Is this morally wrong?

[micseydel]

I've got nothing to hide. This is not using bit torrent, only the public internet.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with the legality (or morality as far as I can tell). Both the "public internet" and Bittorrent have legal and illegal uses. If you stream a video from a random website when downloading that video would be illegal with Bittorrent, then it's also illegal to stream it from that random site. There are practical reasons why Bittorrent might make you more likely to be caught but I'm not going to get into it.

When considering morality, I suggest using the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. Imagine a society where you'll be randomly placed into it, but you don't know where. Are all the roles reasonable, preferences aside? Would you feel bad about being placed into the author's role, and not being compensated for your work? I would, but there might be mitigating factors; if I were poor and the author rich then I would feel far less bad about it, since I would not be depriving them of something I would otherwise have given and they don't really need it.

My personal judgement is: if your'e a poor college student barely getting by, I'm not going to judge you for stealing a PDF. If you have rich parents, I'm probably going to judge you pretty hard for it. If you're someone trying to make a career pivot that will lift you out of poverty, I'm not going to judge you. If you're a software engineer who makes a lot of money but just finds stealing easier, I'm going to judge you.

Lastly, I'm going to soap-box about my personal situation and something tangential... I committed intellectual property theft a lot as a student. Now I'm a software engineer several years into my career and I'm far less likely to steal. There are times I do though. For example, I bought Legend of Korra on Google Play years ago when it was still airing, but my pre-paid-for episodes came out about a day after illegal streams were already available. Did I "steal" to watch it sooner? Hell yes. Do I feel it was immoral? Definitely not. Worse yet, I've wanted to purchase videos that are only available as DVDs. I hate DVDs. I hate having more things. I hate the environmental impact. I hate waiting for shipping. I looove streaming. I'll let you guess what I did.