady gaga CD [unlikely, but whatever] for all intensive purposes) a record label/media corporation is profiting, thus allowing them to take risks and branch out by signing, funding, and promoting newer artists from smaller and different genres. This means that really good alt-rock bands like radiohead will have better access to distribution, recording, and promotion, so that people like you (people that enjoy radiohead in this case) can have more of the good stuff.

Get what I'm saying? You have to buy into the system if you want more of the music/video's/shit that you enjoy. That's in an ideal world though...

The problem is that nobody really thinks like that anymore, because our generation doesn't have enough money to buy music in the first place! Imagine if you bought all of the music in your Itunes library... So an album costs an average of $12.19, the average album has 12.26 songs per album, so that's about 99 cents per song. I have 4307 songs in my iTunes library (nearly all of which I stole), that should have cost me $4263.93 dollars... That's over three times the money the average current generation 18 year old would have made in his entire lifetime.

I mean, I make my own little moral excuses sometimes too. For example, I'm not going to buy a nirvana CD in stores, because Kurt Cobain (the creative master of the band) is dead, and the other members already have enough money. It's a judgement thing. If it's an independent artist that is lesser known, and deserves the money, I will most definitely buy it, even if I discovered and listened to their music using illegal methods. Even with "pay what you want" style things, I will still give them $20 if I have it in my paypal.

So yea, the same goes for TV shows, movies, streaming websites, etc.