It may have been said countless times before, but it does not change the fact, that it is stealing, all pirating is stealing.
That fact has not changed since 1998 or what ever year you pick.
That "fact" has never been true. Theft and copyright infringement are not the same crime nor covered by the same law in any country on earth, for a very simple reason: The legal definition of theft requires that the owner is deprived of that which is stolen.
All human societies have had restrictions on theft, dating back thousands of years even in written statutes, but the very idea of copyright is relatively recent (it dates back to the Statute of Anne from 1710), and was put in place explicitly because theft does *not* cover copying. It was a landgrab.
First a lot later did the idea of justifying copyright as a way of promoting the arts and sciences come about, but even then the theory goes that it is a trade between the public and the creators of works: The public voluntarily give up some rights they would otherwise have in order to give a time limited monopoly, in order to promote creation of more works.
Copyright is explicitly *not* about protecting the rights of creators of works, but about creating new ones by taking away rights from the public.
Since then the power has shifted more and more away from the public with little to no proof that the increasingly uneven trade is worth it.
Long way of saying that the idea of equating theft and copyright infringement is laughable, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding for what copyright is about.
