I owe my entire life to piracy.
I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I’ve ever held are entirely attributable to it.
Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I’m also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.
Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But… just sayin’. There’s more than one face to this coin.
As for media - music, movies and such, I’ve almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I’ve ever consumed. Never. And I still don’t.
I make no apology for this: it’s theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM’ed, force shit I don’t want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I’m a shameless freeloader.
The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors… It’s just like that. I want writers to get paid.
The teacher is the one who’s confused here. The kid is entirely correct.