Okay. So apparently you are bold enough to steal it online. Are you bold enough to steal it from the store? It's the same thing. Next time you want to steal a bunch of stuff go try it physically and see if you have the stones to do so.
It is theft, if you get caught you likely will be prosecuted.

I love joke threads. They make me laugh.

No, it's not the same thing. When pirating, you don't take anything away from anybody. You just make a new copy. That's a rather big difference.

What is the defence for pirating really? It shouldn´t be illegal since it is such a petty thing, but rather be something that the companies work towards reducing. But I find it interesting that a lot of people that copy things actually tries to defend it, like it would be justified to steal other people´s work. I have done a lot of downloading during the years but I atleast acknowledge that I know it is a wrongful act.

I'ts wrong to assume that every pirated copy is a lost sale, like many others have pointed out, many of the people who tend to pirate things probably wouldn't have bought them in the first place.
I also know a lot of people that use piracy to gauge if they're making a good purchase. They will see if they like the content and if they do, buy the genuine article. So a pirated copy isn't even necessarily a lost purchase at all.

Theres a myrad of other reasons to pirate, especially if something is hard to get in the market (like Earthbound and Xenoblade Chronicles were for a long time, for example) or if theres some added bonus to the piracy (like with scanlations, as they're faster than traditional publishing and make it possible to enjoy content that probably would never get published in your language in the first place, or unofficial mac ports of games that don't have a mac version.)

But there's another aspect to this that often gets overlooked: Convienience.

People tend to just do whatever is the most convienient to them. Spotify for example realized that. Op mentioned that he pays for spotify even though he tends to pirate other stuff, spotify hit the sweet spot between a relatively low price he was able and willing to pay for the convienience of a giant music library ready at his disposal.
That shows directly how people work. We don't mind paying for a good service as long as the price is a low entry barrier.

I, for example pay for amazon prime (student edition) because I really enjoy the free shipping and I get Amazon streaming as a bonus. Then again I don't use the streaming option as much as I probably would if it was more convienient. It can be hard to find something in the right language or at all if it's a little obscure. With piracy everything is two clicks away.

I see why someone doesn't want to buy the whole Dvd set of, lets say, Gilmore Girls if they only wanted to binge watch it once and will likely never touch it again. Thats why streaming individual episodes or whole seasons of something should be very cheap. Something like 50 cents per episode and 5 bucks for a whole season would be an alright price. Also everything should just be available everywhere, if I have to have three or more subscribtions just to get all the content I want to enjoy toghether, the convinience aspect is sort of gone and so is the low price point. At that point piracy becomes attractive once again.

I personally still prefer to buy stuff. Being a content creator myself, I know how much blood, sweat, tears and hard work goes into creating something and the annexy of throwing it out there in the wild. I want to be rewarded for that and I want to be able to live off what I do. Thats why I try to support content creators as much as i can. If I enjoy their creation, they deserve my sale too, no matter how ritch or poor they are. Thats one of the reasons I love patreon, it cuts out the middle man and I can directly give to creators without having to finance some coorperate suits golfing hollydays.

Bottom line is, the most effective way to combat piracy is to give people what they want at a reasonably cheap price. There will always be the real fans that will pay good money for fancy limited editions, while the mass just enjoys the streams.

Because the devs and publishers want money for their work but with piracy they get nothing

you are using something that doesn't belong to you. Whether making a new copy or not doesn't mean it isn't theft.

piracy is the use of something copy written without permission. In other words, stealing.

Don't people deserve to get money for the work that they do, like the rest of us? That's what's wrong with Piracy.

You just copied my text in that quote! Is that theft?