> I grew up not expecting to get everything I wanted when I wanted it. Practicing restraint and prioritizing my needs over my wants is a core part of my character. So hearing people act like they need to watch Game of Thrones but can't pay HBO or whatever falls on deaf ears. I simply never watched Game of Thrones, life did move on.

I don't see how to interpret this as anything other than performative asceticism. Once you've judged that you cannot or will not pay, you've put yourself in a situation where watching vs. not watching has no material impact on anyone in the world. You'd have to explain why it makes you a bad person to download it from someone who willingly shares it with you (and who you might even make feel good for having shared). What exactly is the part where you've done something bad?

Where does the bad action happen? If you download it and delete it without watching, was that bad? All you've done is tied up a pirate's capacity to upload, so if anything you're the good guy, right? And it's the actual watching (which affects no one) that carries moral weight? Is watching at a friend's house (or borrowing their DVD) okay? What if your friend had ripped it to their computer, and you stream it from them, but you make sure not to watch at the same time as them, so they never "had more DVDs being used than they owned"? Or was it the creation of a copy? What if you just send all of the incoming packets straight to /dev/null and never have more than ~1500 temporary bytes at a time?

What if I get all of my entertainment value from simply downloading everything I can because I'm such a rebel (or because I'm someone on /r/datahoarder), but I never actually watch it, so in principle it didn't really matter whether I even downloaded the right thing?

It's hard for me to see how the "morality" doesn't essentially boil down to the axiom that what is morally permissible is to follow the law and impermissible to break it, which is IMO a pretty weak perspective. The law seems to be a little too full of special-cases here to think it got it precisely right morally (e.g. if you can borrow but not stream; convenience is immoral?), and surely most people wouldn't agree that e.g. drug use or abortion are immoral because they are illegal in some jurisdictions.

For reference, I don't have a TV and have never watched GoT because I'm just not interested in it. I entertain myself other ways like pondering this sort of nonsense. I don't really see much difference with some counterfactual world (or with some hypothetical person) where I find it worth my time to watch, but not worth (my time + $50) to buy it on ebay and watch. Or (my time + $120) to get the UHD one.

The people who most caused the company to shut down would be people like me that just weren't interested in the thing at all, and yes we are affected the least, and I don't see why anyone should feel bad about that. That's how it should be. People who pirate, if they have any effect at all, will create mindshare by talking about it to people who will buy it. That is still preferable for the company over me changing the subject when someone talks about GoT.

I would love for all of these media companies to go out of business though so they would stop pushing for treacherous computing.