The copyright laws allow for LIMITED license to view materials which are copyrighted by another. The limited license allows you to have one copy for personal use only and an archive copy in case the original is damaged. It does not allow you to share your copy with anyone else. If you want to do thar then you have to pay for a less limited license to do it or buy the copyright outright.
Purchasing a video, game, music or software does not mean you own it. It only gives YOU (specific and singularly) a limited right to use it for your personal enjoyment. You absolutely have no right to share the material(s) with another.
If an owner of copyrighted material (book, game, program or music) has to work for three years to produce something that you wish to use, he has a constitutional right to the exclusive rights to that material. Using it without permission or beyond the permissions allowed is a crime. It robs the author, editor, publisher and producer of their work value that is included in the price plus royalties that are paid when you purchase it. You are not buying the music, book, game or software - only the right to use it under the copyright laws.
Would you use a neighbor's ladder without asking? Would you use someone else's car without asking? It is the same crime and it injures the owner in the same way.
Only it's not the same.
That analogy only works if, somehow, the neighbor's ladder or car is magically reproduced with little to no effort.
More, it would be a bit closer to say that it's like renting the neighbor's ladder and, while you have it, letting someone else use it.
Even that isn't quite right because, in the case of the media we are talking about, you never 'give it back'.
Intellectual property does NOT work the same as material property. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be rules governing how it is distributed, but it does mean that you cannot simply look at how material property is dealt with and translate that to intellectual property. If I sing a song someone else wrote, I am not stealing it from them. If I lend or give someone a cd of a song, that person is not stealing it from the artist. You cannot really STEAL intellectual property, so much as steal the credit and/or profits of it's use and distribution.
The real issue is that current technology has made the transfer of intellectual property so easy. The law has not been able to keep up. This isn't like copying someone's music cassette (and how many people were ever prosecuted for that?). This isn't renting movies and copying them onto VHS. This is anyone who wishes to being able to copy something and distribute it pretty much worldwide, with virtually no work or hassle. This is anyone who wishes to being able to find and download any song, book, movie, or game that someone else decided to make available, again with virtually no work or hassle.
I don't know how the law should deal with this. I'm afraid the choices may be between allowing most of it to pass, and only going after the most egregious violators (those who upload vast amounts of content) or becoming overly draconian in the surveillance and enforcement of copywrite law.
We are now, and have been for some time IMO, in a time of great uncertainty where intellectual property is concerned.