1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.