That is actually, by law, NOT stealing, thats called fraud.

In those three cases, you're receiving a service (showing you the movie, cutting your hair and servicing your car), so yeah, you're stealing their work, which is arguably much worse than stealing objects.

In contrast, copying a copy of a movie or a game or whatever without removing the original or even a copy of it is not stealing.

And before you chime in with "but future income!", those profits are hypothetical, so even in the most uncharitable rational definition, you have stolen something that someone MIGHT have gotten.

Copying is not theft and you can't steal something that doesn't and might never exist.

This needs to clarify digital piracy (even though the term already implies that) so people stop comparing renting physical things and spaces to it.

The difference is that in your later two examples, a business lost something, their time / labor. If you took someones seat at the theater, there will be a disruption at the least, maybe the customer does not get their seat or you have to be kicked out or cleaned up after, but if you don't disrupt anything or make a mess, you caused no harm whatsoever.

No one looses anything when someone copies a file without permission. The FBI and other propaganda sources would have you believe that media companies would make more money if you didn't copy the file, there is no evidence of that, only evidence to the contrary, even so, if it were true, taking an action that causes someone to earn less money than if the action were not taken is not theft. If I open up a store, next to your store, and sell the kind of products you sell, you will make less money than if i don't, but no person with any self respect would ever claim that I stole anything from you, except you, the angry store owner. The reality is that these laws and their associated propaganda exist because the wealthy ruling class is terrified of making slightly less money for their investors.

Think back to the moment you learned that copying was considered theft, you knew it was ridiculous at the time, but you've seen so many FBI warnings, and so much of your favorite youtubers whining about facebook videos that belong to them with more views than theirs, steeling their precious views, even though almost no one on earth watches videos on facebook and on youtube, and no one who knows and wants to support a creator would ever watch their content in a way that would instead support someone else who provided no new value. The reality is that the youtuber was never going to get any views from the audience of the facebook video if the facebook video didn't exist, but because it did, many people followed the comment saying that the video was stolen right back to the original creator. Likewise the people who are pirating software or media are probably not going to buy it in any timeline, but now that they copied the content, they might promote it to people who will actually buy it, people who otherwise would not know about it.

You wouldn't download a car

Well, yes. This exist — I am really grateful for that, but.. This audio library now contains 15M positions. It is a big number, no doubt about it.

Then, Spotify has over 80M files in the library with around 4M podcasts.

Estimated existing music amount is unclear but around 90-200M and growing all the time.

And suddenly 15M is getting somehow small in terms of preserving, and this is with music only.

With movies I even remember some interviews with Tarantino and Nolan talking about how badly some movies are being mistreated, lost cuts, not even close to proper/safe long time storing, fires, accidents and so on..