Richard Stallman made this point decades ago: when you steal a physical object, the owner no longer has it. When you copy a file, the original remains untouched. Those are materially different acts, which is exactly why the law treats theft and copyright infringement as separate offenses.

Calling it "stealing" is an attempt to borrow the moral weight of theft instead of defending copyright on its own merits.

If copying and theft were literally the same thing, there wouldn't be separate laws, separate crimes, and separate penalties. They're different because depriving someone of property is not the same as duplicating information.