I'm a former "industry" professional, so I have the utmost respect for people being compensated on whichever end they process/release material we prefer. (Usually Blu-ray, but sometimes digital if we can't find Blu-rays.) In fact, it's so important to us that we have only a handful of pre-owned movies/TV; all stuff we can't buy new.
Obviously it's a bit of a legal gray area to rip Blu-rays we purchased, but we don't do anything that would prevent content creators/platforms from receiving compensation. We don't format-shift (i.e. If we have a DVD, we don't obtain an HD version) and only rarely platform-shift (i.e. download a Blu-ray if we've only purchased the streaming rights) if that's the only option.
Legally shady but ethically sound stuff we do:
- torrent TV shows that we own the same-resolution discs for (it's faster than ripping/transcoding hundreds of hours of video)
- torrent TV/movies we've purchased effectively-lifetime licenses for (willing to remove if for a good ethical reason a platform revokes said license; hasn't happened yet though)
- pre-download Blu-rays we order if it'll take some time to get here
- torrent the very limited number of broadcast TV shows we record and strip ads from (this is probably the most questionable thing we do, ethically)
Far as music, most platforms at this point allow some form of non-DRM download, so we generally don't do anything unusual. We use several unauthorized plugins for our music streaming services, but do not download/keep anything we haven't purchased.
We absolutely do not "preview" stuff. If we want to "preview", we rent the movies and watch them there. If we choose to purchase, we may torrent, but generally just wait to rip.
No doubt we're in a minority, but Kodi is an invaluable way for us to consume our ethically-sourced content. (Even our children's friends seem to have ethics with this stuff, i.e. if they "gift" some MP3s to a peer, they'll also give them a gift card so they can purchase that content. Not sure how common it is, but I certainly don't remember doing this during the early days of CD ripping and Napster.)
I don't have a huge problem with some people fudging a little more than we do, but take great offense at people who use it simply for the pirating plugins.
I don't, for example, take much issue with people geo-shifting stuff they can't otherwise obtain. (The content creator is still in the same $0 profit situation their publisher put them in.) But stuff like Popcorn Time is really not cool for pretty much anyone except people who can't obtain the content for whatever reason.
Make of it what you will. But guns don't kill people; people kill people.