Piracy, or copyright infringement, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, and theft have the same practical effect : you're accessing a consumable good without paying the requisite cost, your individual crime may not have a large effect on the ability of the seller to provide for that good, but, on the large scale, if everyone committed your crime, you would severely affect the seller's ability to both 1. provide for him/her/their-self and 2. provide that good to the people. So, for all intents and purposes, yes, piracy is theft in cause & effect, if not in literal, philosophical definition.
I said it in my first post. If paid channels are byzantine and draconian, don't pay. You still don't have a right to the content. Just don't buy it. That's "fight" enough. That's "protest" enough.
>[some extremely condescending and pretentious teenage bullshit about "not giving up the fight"]
No, buddy, you're not on some morally righteous journey to freedom. Ironically enough, the DRM, DMCA, and the Gestapo-ification of the MPAA and RIAA only exist because of people like you. The executives and middlemen (i.e.: cable networks, record labels, publishers) hate piracy because it severely harms their bottom line, the artists hate piracy because it harms their livelihood, the consumers hate piracy because it leads to annoying DRM and other counterpiracy measures that end up harming paying consumers most. The only people that are lifting their fists in the air with you are, bingo, other pirates.