The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing. That's what you steal when you pirate. People have been buying into shared cultures

The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing. That's what you steal when you pirate. People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself. In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community. Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience. The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down. The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.